Indicators for a Broad and Bold Education Agenda

This synthesis paper and the accompanying 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 “unmeasurable.”

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. The Open Society Foundations have identified three of the education targets that are particularly contentious and commissioned four papers proposing formulations of indicators that suggest ways of measuring what we care about, rather than what is easiest to measure.