Source: VIEW database.
Quality standards are often not met. In sub-Saharan Africa, the share of teachers with minimum required qualifications has dropped from 70% in 2012 to 64% in 2022. In Europe and Northern America, it dropped from 98% in 2010 to 93% in 2023. Learning outcomes are suffering as a result. The share of students at the end of lower secondary education able to read with understanding in middle- and high-income countries is now 12 percentage points lower than it was a decade ago; the share with a minimum proficiency level in mathematics has also fallen by 6 percentage points in this period.
School principals have reported a decrease in their oversight of teaching activities in high-income countries
Source: OECD (2023).
Despite these challenges, education financing is not keeping up. The new 2024 Education Finance Watch, jointly produced by the GEM Report, the UIS and the World Bank and also released at the meeting, confirms that public education spending per child has largely stayed the same since 2010. Public education spending as a share of total public spending has in fact declined by 0.6 to 0.7 percentage points since 2015. The Watch warns of the growing weight of debt servicing. In Africa, countries spent almost as much on debt servicing in 2022 as they did on education. At the same time, the share of official development assistance going to education has dropped from 9.3% to 7.6% in 2019-2022.
Decisive leadership is needed at political, system and institutional level to bring SDG 4 back on course. The new 2024/5 GEM Report calls for efforts to develop leaders in four key leadership dimensions so that they can set expectations, focus on learning, foster collaboration and develop people. For these dimensions to be realized, people in leadership positions should be trusted and empowered; recruited through fair hiring practices; supported to grow; and encouraged to develop collaborative cultures. The report also calls for investment in education officials’ capacity to serve as system leaders, with a particular emphasis on instructional leadership and quality assurance.
An accompanying #LeadforLearning campaign shows school leaders need more time to focus on the development of staff and students. School leaders can turn schools around: research shows over a quarter of the variation in schools’ learning levels can be attributed to principals, the second most important factor after teachers. A study of 32 countries showed a clear link between strong leadership and improved teaching practices. Yet, principals spend too much time on administrative functions. A study in 14 low- and middle-income countries showed that two thirds of principals’ time was consumed by administration. In high-income countries, principals report spending less time overseeing teaching now than before.
A review of leader selection processes is needed. It is necessary to recruit qualified and diverse leaders with management experience to steer decisive action. The report posits that the best teachers do not necessarily make the best principals. But while 3 in 4 countries require principals to be fully qualified teachers, some 3 in 10 specify management experience. Analysis of the 211 PEER profiles of countries’ laws and policies on leadership in education accompanying the report found that less than two thirds of countries currently have competitive recruitment practices for primary and secondary school principals. Another analysis has shown that almost one third of countries base their hiring and firing decisions for teachers on politics.
School leaders should not be heroes. The report recommends sharing leadership to build better schools. Sharing leadership empowers teachers to lead within their classrooms, students to be active leaders with their peers, and parents and community members to be involved. Yet only half of countries explicitly emphasize teacher collaboration in their leadership standards and barely one third of leadership training programmes focus on it. One half of principals in richer countries today start their role with no leadership preparation at all.
Leadership in local and central government is important too. Ensuring alignment between policy design and implementation I key but system leadership can be limited by a lack of clear orientation and motivation to act towards a shared goal. A survey of education officials in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Peru showed that they could not identify up to four of the five tasks they are expected to perform according to the law. The lack of understanding of their roles was negatively associated with school learning outcomes in their districts.
Political leadership is important. As leaders gathering at the Global Education Meeting in Fortaleza demonstrate, visionary political leaders can make education a priority and build coalitions of action. However, ministers balance multiple demands during short tenures. A new global database shows that half of education ministers since 2010 leave office within two years after their appointment. Such short tenures make it hard to deliver reform. Analysis of World Bank education projects between 2000 and 2017 in 114 countries found a substantive negative correlation between ministerial turnover and project performance.
The theme of leadership will be central to the GEM Report’s outputs over the coming year.
Read the full report, the summary and the 16 background papers commissioned to feed into the report. Future publications to be issued on the theme include:
- a gender edition (mid-2025);
- a youth edition (late 2025); and
- four regional editions:
- on leadership and inclusion in Central and Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia (February 2025)
- on distributed leadership in Latin America (April 2025)
- on leadership and digital transformation in East Asia (June 2025)
- on instructional leadership for foundational learning in Africa, the third report of the Spotlight series (October 2025)
