Education Data · Schools

A dashboard that helps schools see every learner clearly

Good decisions start with good information. We have pulled together a menu of global-standard education indicators — so school leaders and teachers can track what matters and act early.

Most schools already collect data — attendance sheets, gradebooks, enrolment records. The challenge is rarely a lack of numbers. It is pulling them into one place where a teacher or a system leader can see the whole picture and decide what to do next.

This indicator menu does exactly that. It is a starting point for designing a dashboard or tracker, built on frameworks the education world already trusts: the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) indicators maintained by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the World Bank's Learning Poverty measure, and the World's Best School Prizes.

Two dashboards, two questions

The menu is organised around two views — one for the individual learner, one for the school as a system.

What it helps teachers do

For a teacher, the value is early warning and focus. The strongest signals for keeping a child in school — attendance, being over-age for the grade, dropout risk — sit together in one place, so a pattern shows up before it becomes a crisis.

• Spot who needs support sooner. Attendance is the single most useful early-warning signal for dropout, and it sits alongside learning and wellbeing data.
• See learning, not just presence. Whether a student reaches the minimum proficiency level in reading and maths tells you if learning is actually happening — not only that the child showed up.
• Look beyond academics. Bullying, sense of belonging, motivation and social-emotional skills are tracked too, because a child has to feel safe to learn.

What it helps system leaders do

For a school leader, the same data rolls up into questions about the whole school: Do we have enough trained teachers? Is the environment safe and resourced? And — most importantly — are outcomes fair?

• Check the basics are in place. Trained-teacher ratios, in-service training, safe water and sanitation, and safety incidents all surface at the school level.
• Find who is being left behind. The same results, broken down by sex, disability, wealth, location and home language, reveal equity gaps that an average would hide.
• Report with confidence. Because indicators map to recognised frameworks, the story you tell teachers, families and donors rests on evidence, not assertion.

A menu, not a mandate

No school needs every indicator at once. This is a menu for divergent thinking — pick the measures that fit your context, your data sources and your update rhythm. The full document includes a plain-language glossary and a technical data dictionary, so the people who build the dashboard and the people who use it can start from the same page.

Sources drawn on: UN SDG 4 framework (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2025 official list), OECD PISA, the World Bank, and the World's Best School Prizes (T4 Education).