About Us

Overview

The Education Commission is a global initiative encouraging greater progress on Sustainable Development Goal 4 – ensuring inclusive and quality education and promoting lifelong learning for all. The Commission is helping to create a pathway for reform and increased investment in education by mobilizing strong evidence and analysis while engaging with world leaders, policymakers, and researchers.

The Commission was co-convened in 2015 by the Prime Minister of Norway, the Presidents of Malawi, Indonesia, and Chile, and the Director-General of UNESCO. The Commission is chaired by the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown and supported by 26 high-level Commissioners. The members of the Commission include current and former heads of state and government, government ministers, three Nobel laureates, and leaders in the fields of education, business, economics, development, health, and security.

Learn more about the Commission’s members.

The Learning Generation

Drawing upon global consultations and new research and analysis from more than 300 partners in 105 countries, the Commission’s groundbreaking 2016 report – The Learning Generation: Investing in education for a changing world – put forward an action plan to deliver and finance an expansion of educational opportunity for the more than 260 million children and youth who are not in school today. Then Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon received the report and committed to act on its recommendations. The report highlights an urgent and ever-worsening learning crisis that, if left unaddressed, will leave half of the world’s 1.6 billion children and youth out of school or failing to learn by 2030.

The Commission aims to reverse this trend and create a Learning Generation by transforming education systems so that all children can be in school and learning within a generation. We are working with partners to advance the report’s key recommendations: diversifying the education workforce, mobilizing more and better finance, strengthening education delivery mechanisms, and transforming learning.

Download and explore the Learning Generation report.