Primary school enrollment rates have risen dramatically over the past 15 years, but, those gains have been uneven and learning levels remain unacceptably low. Poor quality education is jeopardizing the future of millions of children and youth around the world. Yet we do not know the full scale of the crisis because measurement of learning outcomes is limited in many countries, and hence difficult to assess at the international level.
- The task force calls for a shift in global focus and investment from universal access to access plus learning. The collection of better data on learning is central to that effort.
- The task force recommends that education systems offer opportunities for children and youth to master competencies in seven domains of learning and proposes a small set of learning indicators for tracking globally.
- The task force calls for coordinated action by all education and development stakeholders to make learning and reliable data on learning outcomes a global priority and proposes next steps for carrying its recommendations forward.
- The task force will transition to a new stage of work focused on mobilizing the technical expertise, institutional capacity and political will required to ensure young people develop the skills they need for their future lives and livelihoods.
Motivated by the challenges of low learning levels and a global data gap on learning, 30 organizations have joined efforts through the Learning Metrics Task Force with the ultimate goal of improving learning experiences for children and youth around the world. Convened by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, the task force works within the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), Education for All (EFA), and Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) and contributes to their fulfillment by:
• Catalyzing a shift in the global education conversation from access to access plus learning.
• Building consensus on global learning indicators and actions to improve the measurement of learning in all countries.
With input from more than 1,700 individuals in 118 countries, the task force has developed a series of recommendations to use both existing assessments of learning and innovative, new measures to improve the opportunities and outcomes of all children.
The final recommendations from the task force are presented in this report, entitled Toward Universal Learning: Recommendations from the Learning Metrics Task Force, which outlines how the measurement of learning outcomes can help to ensure quality education for all. It presents key indicators for tracking progress in foundational skills such as literacy and numeracy, as well as in knowledge and skills that go beyond these traditional indicators. In particular, the task force calls for new global indicators to include “readiness to learn” in early childhood, skills and values for youth to be successful “citizens of the world,” and a “learning for all” indicator that would combine measures of access, completion and reading into one statistic. It also calls for a simple global tool to examine the breadth of learning opportunities to which children and youth are exposed through education.