Monitoring SDG 4: Access to education

The world failed on its promise for all children to go to primary school by 2015. That year, the new education goal, SDG 4, set the level of ambition a step higher, calling for all young people to complete secondary school by the year 2030. To achieve this, all children of school starting age should have begun school in 2018, but only 70% did so in low-income countries. Today, 250 million children are out of school. 

According to countries' own SDG 4 benchmarks for the progress they expect to be able to make by 2030 , 84 million children are at risk of still being out of school by the deadline. Most countries that have set national benchmarks for the improvement they intend to make in reducing out-of-school rates appear to be making fast progress towards their targets, although 3 in 10 of these countries appear to have regressed in the out-of-school rate of youth of upper secondary school age between 2015 and 2020.