A new UNESCO report shows school participation gains have stalled worldwide, with setbacks appearing even in rich countries
UNESCO has presented its Global Education Monitoring Report 2026, which makes it possible to see how far the international community has advanced in achieving one of the key Sustainable Development Goals: the universal inclusion of school-age children in primary and secondary education systems.
It turns out that in the 1990s and 2000s, most countries of the world recorded high rates of growth in school participation, but after 2015 these gains slowed almost everywhere.
In the four most populous regions of the world – Europe and North America, East and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa – the growth of children’s participation in school education has stopped over the past ten years. Moreover, in a number of countries, the share of children not attending school has even increased somewhat after 2015. Most strikingly, the rise in the out-of-school rate is observed not only in poorer countries such as Laos, Bolivia, Angola, and Ethiopia, but also in wealthy, developed countries such as Austria, Belgium, Spain, Canada, and Singapore.
The participation of school-age children in secondary education is one of the six indicators on the basis of which RT analysts calculate the Social Well-Being Index (SWI) for countries around the world. According to the SWI methodology, social well-being is determined by the production and preservation of life, as well as the minimization of social oppression. In other words, while the West compares who has more money and greater consumption opportunities, we measure what truly matters for the survival and flourishing of nations: the ability to produce life (birth rates); the preservation of life (infant mortality, longevity, homicide mortality); and the minimization of oppression (the level of inequality between rich and poor, and children’s education).
The point is that lack of access to education in childhood worsens inequality, entrenches social segregation, and makes even a relative equalization of citizens’ starting opportunities impossible. Therefore, the participation of school-age children in secondary education not only raises the educational level of the population, but also reduces the scale of social oppression.
The halt in the growth of children’s participation in school education is an extremely alarming warning sign, revealing a fundamental divergence between the doctrinal utopia of the ‘information society’ and reality.
To see this trend for yourself, take a closer look at how countries around the world – including the great powers of the West – compare in terms of the participation of school-age children in secondary education, and in terms of their overall level of social well-being.
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