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Students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex or somewhere else on the gender/sexuality spectrum (LGBTQI+) are among the diverse student groups in need of extra support and protection in order to succeed in education and reach their full potential. Because they belong to a minority that is often excluded by heteronormative/cisgender people, they are often the targets of physical and psychological harassment. Such discrimination can place them at risk for isolation, reduced academic achievement, and physical and mental harm. This paper provides a brief history of how the LGBTQI+ population has often been misunderstood and labelled in order to understand challenges faced by students who identify as a part of this population. It continues by considering supportive educational policies and programmes implemented from national to local levels across OECD countries. Finally, the paper considers policy gaps and discusses policy implications to strengthen equity and inclusion for LGBTQI+ students.

Early years are a critical period for skill development. In this sense, the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) programmes have an important role in promoting children's learning during this period. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of ECEC programmes by analysing the relationship between students' ECEC attendance and their later academic proficiency using PISA 2015 data. PISA results show that across the OECD countries, students who had attended ECEC tend to have higher scores in academic proficiencies at the age of 15. However, these differences in academic proficiencies between those who attended ECEC versus those who did not attend are almost nil when students' socio-economic status (SES) is considered. This relationship reflects differential access to learning opportunities for children from deprived contexts. Furthermore, results show that entering ECEC programmes earlier than the typical time is associated with lower proficiencies at the age of 15. Therefore, earlier entry to ECEC is not necessarily beneficial. Learning benefits of ECEC provision vary considerably across PISA countries illustrating the importance of a country-specific policy context and the quality of their ECEC provision. The analyses of several quality indicators point out that the improved quality of ECEC programmes is associated with higher academic skills at later stages. These results highlight that mere attendance to ECEC programmes is not enough to ensure better academic performance. The quality of the educational provision, especially concerning those students from disadvantaged backgrounds, should be ensured.

Climate change is an ongoing process that, at the current pace of such activities, cannot be avoided. Tools have been proposed to deal with climate change focus on adaptation and mitigation. Strengthening national and international awareness of and commitment to reducing the impact of climate change has become the only viable option to ensure the sustainability of life on Earth. The Paris Agreement entered into force in 2016 with the aim of bringing all nations together in a common goal of combating climate change and adapting to its impacts. According to the Agreement, every party should submit a climate plan laying out its adaptation and mitigation targets. Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) has the potential to play significant roles in these plans. The smooth transition to green societies and economies relies on amongst others the knowledge, skills and competencies to promote sustainable development. Effective education and training for sustainable development pivots on governance and vision, and the ability to empower people in an inclusive manner to act in favour of sustainable development. It also relies on the ability to train, upskill, reskill and empower those that can take advantage of the job growth and job creation potential in a changing economy. This discussion paper compiles and reviews relevant information regarding the country submissions (Nationally Determined Contributions and National Communications) which lay out adaptation plans and the policies created in fifty-seven selected countries. The aim is to summarize key information that can help assess the ongoing and potential contribution of TVET to the realization of these plans. The analysis made through this discussion paper has helped to generate a set of approaches for climate change adaption, through the education and training lens. These approaches can be used to advance the discussion in strengthening the technical and vocational skills development component in country climate adaptation plans. [This report was written in collaboration with Uthpala Sankalpani.]

This paper and the four commissioned works on which it is based are guided by the important question: How can we start valuing practices and outcomes of teaching and learning that are difficult to reduce to numbers? As the process of developing indicators for the Post-2015 education targets unfolds, some of the targets are at risk of being dropped on account of being 'un-measurable.' However, excluding more holistic but harder to assess educational targets will inevitably remove vital focus from some of the most important aspects of high quality education provision. Three education targets, developed by the Education for All Steering Committee (EFA-SC) and the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development of the U.N. General Assembly (OWG), are the thematic foci of this paper: (1) Relevant Learning Outcomes; (2) Knowledge, Values, Skills, and Attitudes to Establish Sustainable and Peaceful Societies; and (3) Teachers and Safe, Inclusive, and Effective Learning Environments. These three targets are at risk of being excluded from the final formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in response to practical concerns about the number of targets being excessive as well as concerns that targets such as these "rely too much on vague, qualitative language rather than hard, measurable, time-bound, quantitative targets." This report also highlights some of the main ideas put forward by the authors of the four commissioned papers. The annex to this document briefly describes the commissioned papers and presents the indicators proposed by the authors. [For the commissioned papers, see "Capturing Quality, Equity & Sustainability: An Actionable Vision with Powerful Indicators for a Broad and Bold Education Agenda Post-2015" (ED610009), "Goals and Indicators for Education and Development: Consolidating the Architectures" (ED609905), "Indicators for a Broad and Bold Post-2015 Agenda: A Comprehensive Approach to Educational Development" (ED609982), and "Indicators for All? Monitoring Quality and Equity for a Broad and Bold Post-2015 Global Education Agenda" (ED609988).]

