As any statistician will tell you, gathering data is only half the battle. If data are to make a difference, they have to have power. For that, they need to be backed by political will, with a firm commitment that they will be used to drive change.
Young learners have moved up the data agenda for Sustainable Development Goal 4! The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and its partners have been pushing to upgrade SDG 4 Indicator 4.1.1a on measuring learning outcomes in Grades 2 and 3, and earlier this week we heard that our efforts have been successful.
For 10 consecutive days in October, I travelled across Hamburg, Karachi, Islamabad, Muzzafarabad (AJK), Rahim Yar Khan, Bahawalpur, Multan, Muzzaffargarh and Lahore. The purposes of my travel included chasing a consensus for globally-agreed learning indicators, initiating the 2018 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) assessments and overseeing accelerated learning gains for out-of-school adolescent girls.
When the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were drafted in 2015, there was broad agreement that the new global goals needed to evolve from measuring increased access, investment in infrastructure and reporting average learning gains, to measuring learning with a focus on the most disadvantaged children. The focus on ensuring that no child is left behind is crucial.
The 2019 Survey of Formal Education covers key data for the school year ending in 2018 required for the monitoring of international and national education goals.
Following the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is working closely with Member States and partners to develop new indicators, statistical approaches and monitoring tools to better assess progress towards the SDG 4 education targets while making every effort to minimise the reporting burden on countries.
The Institute, in partnership with the UN Statistics Division, has been mandated to develop the methodology to measure the economic contribution of culture, which can be collected through Culture Satellite Accounts. An agreed-upon framework would enable the role of culture in the economy to be compared globally.
During this meeting, technical experts will review methodological issues, learn about experiences in Japan and identify the next steps of the project.
The importance of the culture sector to the economy is difficult to measure with current statistical tools. How much do artists, musicians or any cultural activity contribute to the dynamism of an economy?
The educational prosperity framework that I introduced in a recent blog provides an essential structure for understanding the holistic and cumulative ways that children develop, learn and thrive. The benefits of the framework are hardly theoretical: they provide an important and practical guide for ways that monitoring data can—and should—be used to create smarter and more effective policies to help young people thrive.
On World Teachers Day, this blog presents an assessment framework, called Education Prosperity, that can be used to track the success of teachers, families, communities and public institutions in developing children's cognitive skills and their social, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being.
As the official data source for SDG 4, the UIS is working with countries and partners to build consensus around the measurement agenda, while developing the indicators, standards and tools needed to monitor progress and help countries improve the quality and use of their data in the pursuit of their development goals.
The UIS is bringing together stakeholders from across the international education community through two flagship initiatives that will be meeting in October and November.