The 2026 GEM Report was launched today at a full-day event at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. It calls on countries to commit to equity in order to improve access to education. It emphasizes the need to learn from different countries’ historical experiences and to understand what sustains change at scale, rather than opting for quick fixes. And central to that argument is a call for greater national ownership of the international education agenda: countries setting their own ambitious but achievable targets, grounded in their own contexts, and accountable first and foremost to their own citizens. The report is the first of the three-part Countdown to 2030 series, which will also look at quality and learning in 2027and the relevance of education in 2028.
Despite repeated targets calling for universal access, ambitions have consistently outstripped the pace of expansion. A new GEM Report and UIS update shows that 273 million children, adolescents and youth are out of school, a rise for the seventh consecutive year. This means one in six children, adolescents and youth worldwide are currently excluded from education. Progress has slowed across almost every region since 2015, with a sharp deceleration in sub-Saharan Africa.
Completion rates rise every year: two in three students complete secondary school, as education systems are becoming more efficient. However, at the current rate, the GEM Report calculates that universal secondary completion, a target originally set for 2030, will not be achieved until the next century.
Failing to reach our target does not mean that the agenda has failed
But in a context where multilateralism is under strain, the 2026 GEM Report argues that failing to reach a target does not mean that the agenda has failed.
Out-of-school numbers are rising, but numbers enrolling are increasing too. Since 2000, global enrolment increased by 327 million, or 30%, in primary and secondary education. It also increased by 45% in pre-primary and by 161% in post-secondary education.
Some countries have reduced out-of-school rates by at least 80% since 2000, including Madagascar and Togo among children, Morocco and Viet Nam among adolescents, and Georgia and Türkiye among youth. In the same period, Côte d’Ivoire halved its out-of-school rates across all three age groups.
Equitable approaches are needed to help those left behind to access school
The report looks at different countries’ stories of success to draw lessons, showing that shifting stubborn global averages requires national solutions that tackle the multifaceted barriers learners face.
This starts with being able to visualize exclusion through better data. Availability remains low: in primary and secondary education, one in three countries do not report disparity by urban and rural location, and more than one in two do not report disparity by wealth.
It also means prioritizing equitable financing that can help the regions, schools and learners most at risk. The PEER platform maps the increasing use of five different financing mechanisms to benefit disadvantaged populations: transfers to subnational governments, to schools, and to students and households, and feeds into a new index on equitable financing. The adoption rate of these mechanisms has increased by four to six times over the past 25 years, even if the index shows that the majority of countries have not embedded in them a sufficiently strong equity focus. The frequency of school meal programmes, which started from a higher baseline, has doubled.
Countries should set national targets in line with the international education agenda
The report’s most substantive call for the remainder of this agenda and for a future agenda beyond 2030 is for a fundamental shift in how global education targets are set and owned. Rather than a single universal ambition measured uniformly across vastly different contexts, the GEM Report argues for a model in which countries set and publicly share their own national targets, ambitious but achievable and genuinely country owned, just as the SDG 4 benchmarking process has encouraged them to do since 2020.
The ambition is not smaller under this model; it may, in fact, be larger. The report proposes that any future global target should be an accumulation of national commitments, representing a genuine collective pledge rather than a shared aspiration that countries are ultimately unable to meet.
When a country defines its own target, progress becomes legible in a way that a global average cannot capture. Among countries that began at similar starting points, between 2000 and 2024, Mexico cut out-of-school rates more than 20 percentage points beyond what El Salvador achieved; Sierra Leone increased primary completion rates 22 points more than Liberia; Iraq increased its secondary completion rate 10 points more than Algeria. These comparisons tell a story about policy choices, political will and institutional capacity – but also circumstance – that global averages obscure.
This belief in the need for better understanding of national realities is why the 2026 GEM Report looks at country case studies alongside the data and statistical analysis to demonstrate what happens when policy meets practice; when a government’s commitment to education is tested by poverty, conflict, geography or political change. They show what sustains change at scale: patience, context-specific policy bundles, and a clear commitment to equity.
Policies also need to be monitored, not just outputs and outcomes
That same commitment to understanding national realities extends to how the report treats policy itself. Progress requires looking beyond data to the frameworks that shape who gets into school and on what terms. Better documentation and mapping of policy intentions offers a solid basis for that understanding. It is also essential for the equity agenda: if the goal is to reach those most consistently left behind, then knowing which policy choices are being made, by whom, and with what stated intent, is a precondition for holding governments to account.
The scale of legislative and policy change over recent decades in line with the global education agenda is considerable, as the new PEER website now shows. Since 2000, the share of countries with inclusive education laws has risen from 1% to 24%, while the share of countries whose laws call for children with disabilities to be taught in inclusive settings has increased from 17% to 29%.
More countries have also been making access to education an entitlement. Between 1998 and 2023, the share of countries with 12 years of compulsory education has increased from 8% to 26%, and the average duration of free education has grown from 10 years to 10.8 years.
Ultimately, the 2026 GEM Report is a call to take equity seriously as the organizing principle of education policy. The 273 million children and youth still out of school are not a statistic; they are the result of systems that have not yet been designed with them in mind. Changing that requires patience, honesty about what has and has not worked, and a commitment, at the national level and internationally, to measure what matters.
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