World Bank Launches Integrated System to Help Track Education Quality

Countries across the globe are set to benefit from a newly launched integrated system which will help track delivery of education and policy goals. The system is in partnership between the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and UK’s Department for International Development.

The new partnership is set to develop tools that governments can use to better monitor the quality of their education systems, allowing policymakers to take real-time decisions to ensure that all children are learning.

The collaboration is also meant to advance the goals of the Human Capital Project, a global effort to accelerate more and better investments in people for greater equity and economic growth.

The World Bank will take the lead on developing the new tools under a multidimensional Global Education Policy Dashboard, working together with education and governance experts from around the world. The Dashboard will soon be tested in 13 countries and it will be progressively expanded to more countries.

As the recent World Development Report 2018 highlighted, being in school is not the same thing as learning, and much of the world is facing a learning crisis. Thus, the new partnership seeks to upend that crisis by empowering countries with new data on the most important indicators linked to better learning outcomes.

Improving education systems requires a multi-faceted approach: children have to be ready to learn, teachers need to teach successfully, schools need to have the right materials, and school management has to provide appropriate leadership and oversight. To get this right, education policies need to be aligned with the goals.

This partnership will provide countries with reliable data on the functioning of the whole education system along these dimensions while highlighting the gaps between their actions and best practices.

In this way, the Global Education Policy Dashboard will allow governments to track progress with their investments and policy reforms to improve learning, starting from what’s happening in the classroom all the way to the decisions taken in ministerial meetings. It will provide countries with data to make decisions that have a real impact on student learning, boosting human capital and giving the next generation the ability to succeed.