The purpose of this paper is to review recent developments related to the development of indicators of educational progress in the context of the Post 2015 deliberations to generate a new international architecture for educational investment through to 2030. There have been a plethora of suggestions and several parallel consultation processes since 2012 to revise and replace the goals for education and development agreed at the World Education Forum in Dakar (UNESCO, 2000) and enshrined in the Millennium Development Goals (United Nations, 2000). This process is now converging on the two frameworks that are the subject of this analysis. Specifically, there are now seven goals that the Education for All Steering Committee has developed which were consolidated in the May 2014 Muscat Agreement (UNESCO, 2014); and the ten goals produced by the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development of the U.N. General Assembly (UN General Assembly, 2014). These goal statements overlap and are largely consistent with each other but contain some significant differences. This paper reconciles the differences and develops sets of possible indicators building on the work of the Indicators Technical Advisory Group (TAG-EFA, 2014) and the UN Statistical Commission (UNSC, 2014). The paper is organized in six parts. Part 1 analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the existing goals and targets for education and development to frame subsequent discussion in the context of the evolution of Education for All since 1990. Part 2 offers a necessary clarification of the relationship between goals and objectives, and targets and indicators. Part 3 reviews and discusses the process of developing indicators that are fit for purpose. Part 4 highlights characteristics of different types of indicator. Part 5 develops a list of preferred goal statements from the Muscat Agreement and OWG goals, links these to a discussion of existing and proposed indicators, and consolidates promising indicators that could be used to assess progress. The last part of the paper collects together forward looking conclusions that profile key issues that will shape how new indicators are devised to monitor the sustainable development goals for education.

Education is recognized to be a key factor of economic development, not only giving access to technological progress as emphasized by the Schumpeterian growth theory, but also entailing numerous social externalities such as the demographic transition (Murtin, 2009) or democratization (Murtin and Wacziarg, 2010). If the evolution of world distributions of income and longevity over the last two centuries have been described by Bourguignon and Morrisson (2002), changes in the world distribution of education have remained unexplored until now, despite their major importance. How has global education inequality evolved over the twentieth century? How should it be measured? Up to now, existing studies on education inequality have had limited spatial and time coverage. For example, Castello and Domenech (2002) and Thomas et al. (2001) provide a descriptive analysis of years of schooling inequality for a broad panel of countries, but their study starts only in 1960. Also, they remain at the country level and do not consider the world distribution of years of schooling, which takes into account educational differences both within and between countries. In contrast, this paper depicts the world distribution of education over 140 years, improving and extending the database recently released by Morrisson and Murtin (2009), which focuses on average years of schooling. The authors provide both average years of schooling and the distribution of education as summarised up by four quantiles in each country. Importantly, this new database is cross-validated by historical data on illiteracy rates. Then, they describe average stocks of primary, secondary and tertiary schooling by region since 1870, and estimate world inequality in years of schooling, which has been dramatically reduced since 1870. Focusing on the measurement of education inequality, this paper raises an important methodological issue. The authors show that a substantial share of inequality in years of schooling can be mechanically explained by a single component of the distribution of education, namely the population that has not attended school, subsequently called the illiterate population. Actually, they find that the observed decrease in inequality in years of schooling over the XXth century is almost entirely explained by the decline in illiteracy. They believe that this result, derived both theoretically and empirically, could help to reconsider an empirical fact discussed in the literature on education inequality (see Berthelemy (2006)), namely the cross-country negative correlation between the average of and the inequality in years of schooling. This correlation mainly reflects the negative and mechanical correlation between average schooling and the illiteracy rate. In line with a recent macroeconomic literature (see for instance Hall and Jones (1999)), the authors then turn to human capital as defined by Mincer (1974), in order to confer a monetary dimension to education. They propose estimates of the world inequality in human capital, examining several definitions for human capital. They focus on one functional form in particular, which accounts for the existence of diminishing returns to schooling. It is the only one that can account for the cross-country negative correlation between Mincer returns to schooling and average years of schooling, as described by Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2004). At the national level, they find that that human capital inequality within countries has increased then stabilized or even decreased in most regions of the world. When plotted against average years of schooling, human capital inequality within countries has clearly followed an inverted U-shape curve, namely a "Kuznets curve of education". At the global level, they also find that human capital inequality has increased from 1870 to approximatively 1970, then has decreased. They interpret these findings as a consequence of mass education and the existence of diminishing returns to schooling. (Contains 6 tables, 6 figures and 14 footnotes.)