An event at the end of this week in Paris is taking stock of what has happened since the landmark 2022 Transforming Education Summit. Are education systems being transformed? While the answer varies across countries and priorities, one clear achievement has been the creation of new tools to measure progress on key TES commitments and hold countries accountable for delivering on them.

First and foremost, as his predecessor had done in his synthesis report in 2014, the UN Secretary-General endorsed the setting of national targets in his vision statement at the Summit and called for “taking current arrangements for monitoring SDG4 implementation, including … the national SDG4 benchmarking process, to the next level”. Since then, there have been four SDG 4 Scorecard publications by the UIS and the GEM Report. Its 2026 edition is being launched this week, which monitor these national targets for 2025 and 2030.

In addition, a direct result of the seven Global Initiatives’ Calls to Action that emerged from the summit in September 2022, the SDG 4 High-Level Steering Committee (HLSC) mandated its Data and Monitoring Technical Committee, co-led by the UIS and the GEM Report, to develop new indicators that would make it possible to track progress in future stocktaking exercises, including through benchmarking them, if possible. This blog goes through each in turn.

1. Tracking digital connectivity in schools

The TES commitment to “connect every child and young person to digital solutions” could be immediately monitored through the existing SDG global indictor 4.a.1 on school facilities. It was therefore integrated into the SDG 4 benchmarking process in 2023. Some 50% of countries have set national targets for the share of schools connected to the internet, although another 20% have not set a target simply because they have already achieved universal connectivity.

Based on national commitments, 88% of primary schools worldwide should be connected by 2030. According to the new SDG 4 Scorecard, current progress is only three percentage points behind the trajectory needed to achieve that collective ambition, making this one of the areas where countries are closest to meeting their national targets.

2. Measuring the greening of education

To support the goal of making every learner climate-ready, a new indicator was developed by the GEM Report and the Monitoring and Evaluating Climate Communication and Education (MECCE) to assess the extent to which greening themes are integrated into national curriculum frameworks and in up to eight subject syllabi in grades 3, 6 and 9. Up to that point, the SDG global indicator 4.7.1 measuring the ‘Extent to which (i) global citizenship education and (ii) education for sustainable development are mainstreamed in (a) national education policies; (b) curricula; (c) teacher education; and (d) student assessment’ had only been measured with self-reported country data, raising questions of validity and reliability.

The proposal was a greening education indicator, which assessed the frequency of certain keywords in these curriculum documents. The analysis revealed important gaps: social science curricula tend to contain less environmental content than science curricula, while grade 3 syllabi contain less green content than those in grades 6 and 9. Climate change and biodiversity keywords are far less common than general environment keywords.

The indicator has since been added to SDG global indicator 4.7.1. Currently a UNESCO project is trying to extend the coverage beyond the original 110 countries analysed. The GEM Report is continuing to work with countries to strengthen and expand monitoring in this area. The indicator also contributes to the work of the Greening Education Partnership. Read more here.

While countries familiarize themselves with this new indicator, only added to the SDG monitoring framework in 2025, no steps have been taken to request countries to set and share national targets. There is also a potential concern that curriculum documents do not change very frequently. However, even if it takes about 10 years on average for curricula to be overhauled, this still mean that 10% of countries every year reach the end of their curriculum reform process, which makes it important to monitor change on a regular basis.

3. Assessing meaningful youth participation

The TES also called for meaningful youth participation in education decision-making so that “young people can help shape the future of education systems”. In 2024, the Summit of the Future’s outcome document, the Pact for the Future, further called on countries to strengthen meaningful youth participation in education. Action 36 envisaged national mechanisms. Yet until recently, there was no agreed way to measure whether this was happening.

In January 2026, the GEM Report and the UN Youth Office released Lead with youth, which proposed a new indicator to measure meaningful youth participation in education. The first results, based on two surveys of governments and youth- and student-led organizations, showed that only one in three countries has a formal mechanism through which young people can participate in education legislation and policy processes.

While the indicator provides valuable evidence and a framework for countries to assess their progress against peers, it does not easily lend itself to national target setting.

A lasting TES legacy

Four years after the Transforming Education Summit, these new indicators provide governments and stakeholders with evidence on whether TES commitments are translating into action. They also create a basis for future stocktaking, helping identify where progress is being made and where greater effort is needed. As the education community looks beyond 2030, the TES experience demonstrates the importance of pairing ambition with measurement, ensuring that global commitments can be tracked, assessed and acted upon.