By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)

This blog was also published by Norrag.

On International Women’s Day, we can look back at 50 years of extraordinary efforts to get girls into the classroom. Thanks to these efforts, the gender gap in education is closing and has been closing for decades. And today, the majority of girls worldwide complete primary school. Girls are also in school for longer than ever before. As 50 years of data produced by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) show, girls’ school life expectancy is on the rise.

School life expectancy is the number of years of education a child can expect to receive. Overall the trends look good, even though school life expectancy also includes the years that girls repeat grades. Back in 1970, the global average for girls’ school life expectancy, spanning primary, secondary and tertiary education, was around 6.7 years. Today, it tops 12 years. Continue reading →

By Manos Antoninis, Director of the Global Education Monitoring Report

The latest SDG 4 Data Digest 2018, Data to Nurture Learning, summarized, among other things, the progress made by a range of partners working with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) towards establishing a framework and identifying assessment tools to monitor digital literacy skills.

 Against the backdrop of Mobile Learning Week, this blog highlights the challenges for operationalizing the framework in a way that is formative, informative and cost efficient.   Continue reading →

By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS).

This blog was also published by Norrag.

Among the many factors fuelling the global learning crisis that stunts the educational path of six out of ten children and adolescents, we must consider the conditions in which children try to learn and teachers try to teach.

To put it simply: are pupils and teachers working in schools and classrooms that are fit for purpose? Do they have all the basic facilities they need – electricity, clean drinking water and single-sex toilets – as well as those 21^st century essentials: Internet access and computers? Or are children and teachers struggling in crumbling, overcrowded and poorly-equipped classrooms? Continue reading →