Abstract
At the end of 2015, Education for All (EFA) which had been a dominant global education policy for two decades reached its consummation. EFA was the first meeting which successfully gathered global attention to inequalities in education and had a significant impact on aid policy of many donor agencies as well as on education policy of low-income countries which needed foreign assistance. While EFA has contributed to a significant increase in access to education in low-income countries, it was criticised for failing to share its benefits with the most marginalised children and leaving them behind. Reflecting on this criticism, in 2016 a new global education framework, Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), was announced emphasising ‘inclusive and equitable quality education’. While global education policies such as EFA and SDG 4 gather countries’ attention to achieving the same universal goals, all global policies go through recontextualisation when they are introduced to the national level. Understanding how EFA was recontextualised within a nation state is important as this understanding would inform us of the context where the SDG 4 is implemented, which is a prerequisite to investigate if SDG 4 will bring meaningful differences to educational experiences of the marginalised. This paper first introduces the context of Laos with the country’s demographic information and historical backgrounds of the government’s ethnic Lao-centred education policy. Secondly, it demonstrates EFA’s influence on the country’s education policy. Thirdly, it addresses three policies the Laotian government implemented to achieve EFA goals: resettlement of ethnic minorities, boarding schools for ethnic minorities, and the Progressive Promotion Policy and how these policies, which were implemented to achieve EFA goals, have furthered ethnic minorities’ educational marginalisation. The paper ends with analysis of EFA and SDG 4 focusing on their approach to various disparities within a nation state and the implications on ethnic minority education under SDG 4.