IFUT General Secretary Frank Jones attended the Irish launch of UNESCO’s 2026 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, Access and Equity: Countdown to 2030 today.
The launch was organised by the Irish Network for Education Worldwide (INEW), of which Frank is a Steering Committee member.
The GEM Report provides an independent assessment of global progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4): the commitment to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.
Speaking following the launch, Frank said that the report provides further evidence of an increasingly unavoidable reality: the progress envisaged when SDG 4 was adopted will not be achieved by 2030.
“The international community made a clear commitment to deliver inclusive and equitable quality education for all by 2030. With fewer than five years remaining, it is quite obvious that this commitment will not be met,” Frank said.
“This is not because we do not understand the scale of the problem or what is required to address it. The central difficulty is the absence of the necessary political will, particularly when it comes to financing education and recruiting and retaining the teachers the world needs.”
The report does contain evidence of significant progress over the past quarter of a century.
In 2024, approximately 1.4 billion students were enrolled in school, 327 million more than in 2000. Completion rates have also increased at primary and secondary levels.
Some countries have demonstrated that substantial progress can be achieved where governments maintain a long-term commitment to equity and direct resources towards those most at risk of exclusion.
“Not all the news is bad,” Frank said. “The report identifies countries that have made important advances despite difficult economic and social circumstances. This demonstrates that educational exclusion is not inevitable. Sustained public policy, adequate investment and a clear focus on equality can make a measurable difference.”
However, these advances fall far short of what is required to meet the targets agreed under SDG 4.
The 2026 GEM Report records that 273 million children and young people remain out of school. This represents approximately one in every six children, adolescents and young people worldwide.
The global out-of-school population has increased for seven consecutive years, while progress in reducing exclusion has slowed across every region.
UNESCO estimates that one additional child would have to enter education every two seconds simply for the world to remain on track towards SDG 4.
At the current rate of progress, universal completion of secondary education remains a distant prospect. The report estimates that the world would not achieve a 95% upper-secondary completion rate until 2105.
“The commitment was to deliver quality education for all by 2030, not by the beginning of the next century!” Frank said.
“The failure to achieve SDG 4 is not simply a failure to meet an international target. It represents a failure to vindicate the right to education of hundreds of millions of children and young people.”
The global education crisis cannot be separated from the wider international situation. Conflict, forced displacement, poverty, climate emergencies and political instability continue to disrupt the lives and education of millions of children.
Humanitarian needs are increasing year after year. At precisely the time when international solidarity and investment are most urgently required, overseas development assistance is being reduced.
International aid to education could decline by as much as 30% between 2023 and 2027. Low- and lower-middle-income countries already face an estimated annual financing shortfall of approximately US$97 billion if they are to achieve their national SDG 4 targets.
“These are not abstract financial figures,” Frank said. “They mean children without access to schools, classrooms without adequate resources and education systems without sufficient numbers of qualified teachers.
“It is completely contradictory for governments to reaffirm their commitment to SDG 4 while simultaneously reducing the funding required to achieve it.”
At the core of the global education crisis is the shortage of teachers.
The world requires approximately 44 million additional primary and secondary teachers by 2030. Despite this, there remains insufficient political will to finance their recruitment, education, professional development and retention.
In many countries, teachers work in overcrowded classrooms with inadequate materials, low pay, insecure employment and limited professional support. These conditions make it increasingly difficult to attract people into teaching and to retain experienced teachers within the profession.
“There can be no credible plan to achieve SDG 4 that does not place teachers at its centre,” Frank said.
“Education cannot be expanded, improved or made more equitable without sufficient numbers of appropriately qualified teachers. Buildings, technology and policy commitments all have a role, but none can replace the relationship between a teacher and a student.
“Governments must recognise teachers as highly skilled professionals and ensure that they have decent pay, secure employment, manageable workloads, professional autonomy and a meaningful voice in the development of education policy.”
The report also underlines the importance of how education funding is distributed. Although more countries are adopting policies intended to direct additional resources towards disadvantaged communities, fewer than one in ten have a sufficiently strong focus on equity.
Frank said that education must be treated as a fundamental public responsibility rather than a discretionary expense.
“Governments and international institutions must protect and increase education budgets, ensure that funding reaches disadvantaged communities and reverse the decline in international assistance.
“Education unions must also be recognised as social partners and included in the decisions that shape education systems and the working lives of those who sustain them.”
The 2026 report is the first instalment in UNESCO’s three-part Countdown to 2030 series. It examines access and equity, while the subsequent reports will consider quality and learning in 2027 and the relevance of education in 2028–29. Further information and the report itself are available from the official UNESCO GEM Report website.
“The report demonstrates that progress can be made,” Frank concluded. “The question is whether governments are prepared to provide the sustained public investment, international cooperation and commitment to equity required to make that progress possible for every child.
“The resources required are substantial, but the greatest obstacle is not a lack of knowledge. It is the failure to make education, and the teachers who provide it, a genuine global priority.”