Today’s system of global education governance and policy-making is characterised by a complex and multilayered interplay of interests and actors seeking to influence relevant spaces and processes. It is a highly interlinked, yet decentralised and non-hierarchical polity that strives for and derives legitimacy through participation, negotiation and mediation between stakeholders.
Among the most important institutional players are international organisations: the United Nations and its subsidiary agencies, specifically the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) alongside powerful multilateral financial institutions such as the World Bank, Global Partnership for Education and Education Cannot Wait.
The international education sector is also home to a diverse and vibrant civil society community. This community is composed of non-governmental organisations and trade unions which have developed their respective partnerships and pathways to enact policy influence over decades.
Some of them enjoy a considerable degree of participation and formalisation in regard to their relationships with key institutions.
Absent student voices
While education workers, educational institutions and civil society have been well represented through their global umbrella organisations – such as Education International, the International Association of Universities and the Global Campaign for Education – the democratic and representative voice of secondary and tertiary student unions has been formally absent from the discourse since the end of the Cold War.
When the pro-communist International Union of Students collapsed under political and financial pressure as a result of the unfolding post-1989 world order, a void emerged that was not filled for more than 30 years until the Global Student Forum (GSF) was established.
The 2016 Student Voice Conference in Bergen, Norway, represented a unique opportunity for national student union delegations from across the globe to come together for the first time in recent years. It was followed by an extended period of further mapping, development of transcontinental relationships and political rapprochement between regional and national student organisations.
The GSF was founded in 2020 by the All-Africa Students Union, the European Students’ Union, the Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions, the Commonwealth Students Association and the Latin American and Caribbean Continental Students Organisation (or OCLAE) as the formal unification of the world’s largest student federations and their national organisations.
Through its 202 member unions from 122 countries, it is the democratic and independent voice of learners worldwide, representing the economic, social, cultural and educational interests of more than 200 million secondary and tertiary students from around the world in the international community, its institutions and the global education sector specifically.
Global governance
While the dominant shift to more participative methods of governance, at national and regional levels, in most parts of the world was used by representative unions of students to strengthen their formal influence and recognition as a fixed component of a modern educational leadership approach, governance and policy-making – the system of global education governance – has not seen a legitimate global union of students claiming this space.
The student representation gap in the education processes of the UN system has, however, been superficially filled through youth involvement, commonly through the application of a top- down approach in which the institutional leadership cherry picks young people, usually individuals without any accountability to an electorate of learners or a commonly agreed policy framework on which they would act.
When the UNESCO Global Education Cooperation Mechanism was under review in 2021, a broad coalition of civil society organisations and the international student movement, under the GSF umbrella, advocated for the creation of a student seat at the SDG 4 High-Level Steering Committee (HLSC) and Sherpa Group.
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