2026 Global Education Monitoring Report

by communications | 22 Apr 2026 | Blog

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Blog by Marie-Christine Gries, SI Representative at UNESCO, Paris.

UNESCO Presentation on March 25 2026

Following speeches by the Director-General and the Assistant Director-General for Education, a series of round-table discussions took place throughout the day. These featured expert panellists and education policymakers from various countries, particularly those that have made significant progress in improving access to education.

According to global data, Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) will not be achieved by 2030.

There are multiple reasons for these delays, including the isolation of rural areas, cultural barriers, armed conflicts, shortages of school infrastructure despite high birth rates, challenges in securing technical and technological investment, financial constraints in the poorest regions, and the effects of the 2020 pandemic.

Despite this, considerable progress has been made. However, performance varies significantly both between countries within the same region and globally. In response, UNESCO’s monitoring approach avoids a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, it prioritises country-specific research to understand the policy factors that have enabled success in some contexts and hindered progress in others.

This approach supports informed debate, data sharing, and the exchange of national experiences. It also acknowledges the complexity of building effective education systems, which cannot always be replicated across different local contexts.

UNESCO has revised the format of the Global Education Monitoring Report. It is now a more focused analytical tool designed to track progress towards SDG 4 and contribute to discussions on the post-2030 education agenda. New indicators have been developed to enable more detailed analysis.

The report will be structured in three sections over the coming years:

2026: Access and Equity
2027: Quality and Learning
2028–29: Relevance of educational content and its suitability for current challenges

Each theme requires a distinct monitoring approach.

The availability and reliability of data on countries’ progress mean that data collection is unevenly developed: the 2026 report on access to education contains abundant data that is relatively easy to interpret, whereas for the subsequent sections, data is scarcer and more difficult to interpret. Furthermore, equity is a cross-cutting issue, featuring in all three reports.

The 2026 Report: Access to Education

Despite the outlook for 2030, the report does not conclude that the agenda has failed, given the significant progress made towards universal access to primary and secondary education. It appears that there has been an unfortunate negative discrepancy between this rate of enrolment and the expansion of education systems, which may partly explain the dropouts and disengagement from education.

Taking all circumstances and factors into account, the report casts doubt on whether universal completion of secondary education will be achieved. At the current rate, the target of 95 per cent would not be reached until 2105.

Equity

With regard to gender, the data appear to be fairly reliable, but the same cannot be said for other aspects of inequality. Measuring equity in terms of wealth, place of residence, disability status or ethnic origin does not yet have comprehensive data. The report must also focus on policies regarding the use of public funding to channel resources to local sub-national governments, schools and disadvantaged pupils (or their households) in order to level the playing field in education. A new index has also been created for this purpose.

Conclusions

The report concludes that there is no single explanation for long-term progress in access and equity. While education policies play a key role, external factors—such as post-conflict recovery, women’s participation in the labour market, and health and nutrition policies—also significantly influence outcomes.