2027 Case study on rural schools in China

The Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report is an editorially independent, evidence-based annual report hosted and published by UNESCO. Established in 2002, its current mandate derives from the 2015 World Education Forum and focuses on monitoring education in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the implementation of the strategies outlined in the Education 2030 Framework for Action.

The upcoming three reports (2026, 2027 and 2028/9) will form a mini-series, Countdown to 2030, which will be based on a review of progress on selected SDG 4 indicators, with emphasis on SDG 4 benchmark indicators, focusing on countries that have improved faster than their peers over the course of the past 15-20 years and countries that have stagnated or reversed. The purpose of these reports will be to assess the reasons for this improvement (or stagnation and reversal) and extract potential policy lessons. These lessons should help inform the debate on how to set the education agenda priorities beyond 2030. The three reports are expected to focus on, respectively:

• Access and equity (2026)
• Quality and learning (2027)
• Relevance (2028)

Complementing the 2027 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report on quality and learning, and as part of the Countdown to 20230 global report series, two regional editions are planned on selected topics of particular interest to individual regions:

• rural schools in Southeast Asia;
• teacher shortage in the Pacific.

These regional editions will be built upon case studies demonstrating efforts to overcome the respective challenges and leading to tailored messages and recommendations.

The GEM Report team is inviting proposals from companies to produce a case study on the development of rural education in China, documenting the country’s vast experience in implementing policies and programmes aimed at closing the rural-urban gap in education quality over the past 25 years, which would be highly relevant for Southeastern Asian countries.

The contractor will develop a country case study exploring the socio-cultural, economic, demographic and institutional contexts in which rural schools have operated, analysing factors that facilitated or hindered progress in quality and learning in those schools compared to urban schools, and identifying key policy and interventions that served as drivers of change.