Education is at the heart of the global struggle to alleviate poverty and reduce inequality. It has been demonstrated that one extra year of education is associated with a reduction in inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) of 1.4 percentage points. Yet it is precisely the most disadvantaged who face the greatest obstacles to accessing quality education. Although some progress has been made in recent decades, there were still as many as 57 million out-of-school children of primary school age in 2015. Many of these will never access education. What role, then, can human rights play in addressing these issues? Education has been recognised as a fundamental human right at least since 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared that everyone has the right to free and compulsory education. Importantly, the right extends beyond access to education. It also includes quality education. Education must be ‘directed to the full development of the human personality’ and ‘promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups’. The right to education has also been recognised in the major international human rights instruments, and in the domestic law of numerous countries.

This volume asks what role human rights can play in addressing some of the most challenging issues in the quest for quality education for all. We provide case studies from both the global South and the global North. The challenges are surprisingly similar, despite marked differences in development. From the South, we focus on India, Kenya and South Africa. Both countries face an enormous chasm between the ideal of equal rights to quality education and the reality; each has relatively recently given entrenched constitutional status to the right to education; and both have seen human rights litigation play an important part. From the global North, we look at New York State, where educational disadvantage, in the midst of the richest country in the world, is even more striking. Although there is no constitutional right to education at federal level, the right is entrenched in the New York State constitution, and human rights litigation has been utilised in the quest for a better quality of education for disadvantaged innercity children.