Time to Get Serious About Education for All, with Progress at a Standstill

By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and Karen Mundy, Chief Technical Officer, Global Partnership for Education (GPE)

 This blog was also published by the GPE.

The latest figures on out-of-school-children are sobering, to say the least. According to new data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), progress remains at a standstill. We still have about 263 million – or one out of five – children, adolescents and youth worldwide out of school and this number has barely changed over the past five years.

Despite strenuous efforts to get every child into primary school, there has been little or no progress at the global level over the past decade, with 9% of children of primary age denied their right to education in 2008, and 9% still out of school today (see our video).  Continue reading

SDG4-Education 2030 Steering Committee: Time for a Concerted Push to Help Countries Produce the Best Possible Data

This blog was originally published by the Global Education Monitoring Report.

By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and Dankert Vedeler, Co-Chair of the SDG Education 2030 Steering Committee and Assistant Director General of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research

With so many threads coming together.. the task now is to weave them into one coherent whole as we push for the best possible data on education to monitor progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4). And the Fourth SDG-Education 2030 Steering Committee Meeting in Paris this week is an opportunity to do just that. Continue reading

Calling All Assessment Experts! Online Consultation on Global Framework of Reference for Mathematics

By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Mmantsetsa Marope, Director of the UNESCO International Bureau of Education (IBE-UNESCO) and Renato Opertti, Senior Programme Specialist of the IBE-UNESCO

The Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML) is making steady progress in defining the learning outcomes indicators of the SDG 4 monitoring framework. The first step for all of these indicators – whether they refer to adult numeracy, digital literacy or global citizenship skills – is to develop a framework that by listing all of the content and skills can serve as reference to teach, develop and assess children, youth and adults. These frameworks will play a key role in the GAML strategy of linking existing assessments to produce SDG 4 data instead of developing a new global assessment.

In this context, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the International Bureau of Education (IBE) have developed the Global Framework of Reference for Mathematics, which is the subject of an online consultation. We need your feedback on this framework that will pave the way to monitoring progress with global monitoring indicator 4.1.1, which tracks the proportion of children and young people achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in mathematics in Grades 2/3 and at the end of primary and lower secondary education. Continue reading

A Global Sharing Network to Strengthen Countries’ Education Data

By Luis Crouch, Senior Economist at the International Development Group (RTI International), and Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)

This blog was also published by Norrag.

No strategy – no matter how thorough – can succeed unless it is backed by good data that chart progress towards its objectives and meets the needs of its users, especially countries.

As a previous blog has noted, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) wants to ‘re-boot’ the education sector through data innovations that respond to demand, and we are pushing hard for a Global Strategy for Education Data. As part of that push, we have been making the case for greater investment in the data needed to chart progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) on education, publishing a blog and paper in the run-up to this week’s replenishment meeting of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), in Dakar, Senegal. The meeting aims to secure pledges from donors to secure the future education of no less than 870 million children. Continue reading