Local school in Nuwakot district, Nepal, one year after the April 2015 earthquake.

Educational Systems & Direction

Counting on education

Educational Systems & Direction

Counting on education

Published: February 2, 2026
Last Updated: June 26, 2026

How a global tally of institutions can help track education resilience as more and more children are left out of school

Journalists: Naushad Ali Husein and Ka Man Mak
Data Scientist: Harsh Trivedi

How many schools are there in the world? You might think, in the age of big data, that a quick internet search might reveal the number. Not so.

While most countries do track their own school numbers, it appeared nobody had stitched those disparate national records into a single, cohesive database. International organisations like UNICEF have updated global data for several education metrics, including literacy rates, out-of-school rates, attendance rates, foundational skills, and IT and digital connectivity skills. So why was a harmonised count on the number of schools so difficult to find?

This might partly be because the number of schools, by itself, is a blunt metric. On its own, school numbers do not reveal anything about the quality or health of an education system. It indicates nothing about the quality of instruction, the condition of the facilities, the proportion of the population actually receiving an education, or whether students are actually learning, or simply attending.

However, the school count becomes far more valuable when combined with other data, such as population or population density – and crucially, once we observe how it changes over time. Looking at the growth or decline in the number of schools over periods of disaster or stress, for example, could tell us a great deal about the resilience of an education system.

Boy in school destroyed by east Ukraine war — Oleg Teryokhin sits in a classroom in his former school in Nikishino village, Donetsk People's Republic in Eastern Ukraine, in 2015. The school was destroyed by the east Ukraine war. Photo: Lynsey Addario, Getty Images

Driven by the goal of understanding the resilience of education systems around the world, Sunstone Institute published a complete data set for 5,981,024 schools in 190 countries in December 2024.

Presented with the data, Dr Rebekah Levine Coley, professor of applied developmental psychology and director of the Center on Child and Family Policy at Boston College, said that it “fills a hole” in our understanding of educational, social, and economic services.

“These data can be disaggregated to address educational options for children of different ages, for example, and used to track shifts over time,” she said.

“They also can be incorporated into broader tracking systems which assess the resources and outcomes of children around the world, such as Unicef's State of the World's Children (opens in a new tab) data systems or the WHO’s Child Data Tracker (opens in a new tab).”

Telling tallies

However, compiling this data was a particularly tedious task. The foremost challenge in compiling school data for the world was to be able to classify what might count as a primary or a secondary school, or a school at all. One government’s classification might differ vastly from another.

To ensure consistency, the data was aligned with the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED 2011) (opens in a new tab) framework. Where direct categorisation was not possible, the team classified the schools according to local government definitions.

Once the categories were set, the problem was mismatches and inconsistencies across different sources. In many cases, government figures contradicted those of independent organisations or even other departments within the government. In these cases, priority was given to ‘official’ government data, as opposed to independently produced data. In other cases, government data was found to be missing, and the data scientists had to sift through data from private organisations to fill the gap.

The process had its surprises. Countries rich in resources often lacked high-quality data. For example, the data for the United States was much more difficult to find than Sierra Leone, which had impeccable data, despite being a country that is much less prosperous.

“Data has its own biases, and this problem manifested itself during the school mapping project,” said Sunstone’s CEO, Jan Grønbech. “We have to be humble when it comes to that. How many schools are there in North Korea? We don’t know. So we get that data from South Korea. We don’t know whether that’s accurate or not.”

Attempts have been made to count schools before this. Perhaps the most successful is Giga (opens in a new tab), a project under UNICEF, which aims to locate and map every school in the world. They have mapped the locations of 2.2 million schools out of an estimated total of 6 million worldwide. Giga also assesses each school's level of internet connectivity.

Education in crisis

At this moment in history, out-of-school rates are rising (opens in a new tab) in the wake of the Covid-19 shutdowns, mass displacements due to conflict, and due to poverty and the climate crisis. UNESCO Director-General, Audrey Azoulay said in 2023 that “Education is in a state of emergency.”

From 2000 to 2019, at least 60 major disasters across 30 countries disrupted (opens in a new tab) education for over 11 million children, according to GADRRRES. These events destroyed 30,000 schools and caused the deaths of nearly 35,000 children. Education, in turn, plays a critical role in breaking the poverty cycle (opens in a new tab), reducing inequalities, and fostering economic growth (opens in a new tab), health (opens in a new tab), and social cohesion (opens in a new tab).

To address the present challenges and restore decades of progress in global education, data can play an important role.

“Data on the numbers of schools in countries across the world can be combined with information on demographics, environments, and child outcomes to assess variability over time and place in educational opportunities and their connections to children’s academic, health, and social outcomes,” said Dr Rebekah Coley.

She pointed out that educational institutions are resources that serve children and families, and therefore enhance and stabilise societies.

Sunstone Institute will continue to enrich the dataset by updating the numbers every year. The 2025 numbers will be available by March this year.

Students celebrating the religious festival Guru Purnima in Mumbai, India — Students in Mumbai, India, offer flowers to their teacher for the celebration of the religious festival Guru Purnima, honouring one's spiritual teachers and leaders. Photo: Raju Shinde, Getty Images

Every number has its story

Data can also be misleading. Nafisa Anwar, senior lecturer at the Institute of Educational Development at Brac University in Bangladesh, points out that whereas the number of primary schools in the country grew slightly from 2022 to 2023, enrolment declined (opens in a new tab) during this period. “Data can give us a holistic picture of the progress, but every number has its story,” she says, highlighting the need for qualitative study to understand what lies beyond numbers.

Part of Sunstone Institute’s mission is to engage with the narratives created by the data, and to uncover the stories on the ground to balance the overarching insights from the numbers. The institute will also continue to publish new research and journalism on educational resilience from around the world over the coming months. Stay tuned!

Counting on education

Counting on education

2024 School Count Report

Telling tallies

Education in crisis

Every number has its story

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Telling tallies

Education in crisis

Every number has its story

Counting on education

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2024 School Count Report

Telling tallies

Education in crisis

Every number has its story

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Telling tallies

Education in crisis

Every number has its story