UNESCO has released the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report for 2024/2025. Entitled ‘Leadership in education: Lead for learning’, the report emphasises the crucial role of educational leaders in shaping their institutions and communities.
Effective school, system and policy leaders can significantly impact educational outcomes. The report highlights the importance of identifying, selecting, training and supporting individuals with the necessary skills and vision for leadership positions. Effective school leaders are shown to significantly influence learner outcomes, second only to teachers.
The report stresses the need for national plans to focus on four key aspects of leadership: setting expectations, focusing on learning, fostering collaboration and developing human potential. It also reveals that only about half of the programmes and courses for school leaders around the world address these aspects.
The Agency’s Supporting Inclusive School Leadership activity examined the topic of school leadership for inclusion. Outputs from the activity include practical tools, such as a policy framework and a self-reflection tool, to help policy-makers and school leaders to develop and promote inclusive school-level leadership.
The GEM Report is available to download on the UNESCO website, which also contains background documents and resources. A video of the launch event, held in Fortaleza, Brazil, on 31 October, presents the report’s key findings.