It has been almost 10 years since the world committed to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030, what is known as Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4). The GEM Report was invited at the end of August to present an update on global progress towards that goal to the SDG 4 High-level Steering Committee (HLSC) meeting in Chile.

Participation levels have stagnated except for tertiary education

The first experience young children should have of the promises in SDG 4 would be to attend preschool. Yet the participation rate of children age one year before entering primary school has flatlined at around 75% since 2015. This is the level of education that has been most affected by COVID-19. Moreover, adjusting for the fact that one fifth of these children were attending primary school, the true preschool attendance rate is closer to 60%.

“I don’t want my children to suffer the way I did because I couldn’t go to school,” a mother told us in Ghana. But the world is progressing extremely slowly in helping more children access education.

Since 2015, the global out-of-school rate has fallen by a mere half a percentage point to 17% as of 2023. In absolute numbers, while 101 million more children are now in school, the out-of-school population has grown by 8 million, reaching a total of 272 million according to the latest estimates published by the GEM Report and the UIS earlier this year. This number rises to 285 million, when supplementary data are used to account for the impact of armed conflict in the 10 countries with the most severe conflicts, notably Myanmar, Somalia and Sudan.

The number of children out of school in sub-Saharan Africa has barely fallen since 1990

The upper secondary education completion rate has increased from 53% in 2015 to 59% in 2023, or to 62% if those completing that level of education much later tha the official graduation age are also included. This corresponds to an annual increase of about 0.8 percentage points, which suggests that while attendance has stagnated, education systems have been improving their ability to ensure that those who are in school graduate. But the richest children are 5 times as likely as the poorest to complete secondary school.

The opposite phenomenon is observed in tertiary education. Enrolment has increased from 37% in 2015 to 44% in 2024 but graduation rates have been growing at half the annual rate, by just 0.4 percentage points, reaching 27%.

Learning outcomes are highly unequal but also declining in the world’s richer countries

A trademark emphasis in the international education agenda since 2015 has been the shift of attention to monitoring a comparable measure of learning achievement. There is more data on learning outcomes than before 2015 but the evidence far from sufficient to help draw robust global conclusions.

In early primary grades, we have very little data, but the evidence we do have suggests that only about 10% of children in low-income countries are proficient in reading. But there is also some limited evidence that levels are improving from those very low levels.

At the end of primary, we have a clear global estimate on learning levels: 58% of students globally are proficient, with a stark disparity between low-income countries (17%) and high-income countries (93%). Taking into account those children who do not reach the end of primary school, 53% of children were achieving minimum proficiency before COVID-19.

At the end lower secondary, there is no global estimate on learning levels, but there is a robust estimate on learning trends in middle- and high-income countries – and a highly concerning one. Since 2012, the percentage of students achieving minimum proficiency in reading has dropped from 59% to 47% in 2022. This unprecedented decline of one percentage point per year began before the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting deeper systemic issues.

The record on quality indicators is mixed

A definition of quality in education is made up of many components. In terms of access to the internet, the percentage of connected primary schools, for example, has increased from 61% in 2015 to 72% in 2023. In terms of content, there is some evidence that curricula increasingly cover topics relevant to sustainable development, but coverage of climate change and biodiversity, as captured in a recent extension of SDG global indicator 4.7.1, is too low and unbalanced: it is lower in social science than in science subjects and lower in primary than in secondary education.

The SDG 4 HLSC meeting in Chile was followed by the World Summit on Teachers. Without a clear international standard for what constitutes a ‘trained’ teacher, it is very difficult to compare countries with each other over time. Even the concept of a teacher ‘shortage’ can be misleading, as it confuses the lack of supply of teachers in richer countries with the lack of demand for teachers in poorer countries.

On the financial front, public education spending has fallen from 4.3% of GDP in 2015 to 4.1% in 2023. This trend is even more pronounced when viewed as a share of total public expenditure, which dropped from 13.8% to 12.6% in this period. This reflects increasing fiscal pressure, especially in indebted middle-income countries.

What next?

Many of these numbers paint a bleak picture but also provide a clear roadmap for action. There are four key areas of action that the HLSC included in its decisions:

• Data gaps on learning need to be addressed. External support must be much better focused on developing countries’ national assessment system capacity. Political support was given to the proposal for a vetting mechanism to help countries identify the areas in which learning assessments need to improve, and for a virtual fund to better coordinate external support to countries to make these improvements.
• There is a need for teacher policy indicators – on their status, career, professional development, working conditions and voice. This was among the decisions of the last Education Data and Statistics Commission meeting, to which the HLSC has lent its political support.
• Countries need to continue setting, updating, sharing and monitoring national SDG 4 targets – or benchmarks. A huge success is that 80% of countries have already set such national SDG 4 targets for 2025 and 2030. The annual invitation to Member States to review their benchmarks for the 2026 SDG 4 Scorecard will be shared in October.
• We need to understand the reasons of progress and stagnation to plan a better agenda. Our next series of GEM Reports, Countdown to 2030, will analyse country experiences on access and equity in 2026, quality and learning in 2027, and relevance in 2028.

The data show that countries stand further than where they want to be. But they also give clear directions to collect better data and to link this information to effective actions.