Ms Anne O'Mahoney:

I will add just a little to that. Mr. O'Brien is right: some progress is being made but there is a long way to go. Until the governments of the countries in which we work begin to take seriously their responsibilities in delivering education for their populations, we will always have some of these hit-and-miss attitudes. We work in places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, where once the girls reach puberty and, as Mr. O'Brien mentioned, if there are no female teachers in the school, the girls cannot continue to go to school. This immediately reinforces the stereotype of uneducated girls who are unavailable to take up positions that could be created and endorsed for them as they go through their careers. We are starting at a huge disadvantage on that basis. That whole thing needs to change substantially.

Some progress is being made in certain countries on attitude changes in keeping girls who are pregnant in school. It requires quite an upscaling of advocacy, not just from the authorities at the top but also from communities themselves, to make it unacceptable within communities for girls to be taken out of school just because they are pregnant, going back to school only after the pregnancy has finished. Until communities engage with this, it will not really change, so it is both a top-down and a bottom-up push to try to change attitudes. We are using tools such as community conversations to engage with communities and to demand first of all protection for their children and, second, that if their children happen to be abused while they are in the school system or even of schoolgoing age, that does not mean the end of their lives and their education but rather that they can go back into education. Steps are being taken on all these fronts, but the steps are very small and need to increase. We need to continue to shine a light on these issues that particularly affect girls and people with disabilities because they are, as Mr. O'Brien said, hidden groups of people. They are the people who are not getting any chances at all.