April 30: Consultation on the 2024/5 GEM Report hosted by the German Commission for UNESCO May 2: Dialogue with International Organization of Employers policy working group on Employment, Skills and Digitalization May 7: Launch of the 2024 Spotlight Report on universal basic education completion and foundational learning in Africa: Learning Counts at the Conference of…
In Russia, discussions about canceling the Unified State Exam occur in public with a frequency of several months. The most recent initiative came from a group of LDPR deputies, who drafted a relevant bill. Pyotr Tolstoy, Deputy Speaker of the State Duma, referred to the exam as a “special police operation on children” and claimed that both teachers and parents opposed it. Viktor Alexandrovich Bolotov, one of the creators of the exam concept, former head of Rosobrnadzor, professor at the Higher School of Economics, and academician…
The UNECE Regional Forum (March 13-14, 2024) served as an important platform for showcasing Russian expertise in sustainable development. The 2024 Regional Forum took place amid multiple crises. In commitment to the 2030 Agenda at the SDG Summit, governments and stakeholders across the UNECE region are focusing on finding effective, innovative, and crisis-resilient strategies and…
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Regional Forum, held on March 13 and 14, 2024, served as a significant platform for showcasing Russian expertise in the area of sustainable development. This year’s Regional Forum took place amidst numerous challenges. In line with the commitment to the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals…
Let us discuss the fundamental basis of any system for assessing the quality of education – the educational outcomes that are subject to evaluation (knowledge, skills, abilities, competencies, etc.). To begin with, let us consider the well-known skills of the 21st century, which have been widely discussed since 2015. At that time, for the first…
In 2022, the UIS and the GEM Report proposed a major improvement in the way out-of-school rates and populations are estimated, making efficient use of different sources of information. Yet, the model has a weakness: when crisis strikes, estimates cannot be updated without new information. Sometimes such new information is collected. For instance, UNICEF carried…
Do Not Exaggerate the Importance of the Student Portfolio In recent years, there has been much discussion about the student portfolio as a means of objectively recording academic and extra-curricular achievements. Even today, individual student accomplishments serve as an alternative to standardized exams for admission to higher education, such as when entering universities based on…
This second edition of the SDG 4 Scorecard produced together with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) shows the efforts that countries have been making towards achieving their 2025 and 2030 national benchmarks. It was launched at the UNESCO Conference of Education Data and Statistics, which brought together education statisticians from over 125 countries and…