Send my friend to school

Way back in 2000, world leaders promised to get all children into school, receiving a quality education by 2015. Some progress has been made, but with just 6 years left there are still more than 70 million children who miss out on education. At the current rate there will still be 40 million children out of school in 2015. That isn't good enough.

We don't want to get bogged down in number crunching, there's lots of places where you can view the figures if you want to, but it would only take $7 billion to fund basic schooling in poor countries - and this tiny bill, in global terms, is shared between the world's rich nations.

Or, to put it another way, every child in the developing world could have access to a quality education for just 10% of what Britain spent on last autumn's bank bail out package - talk about value for money.

To keep all of this in the politician's minds the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) has done lots of things over the years. Back in 2003 we created a Guiness World Record for the biggest ever lesson, where 2.2 million people took part. Then we smashed it in 2008, as over 8.8 million children in over 100 countries got involved.

This year the 'Send my friend to school' campaign aims to get UK school pupils to join forces with young campaigners around the world.

Thee will be big events to get involved in throughout the year - including the 'Big Read' this April. You can find out more on the Global Campaign for Education's website, including resources for your local school to take part.

We will keep you updated about the progress of the Send my friend to school campaign and activities that you can do to keep up the pressure on global leaders to end the education crisis around the world.

In the meantime tell us why you think it is important for everyone to have access to quality education.