SDG 4 and the World Education Reform Database

• In Event: Countdown to 2030 – Global Education Monitoring Report 2026: What explains progress in access to education in the past 20 years?

Proposal

The Sustainable Development Goals spelled out an ambitious agenda aiming to achieve high quality schooling for all by 2030. One challenge is assessing how countries are progressing on these goals, and what areas are in most need of attention. The World Education Reform Database (WERD) can support in monitoring and evaluating progress towards SDGs and provide insight into the range of diverse policy options pursued worldwide. WERD is a repository of roughly 12,000 national education reforms reported to international organizations and experts, mainly covering the period since 1960. The database consists of brief descriptions of a wide range of educational policy changes across all levels of education, including curriculum revision, teacher training, technological innovations, structural shifts in schooling. While WERD does not represent the full population of each country’s reforms, it is a comprehensive compilation of changes that are reported to the international community. As global education systems strive to address inequalities, enhance learning outcomes, and adapt to the evolving demands of the 21st century, WERD offers an expansive repository of education reform initiatives from around the world, providing policymakers, researchers, and educators with valuable insights into global trends, and an additional resource to evaluate successful strategies and best practices. This wealth of data allows for cross-country comparisons, enabling stakeholders to identify trends, gaps, and areas for improvement in their own contexts.

A notable strength of the database is that it can provide information about longitudinal trends within a country, making it possible not only to consider the current state of policies, but also the direction of historical trends. Given the vast differences between country resources, historical legacies, and social and political contexts, often it makes more sense to consider a nation’s trajectory over time rather than its comparison to other nations at a single moment. The trends in WERD can reveal, for example, global patterns over time in education reforms related to gender equality, as well as other marginalized groups. In addition, it can shed light on the extent to which education policy has moved to emphasize quality as well as access, or how much a system is working to improve various subject areas; not only in the core areas of literacy and numeracy or STEM, but also in areas of newfound concern in the contemporary polarized world such as climate protection, digital literacy, social and emotional learning, and democracy. Country attention to policies is important in its own right, as policy changes can set the foundation for systemic changes in education. Going further, the policies could prove useful in analyzing variation in progress towards SDG indicators because reported policy changes serve as a proxy for country effort or attention to specific dimensions of sustainable development. For example, gender-related policies could be used to help explain variation in progress on gender equity in education or access-related policy changes may be associated with expansions in enrollments. This presentation will provide an overview of trends in WERD that shed light on country progress towards SDG 4.

Author

• Patricia Bromley, Stanford University