By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and Manos Antoninis, Director of the Global Education Monitoring Report

In 2015, the international community declared that universal primary completion, the unattained education goal of past decades, was not going to be ambitious enough for the 2030 Agenda. It would not even be sufficient if all youth completed secondary school, a new target aimed to set the bar higher. Instead, all children and adolescents would also need to achieve a minimum proficiency level in reading and mathematics if they were to be prepared for the future. According to new estimates released today by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, only about half of all children and adolescents are prepared for the future, according to this definition; education systems are failing the other half.

Combining completion with learning enables us to quickly assess whether children are receiving a quality education.  Globally, we find that 514 million are prepared for the future, including 386 million children of primary school age (typically 6 to 11 years old) and 128 million adolescents of lower secondary school age (typically 12 to 14 years old). These figures are equivalent to 53% of primary school age children and 32% of lower secondary school age adolescents.

Delivering a better education is an enormous challenge – but not delivering it is an even bigger waste of potential that threatens the development agenda for people and planet. As the world’s education leaders are gathering in New York, invited by the UN Secretary-General to take part in the Transforming Education Summit on September 19, they will debate solutions to make schools green, connected, safe and healthy. What is ultimately at stake is how to put inclusive and equitable education of good quality at the top of the political agenda in recognition of its key role for learning and sustainable development.

There has been progress over time, but it is not enough

Assessing whether children are ‘prepared for the future’ involves combining two SDG target 4.1 global indicators on completion (4.1.2) and learning (4.1.1), which provide a snapshot of progress towards SDG 4.

In recent months, our understanding of completion rates has improved, through methods that have combined multiple sources of data. But today’s UIS data release contributes the other piece of the puzzle: it provides the first estimates of the evolution of learning rates over the past two decades. This means we now have information to report on SDG target 4.1, which calls on countries to ‘ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes’ by 2030. It is a strong way of summarising the essence of our common global agenda.

There has been modest progress from 2000 to 2020 in both completion and learning, although progress rates differ by region and income group. And COVID-19 has deeply disrupted education, directly through school closures and unequal distance learning opportunities and indirectly through economic shocks, putting even these modest gains at risk.

Globally, the percentage of children prepared for the future after primary school increased from 38% to 53% from 2000 to 2020. This has been fuelled by an average annual increase of 0.5 percentage points for children completing primary school and of 0.6 percentage points for students reading proficiency at the end of primary.

But in sub-Saharan Africa, the percentage of children prepared for the future only increased at about a quarter of the global rate of progress. This is because while completion rates increased by 0.8 percentage points per year, improvements in reading proficiency were far slower, increasing by just 0.2 percentage points per year.

Percentage of children and adolescents completing, learning, and competing and learning, 2000–2020

By SDG region

Source: UIS and GEM Report estimates.

By country income group

Source: UIS and GEM Report estimates.

The new findings show where our efforts need to concentrate on the way to 2030. While 90% of children and adolescents in Europe and North America are prepared for the future and 75% in Eastern and South-eastern Asia, less than 10% in sub-Saharan Africa can say the same.

Number of children and adolescents prepared for the future, by SDG region

Source: UIS and GEM Report estimates.

These estimates are as good as the quality of the data that support them. They should not give us a false sense over the depth of our knowledge. Major data gaps mean that some of these estimated trends are very tenuous and are likely to be contested once we have more reliable data series on learning, a luxury that we can afford only for some regions.

At the same time, putting together a long-term trend is a necessary milestone against which to measure our ambition. The rate of children and adolescents prepared for the future has grown by 0.7 percentage points per year since 2000. As we will present at a side event on data and monitoring on September 17, the Summit’s Solutions Day, 9 in 10 countries have set their national SDG 4 benchmarks for 2025 and 2030 for seven indicators, including indicators 4.1.1 and 4.1.2 on completion and learning. These national targets show that governments have committed to an average annual increase of 1.2 percentage points between 2020 and 2030 – so that 63% of children and adolescents will be prepared for the future in 2030.

Given the setback that the pandemic has caused, these national targets may appear ambitious to some even if they may appear less ambitious to others. But they show governments’ readiness to be held to account for their 2030 commitments. They also provide a solid foundation upon which to build the following-up of the Transforming Education Summit’s new commitments, in line with the call of the SDG 4 High-level Steering Committee. For instance, the benchmarks on completion and learning will serve to monitor the Summit’s global initiative on foundational learning. We believe that benchmarks will help focus countries’ efforts to deliver the education transformations they need.