Middle-level Consultant on Education

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OVERVIEW

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

Exclusion across education trajectories

Despite major expansion of education worldwide, an estimated 273 million children and youth of primary and secondary school age remain out of school, and many more enrolled learners are at risk of leaving before completion. Educational exclusion is not a single event: learners may never enter education, enter late, disengage progressively, leave before completion, be excluded at critical transition points, or be unable to find an appropriate pathway back. The challenge starts early and does not stop at secondary school. While higher education enrolment has grown rapidly to 269 million students with a gross enrolment ratio of 44% in 2024, yet the global gross graduation ratio for bachelor's and master's programmes was 27%, and available evidence points to significant attrition in many systems. Systematic and internationally comparable data on higher education dropout remain limited. Understanding exclusion therefore requires following learner trajectories, from early learning to tertiary education, rather than treating being "out of school" as a single status.

Long Description

Profiles, barriers and the architecture of systems
Exclusion results from the interaction between learner profiles that face disproportionate risks and the barriers that prevent learners from entering, remaining in, progressing through or completing education. Risks are unevenly distributed across children affected by poverty, disability, gender inequality, displacement, ethnicity or language, rural isolation, and conflict or climate vulnerability, and they compound through intersectionality. The barriers can be read as push factors (poor quality or relevance of learning, unsafe or discriminatory school environments, inaccessible schools, weak support for learners at risk), pull factors (poverty and education-related costs, child labour and care responsibilities, social norms, migration, displacement, conflict
- or climate-related disruption) and systemic factors (underinvestment, regional and socioeconomic inequalities, legal and administrative restrictions, weak governance and planning, exclusionary rules on admission, progression or recognition of learning). These are points of intervention, not exclusive causes: a learner may face poverty, meet an inaccessible school, and live in a system too weak to respond. The architecture of education systems matters in itself. High-stakes examinations, early tracking, restrictive admission rules, limited articulation between academic and vocational routes, and the absence of viable routes for re-entry can all amplify exclusion at critical transition points.

ASSIGNMENTS

Under the overall authority of the Director of the Division for Policies and Lifelong Learning Systems (ED/PLS), and the direct supervision of a senior programme officer within the Section of Education Policy (ED/PLS/EDP-K12), the consultant will carry out the following tasks:
1. Literature review on data systems for OOSCY, dropout and learner pathways
o Review existing approaches and tools, drawing heavily on the OOSCI documents (framework, 2023 Operational Manual, country reports, synthesis reports and evaluations) and on work by UIS, UNICEF, UNESCO and others on administrative data, household surveys, learner identifiers, tracking across institutions, early warning, and the distinction between dropout and transfer.
o Examine how these approaches work, and could work, beyond basic and secondary

education:
early childhood care and education (ECCE), TVET and higher education (including the EMIS-HEMIS interface), and at transitions between levels and routes back into education.
o Identify the capacities and enabling conditions of systems able to detect and respond (learner-level longitudinal data, disaggregation, interoperability, governance and data protection, use of information for action) and document evidence gaps.

Long Description

2. Country case studies
o Prepare 6 case studies on the capacity of national data systems to track out-of-school children, dropout and learner pathways, using a common template, mainly through desk review and remote interviews with ministry staff and partners.
o Work with the countries identified by UNESCO in coordination with the other ED/PLS teams on this programme (rights-based approach, learning and engagement, pathways and assessment, TVET, higher education, teachers, lifelong learning), so that each case also serves their thematic work. Selection criteria include existing OOSCI or comparable studies, regional and income diversity, stable and crisis contexts, and varied data-system maturity.
o Produce a