SDG 4: 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, adult education and digital skills.

Source dataset: SDG_04_31, SDG_04_40, SDG_04_20, SDG_04_70

The EU has further progressed in increasing the participation rate in early childhood education, which reached 93.1% in 2022. This was an increase of 0.7 percentage points (pp) since 2017 (92.4%). 

The same positive dynamics are observed in tertiary education (ISCED levels 5-8): the share of individuals aged 25 to 34, who had attained tertiary education in 2023, went up by 4.4 pp to 43.1% compared with 2018 (38.7%).  

However, the percentage of underachievers in the PISA test likewise increased: in 2022, the share of low achieving 15-years olds in mathematics reached 29.5%, 6.6 pp more than in 2018 (22.9%).

In 2023, the share of adults having at least basic digital skills slightly increased and showed 55.6%, +1.64 pp compared with 2021 (53.9%).

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 low achievers in math evolved? 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 – 2024 edition, and the corresponding brochure provide an overview of progress towards the SDGs in the EU; 
• 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 20th June, 2024.