Over half a billion children missing from education data

Today, the first ever global Conference on Education Data and Statistics is being convened by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in Paris. The UN Statistical Commission has been convening for 78 years and annually for the past 30 years. Labour statisticians celebrated the 100th anniversary of their conference last year. It was education’s turn to establish its global community of statisticians.

Education data matter. Not everything can or should be measured in education. But data make children visible – and can ensure that children count when policies are designed and resources are allocated. The Conference this week is bringing together statisticians from all over the world who help collect and analyse data to better assess the health of their education systems.

When the education goal, SDG 4, was set in 2015, the aspiration in its targets had to be translated into indicators that would be understood by all so that they then be tracked, and against which governments could be held to account. How can we tell if a child is learning what is expected? What does it mean to have a teacher of good quality? Education is a fiercely national domain of policy, where each country uses a different language and has a different understanding of the same concepts. The challenge for Conference participants is to put the light and reach consensus on an agenda of issues that remain to be resolved.

This is work that UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics, the leading data agency for education, has led on, creating a structure to the meaning of global progress in education for countries to work towards. There is now a global standard for what it means for a child to have learnt sufficiently at each education level; there are new suggestions that will be tabled at the Conference for the elusive definition of qualified teachers.

Participants also have a mission to find new solutions to some major blind spots in education data preventing us from effectively monitoring SDG 4. Almost half of countries are not measuring children’s learning levels as they progress through school. There are 680 million children whose achievement is neither counted nor accounted for.  The UIS will be presenting the results of an innovative, cost-efficient and capacity-enhancing approach to this: the Assessment for Minimum Proficiency Level.

Given the scale of the challenge on data gaps across the board, it is sometimes necessary to patch together data collected by different bodies and find a way to make them align, so that success is judged fairly from one country to another.  This is the way that out-of-school rates of children are now calculated, for example: data is pulled from multiple sources and combined. Thanks to this method, new numbers on how many children were out of school in 2022 were produced for countries such as Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya that had not reported data for over a decade. There is potential for the same to be done to fill the gaps in other areas, as data sources are diversifying.

This level of work is not simple and is not made much easier by technology bringing fast-paced developments to data for education either. Capacity building for statistical offices is critical. One way that UNESCO has been doing this is by helping countries to read their own past progress to determine what pace of change they might expect to see in the future. Countries have been supported to set national targets, called SDG 4 benchmarks, extracted from their national plans and – where these were not available – based on these past trends. This can give a better idea of where they expect to be when the education goal reaches its deadline: 2030. It also nurtures political leadership to use data for policy.

At the Conference this week, the second SDG 4 Scorecard will be launched showing how countries are progressing towards their national targets. It shows that progress towards national benchmarks is insufficient.  In Africa as many as 40% of countries with data have made no progress in reducing out-of-school rates among lower secondary school age adolescents since 2015. The gender gaps in upper secondary completion are getting wider. Five countries have seen gaps getting wider for women: Afghanistan, Benin, Comoros, Nigeria and Togo; gaps are growing wider for men in 39 middle-income countries including Argentina, Cambodia, Iraq, Montenegro, Namibia and Samoa. These findings are important for accountability, but also for peer learning. Countries can assess others’ trajectories; the reasons one country might have bucked trends can be analysed and learnt from. They are a perfect example of why comparable data at the global level is important.

A forum was needed for discussion, knowledge exchange and sharing of best practices on many of these issues, which today’s Conference has provided. It hopes to find common ground among countries and data producers to better monitor progress towards SDG 4 so that no child is uncounted; no child left behind.