The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released the 2024 Global Education Monitoring Report on the first day of the Global Education Meeting (GEM). The event took place in Fortaleza (CE) on Thursday, October 31.

The data presented in the document, known as the Fortaleza Declaration, point to stagnation or decline in educational indicators worldwide and to a lack of school leaders capable of improving educational standards. 

• View the Executive Summary of the report

“Education has the power to transform our world and is the main driver of progress across all the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs], as well as being crucial to addressing global challenges,” said Stefania Giannini, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education. “However, we face urgent crises of equity and funding. Today, we call for decisive leadership to address these intertwined crises and dramatically increase investment in education.” 

In addition, the report calls for the adoption of an educational approach that addresses the urgent global challenges we face today, such as incorporating climate action into curricula and promoting peace, human rights, and gender equality. The goal is to accelerate efforts to achieve inclusive and equitable quality education for all. Action is required in four key areas: setting expectations, focusing on learning, promoting collaboration, and developing people.

Manos Antoninis, director of the GEM report, emphasized the importance of developing new leaders to achieve these goals. “The 2024 report indicates that, in recent years, learning levels have declined, the number of out-of-school students is not decreasing, and the priority governments place on education has also diminished. With so many challenges facing education, we need more leaders—not only within schools but across all sectors of civil society,” he said.

Tuition

Silvia Montoya, director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, explained how global education is analyzed and highlighted the need for change: “We use eight indicators to measure progress in education and SDG 4 [regarding inclusive, equitable, and quality education] in UNESCO partner countries, and most of them are not at the ideal level. Learning is a basic human right, and what we see from these studies is that most nations are unable to guarantee quality education for a large portion of their population. Without effective changes, we will not be able to achieve the goals set for 2030.”

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The study shows that 110 million children and adolescents have enrolled in school since SDG 4 was established in 2015. Today, more children are in school than ever before. Completion rates are also rising: compared to 2015, more than 40 million young people are now completing high school. However, the out-of-school population has decreased by only 1% over the past ten years. Currently, 251 million children and young people are out of school worldwide, while 650 million drop out before completing high school.

Regional disparities remain stark: 33% of school-age children and adolescents in low-income countries are out of school, compared with just 3% in high-income countries. Globally, more than half of all out-of-school children and adolescents live in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Financing

The 2024 Education Financing Observatory, published by UNESCO and the World Bank, confirms that spending on education per child has remained virtually unchanged since 2010. Currently, four out of ten countries spend less than 15% of their total public expenditures and less than 4% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education (the two agreed-upon benchmarks).

Globally, between 2015 and 2022, spending on public education fell by 0.4 percentage points of GDP: the median level dropped from 4.4% to 4%. Education’s share of total public spending decreased by 0.6 percentage points: from 13.2% in 2015 to 12.6% in 2022. This highlights the growing gaps in education and the inadequacy of domestic budgets to address these challenges.

The UNESCO and World Bank report also warns of the growing burden of debt payments on the budget for this sector. In Africa, in 2022, countries spent nearly as much on debt as they did on education. At the same time, the share of international aid allocated to education fell from 9.3% in 2019 to 7.6% in 2022.

Leaders

The Fortaleza Declaration also emphasizes that school leaders need more time to focus on teaching and learning in order to reverse the 3-point decline in learning levels observed since 2018—a trend that began at the start of the last decade.

According to UNESCO, more than a quarter of the variation in student achievement levels across schools can be attributed to the performance of these professionals. Therefore, it is necessary to revise the selection processes to recruit more qualified and experienced individuals with diverse backgrounds in order to implement decisive actions in schools.

Global Education Monitoring Report

Established in 2002, the Global Education Monitoring Report is an independent publication issued by UNESCO. At the 2015 World Education Forum, the organization received a mandate from 160 governments to monitor and report on progress toward the SDGs in education, with a particular focus on monitoring SDG 4 and the implementation of national and international strategies to help hold all relevant partners accountable for their commitments.  

Source: MEC Press Office, with information from UNESCO and GEM

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