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Overall, 79% of countries have submitted benchmarks, or national targets, to be achieved by 2025 and 2030 for at least one of eight SDG 4 indicators. This process, supported by the UIS and the GEM Report, responds to the Education 2030 Framework for Action which had called on countries to establish ‘appropriate intermediate benchmarks ... for addressing the accountability deficit associated with longer-term targets’.

In total, 54% of the potential 2025 benchmark values (i.e. for all 8 indicators and the 23 disaggregation possibilities) have been submitted. Apart from the public expenditure indicators, for which there is a common benchmark for all countries, the two benchmark indicators with the highest submission rates are the early childhood education participation rate (72%) and the completion rate (65%). The two indicators with the lowest submission rates are the gender gap in upper secondary completion (36%), and school internet connectivity (32%). The latter is a new benchmark indicator and countries may have had too little time to set a target if they did not already have one. 

Overall, the classification of individual countries according to the speed with which they are improving and the analysis of countries with baseline, recent and benchmark values, visually summarized for one education level for each benchmark indicator (see Progress assessment), suggests insufficient progress towards national benchmarks. Progress is close to the national targets in primary school internet connectivity (from 69% in 2015 to 79% in 2022 or just 3 percentage points off track) and in pre-primary school teachers with minimum required qualifications (from 75% in 2015 to 85% in 2022, just 2 percentage points off track). Progress is significantly more off track for the remaining six indicators. In two of them, countries are moving backwards: the gender gap among countries with a disadvantage for boys (where the gap has increased from 6.8 to 9.5 percentage points) and public education expenditure (where the median country has fallen from 13.8% to 12.7%, moving further away from the minimum benchmark of 15% of total public expenditure).

Among the three indicators with the highest data coverage, the percentage of countries that have indicator levels above 95% and/or have recorded fast progress is 40% in the early childhood education participation rate, 28% in the upper secondary completion rate, and 21% in public education expenditure (i.e. countries have achieved both benchmarks). However, challenges remain with the large share of country-indicator pairs for which there are either no data (32%) or there are insufficient data to establish a trend (14%). These gaps prevent comprehensive assessment of progress, especially with respect to the indicator on the minimum level of proficiency.

It will not be until 2027 at the earliest that the achievement of the 2025 benchmarks can be verified, once 2025 data are available for all countries. In the meantime, the focus will be on the probability of countries reaching their benchmarks. Countries have been classified into six categories (Table 5) based on the speed of their recent progress and the range of progress rates observed historically (2000–15). Four categories capture the speed of progress since 2010 or 2015 – and its implication for the probability of achieving the benchmark – and two categories recognize the non-availability of data (Box 2). For countries without national benchmarks (either submitted or extracted from national sector plans), progress is evaluated against the feasible benchmarks. As described previously, these were estimated for each indicator based on the average rate of progress of the fastest-improving top 25% of countries in 2000–15 and vary by the indicator’s starting value.