The Teacher’s Waking Nightmare

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By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

You did well at school and at college. You studied hard and made great sacrifices to qualify as a teacher – determined to help the next generation reach their full potential. But now you’re standing in a poorly-equipped classroom in front of 50 children aged from 6 to 11 years old. You have a few textbooks that are falling apart, only a handful of pens and pencils, a few scraps of paper, and no chalk for the chalkboard painted on the crumbling wall behind you. And your pupils are looking at you expectantly, ready for you to teach them everything that they need to know.

This is not some nightmare that ends when you wake up. It’s a daily reality for many of the world’s teachers. Continue reading →

News from Hamburg: Big Steps Forward towards Reliable Metrics to Harmonise Learning Assessment Data Globally

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By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and Dirk Hastedt, Executive Director of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)

This blog was also published by Norrag.

On the day that the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) released new global numbers of children and adolescents not learning, representatives from regional and international learning assessments gathered in Hamburg, Germany. They had answered the UIS’ call to come together to help tackle measurement issues around the coverage and comparability of data for SDGs Indicator 4.1.1: the proportion of children and young people in Grade 2 or 3; at the end of primary education; and at the end of lower secondary education, achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in reading and mathematics. Continue reading →

New Data Reveal a Learning Crisis that Threatens Development Around the World

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

New data released today by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) show that 617 million children and adolescents worldwide are not reaching minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. This signals a learning crisis that could threaten progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Continue reading →

Building a True Picture of Lifelong Learning

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

This blog was originally published by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE)

New data on learning are steadily coming on-stream, helping us to gauge the extent to which children and youth, in school and out, are learning acquiring the skills they need to build their lives. This week at the UKFIET (The Education and Development Forum) Conference in London, the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) has set out progress on the development of a global approach to measure learning. The UIS presentation showed the challenges and the most feasible solutions to resolve them. All of this information is vital for the pursuit of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) on education: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Continue reading →

Tracking Literacy in an Increasingly Digital World

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

The theme of this year’s International Literacy Day on Friday, 8 September, is ‘Literacy in a Digital World’. The Day aims to highlight the kind of literacy skills people need to navigate this world and the literacy policies and programmes that can leverage the opportunities such a world provides. Continue reading →

Moving Up a Gear: The CapED Initiative

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By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and Jordan Naidoo, Director of the UNESCO Division for Education 2030 Support and Coordination

This blog was also published by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).

In 2015, the international community agreed on Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), which now forms the universal education agenda to 2030. Many countries still have a far way to go to reach these targets, and to do this, they will need external support to overhaul their education systems. There are two dimensions at stake to achieve SDG 4: identification of policy priorities and the associated data availability and quality to monitor progress.  Continue reading →

Learning Progression Explorer: Tell Us What You Think

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By Ray Adams, Director of ACER’s Centre for Global Education Monitoring and a Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne

This blog was also published by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).

The push for globally-comparable measures of learning is truly underway, with work well advanced through the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML) to develop common metrics to benchmark student performance in reading and mathematics. The development of common metrics is fundamental to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4): ensure inclusive and quality education for all by 2030. Common metrics are crucial if we are to obtain a comprehensive and comparable picture of how well children are learning what they need to learn – the ‘quality’ part of the SDG 4 equation. Continue reading →