The Send My Friend to School campaign strongly welcomes the recommendations published today by the International Development Select Committee in its inquiry on DFID’s work on education.

This year the Send My Friend to School Campaign and its 300,000 dedicated campaigners across the country have been calling on the UK Government to invest $500 million in the Global Partnership for Education. We have met with MPs, ministers, civil servants, global decision makers and more to spread our message that investing in GPE is not just the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do.

The report published today sends a strong signal to the UK Government that Parliament is behind our campaign. We strongly welcome the Committee’s recommendation that ‘DFID should agree to the full financial contribution [$500 million] requested at the next replenishment’ and that ‘the UK should also announce its intentions early, to encourage other donors to step forward’.

 Responding to the Committee’s call to pledge early will send a strong signal of the UK’s continued global leadership on education, and encourage more donor countries to follow suit. It will also show developing country leaders that the UK is ready to back their ambition to finance education.

2018 Send My Friend to School Campaign Champion, Lulu 16-years-old , today at the launch of the report in Woodside High in North London, said, ‘It has been great opportunity and amazing experience to campaign on this important issue over the past year. Education is so important because we are the future generation, and there might be other people around the world that may be able to discover something that we haven’t but they are unable due to not getting an education. That is unfair. It was great to hear from Stephen today that our campaigning has had a big impact.’

Campaign Champion, Lucy, 16-years-old said: ‘We wrote letters to the IDC and met with them in the summer. It is great to know that created a chain reaction to today’s report. It has been fantastic to make such a difference in a cause so big.’

 We are also pleased to see many of the other recommendations we made in our written evidence reflected in the Committee’s report – in particular, that DFID should: continue its investment in girls’ education; launch a reinvigorated strategy to support access to quality education for disabled children; and establish a long-term, integrated strategy for supporting education in emergencies.

 We would like to thank the Committee and its Chair, Stephen Twigg MP, for meeting young people from our campaign this year, taking on board our recommendations and being so supportive of our work. We now hope that the UK Government responds positively to this bold call and continues to deliver quality, equitable learning for the world’s most vulnerable children and young people.