The SDG4-Education 2030 High-Level Steering Committee’s contribution to the 2022 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (2022 HLPF)

“Building back better from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) while advancing the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”

1. Introduction: the SDG 4-Education 2030 agenda

The vision of the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all) as embodied in the Education 2030 Framework for Action is to transform lives through quality education, recognizing the critical role of education as a main driver of development and in achieving the remaining 16 SDGs.

Education is a human right. It is also a means to realize other rights and contributes to gender equality, poverty reduction and building prosperous, resilient economies and peaceful, stable societies while empowering children, youth and adults to realize their full potential and to participate in society. SDG 4 and its targets are inspired by a humanistic vision of education and development based on human rights and dignity; social justice; protection; individual and collective autonomy; cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity; and shared responsibility and accountability. Inclusion, equity and gender equality in and through education (SDG 5) is the cornerstone of SDG 4’s transformative education agenda.

The SDG 4-Education 2030 commitment promotes inclusive and equitable quality lifelong learning opportunities for all, in all settings and at all levels of education from early childhood to adulthood. As such, SDG 4 has links across the 2030 Agenda as an enabler for the other SDGs and harnessing human ingenuity to address challenges like inequalities within and among countries (SDG 10), climate change (SDG 13), rapidly changing labour markets with increased digitization and greening economies (SDG 8) and peace building (SDG 16).

SDG 4 encompasses the acquisition of foundational skills in literacy and numeracy; analytical, problem-solving and other high-level cognitive, interpersonal and social skills; and skills, values and attitudes that enable citizens to lead healthy and fulfilled lives (SDG 3), make informed decisions, and respond to local and global challenges such as ocean protection (SDG 14) and biodiversity loss (SDG 15) through education for sustainable development (ESD). Global citizenship education (GCED) can also help to build peaceful societies and solidarity around the 2030 Agenda and to advance partnerships (SDGs 16 and 17).

The pre-pandemic world was already seriously off track to deliver on the SDG 4 - Education 2030 commitments with 260 million children and youth out of school2 and 53% of children in low- and middle-income countries could not read and understand a simple story by the end of primary education.3 Adult literacy rates were steadily growing, but 750 million youth and adults still lacked basic literacy skills. Alarmed by the learning crisis and the persisting inequalities in the access to, quality and outcomes of education, the SDG-Education 2030 Steering Committee put forward a set of concrete policy recommendations to the 2019 HLPF, calling for transformation, innovation and partnership, political responsibility and commitment to encourage the international community to move:

• Beyond averages: to leave no one behind
• Beyond access: to ensure relevant learning outcomes
• Beyond basics: to diversify and broaden the contents of education
• Beyond schooling: to lifelong and lifewide (across multiple learning spaces) learning
• Beyond education: to expand multi-sectoral planning
• Beyond countries: to foster peer learning mechanisms.