Hosting the world’s education ministers while abandoning the world’s children This week the UK hosts the Education World Forum, the largest annual gathering of education and skills ministers in the world. Ministers are discussing how to get every child into school, improve learning outcomes, and prepare young people for an increasingly unstable and technologically complex world. It is a moment that should showcase British leadership. Instead, it exposes a growing contradiction in the UK’s presence on the global stage – one in which the UK positions itself a convenor of the world’s education leaders, while simultaneously denying them meaningful support for their vital work. I’m speaking, of course, about Britain’s overseas aid spending. Far from reversing the Conservative’s cuts to the aid budget, this Labour government further slashed spending, cutting the UK’s commitment from 0.5 per cent of gross national income to 0.3 per cent by 2027, in order to fund a hike in defence spending. This marks the lowest level of aid spending as a share of national income in decades. Education has been particularly affected, with the effective ending of dedicated bilateral education programmes through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and growing pressure on multilateral funding. Taken together, this demonstrates a clear retreat from one of the UK’s long-standing areas of international leadership. For decades, support for global education has been a relatively stable part of Britain’s international role, backed by governments from across the political spectrum. It reflected a basic principle: that helping children access education is both a moral responsibility and one of the most effective investments in global stability and prosperity. That consensus is now weakening. Labour came into office promising to restore Britain’s international standing and rebuild trust with global partners after years of turbulence. Yet the scale of the cuts to the aid budget and the speed with which they have been introduced mark a significant departure from those commitments. This matters not only because of what is being cut, but also because of what is being prioritised instead. The decision to increase defence spending by reducing aid reflects a false view of security, one in which bombs and guns offer more of a stabilising force than education and opportunity. I worked in international development for years before entering politics. I lived in an active conflict zone. I have seen, first-hand, the roles extreme poverty, political instability, and yes, lack of educational opportunity, play in fostering the conditions for violence and crises. It is for that reason that I know global access to education is not a peripheral development goal; it is infrastructure for stability, an investment in global security, and one of the most effective tools available for reducing inequality, strengthening institutions, and supporting peaceful societies. And yet across the world, an estimated 273 million children are out of school. Around six in ten children in school are not on track to achieve basic literacy and numeracy by age 10. By 2030, more than half of young people globally are expected to leave school without the skills needed for work. Aid is not the primary source of education funding in most countries, and national governments rightly carry responsibility for their own systems. But external support plays a catalytic role, helping unlock reforms and investments that domestic budgets alone often cannot cover. Take Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, where 97 per cent of the national education budget is allocated to recurrent costs like teacher salaries. External support is critical to funding improvements in teacher training, classrooms, and books. That is precisely the kind of gap that the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), the UK’s most effective channel for supporting education systems at scale, exists to fill. GPE pools international funding to strengthen the education system and reach children who would otherwise be left behind. It is also one of the clearest examples of effective, multilateral cooperation that the UK has consistently supported and shaped over many years. Weakening that commitment risks undermining crucial educational progress in low-income countries and further damaging Britain’s credibility as a reliable partner in global development. The UK has made some important commitments, including a £80 million contribution to Education Cannot Wait, which will support children affected by conflict and crisis. That funding is welcome and urgently needed. But isolated commitments cannot disguise a wider retreat from sustained education financing, nor an overarching political culture which treats overseas development as an optional extra instead of a fundamental pillar of security. The decisions the UK makes about overseas aid spending over the next five years will shape the next fifty – we cannot afford for global education to fall down the priority list. The government must change course: restore the aid budget, invest in critical educational programmes such as the GPE, and recommit to strengthening Britain’s role as a global leader in development, diplomacy, and peacebuilding - so that every child can access the opportunities they need to thrive. Dr Ellie Chowns is the Green Party MP for North Herefordshire. She is the party spokesperson for foreign affairs and educationThis article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project