SDGs & me: Quality education

The Sustainable Development Goal 'Quality education' (SDG 4) seeks to ensure access to equitable and quality education through all stages of life. Besides improving formal qualifications, SDG 4 also aims to increase the number of youths and adults who have relevant skills for employment, decent jobs, and entrepreneurship. 

In the EU context, monitoring SDG 4 focuses on progress made in promoting and increasing basic education, tertiary education, and adult education.

Source dataset: SDG_04_31, SDG_04_10, SDG_04_20, SDG_04_70

The participation rate in early childhood education was 92.5% in 2021, and this figure has remained steady since 2017.

In addition, the percentage of early school leavers decreased by 0.9 percentage points (pp) in 2022 (9.6%) compared with 2017 (10.5%). 

In 2022, 42.0% of individuals aged 25 to 34 had attained tertiary education, marking a 4.4 pp rise from 2017 (37.6%). 

The percentage of adults with at least basic digital skills amounted to 53.9% in 2021.

How is your country doing in this regard?

Do you know the share of children in your country that participated in early childhood education? How has the percentage of young people who leave school early evolved since 2002? Or, how many people have completed tertiary education in your country? 

The visualisation tools in our data visualisation ‘SDGs & me’ will help you to easily explore and evaluate the situation in your country as well as enable you to compare it to others.

Select your country in the header below and choose different indicators of SDG 4 to find out more:

Would you like to learn more?

You can find out more about the EU’s progress towards the SDGs with the following products: 

• The publication Sustainable Development in the European Union – Monitoring report on progress towards the SDGs in an EU context – 2023 edition, which monitors progress towards the SDGs in an EU context; 
• The visualisation tool - SDG country overview - which compares country level data with the EU average for each SDG; 
• The recording of the webinar on the EU’s progress, held on 25th May, 2023.