With just a decade remaining to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals for Education (SDG 4), relevant, timely, and quality data is key to monitoring progress and informing policy responses. This was further highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted progress on school participation and learning, widened gaps between and within countries and underscored the urgency to re-examine efforts to achieve SDG targets.

SDG 11.4.1 is the only direct culture indicator of the SDGs, which calls on countries to “strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard cultural and natural heritage.” Key insights from the 2020 data collection cycle were encapsulated in the report Tracking investment to safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage.  

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, most governments worldwide have implemented policies to contain the disease's spread. While incurring high economic costs, restrictive procedures such as schools closures and the changes of learning methods risk hindering effective learning during the pandemic and the progress made towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4).

The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) was established in the 1970s, with updates in 1997 and 2011, to categorize information on education systems in a way that facilitates cross-national comparability of education statistics. As the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) collects and produces data to monitor progress toward the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) for education, ISCED has an important role.