UIS Data Browser — UNESCO Institute for Statistics education statistics

It is the widest table anyone keeps of who sits in a classroom, who pays for the seat, and who never gets near one. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics is the UN's official custodian of comparable national education statistics and the series behind SDG 4 monitoring, and its Data Browser is the interactive face of that corpus. The February 2026 release holds 4,986 education indicators carrying 8,300,226 data points, with 78 further indicators in three side domains: demography and socio-economics, science-technology-innovation, and culture.

Every measure is keyed to the same address - indicator x country x year, annual, national grain - whether the statistic is an entrance age, the month a tertiary academic year begins, an enrolment count, an out-of-school rate, a literacy figure or education spending. Regional aggregates ship as separate geounits rather than being blended into national rows, so a comparison of forty systems stays a filter rather than a reconciliation project.

Two shapes, one system. Catalogue entries describe each indicator; observation cells hold its values:

# UIS catalogue entry - indicator 10, one of 4,986 education indicators
indicatorCode : 10
name          : Official entrance age to early childhood educational development (years)
theme         : EDUCATION
records       : 1,885 national observations
timeline      : 1972 - 2025

# observation cells - indicator 10405, France
indicatorId : 10405   geoUnit : FRA   year : 1970   value : 1969
indicatorId : 10405   geoUnit : FRA   year : 1971   value : 1970

Read the observation pair carefully and you learn why the dictionary matters: indicator 10405 records when the tertiary academic year starts, and its stored value arrives as a code rather than the words September. The flat shape never changes; the meaning of value travels with the indicator definition attached to it. Get a sample of this dataset

Ten field families cover the whole corpus, and they divide cleanly into three jobs. indicatorCode, name and theme belong to the catalogue layer - what the statistic is and which domain it lives in. indicatorId, geoUnit and year form the address layer, pinning every number to one country-year cell. value is the payload, and magnitude and qualifier are the honesty layer riding beside it: precision flags and reporting qualifiers that tell you whether a figure is a national count, an estimate, or something odd enough to need a footnote.

lastDataUpdate closes the loop, dating each indicator's most recent refresh within its release. Everything beyond these ten - full geographic-unit reference lists, the complete indicator catalogue with per-indicator glossary text, the flag vocabularies - folds under additional fields on request.

Geographically this is the widest net cast over world education: more than 200 countries and territories report at national grain, with SDG regional aggregates published alongside them as separate geounits. Where the OECD collections stop at member economies and partner countries, UIS continues down the income ladder until every system with a ministry and a school register has a row.

Temporally each indicator carries its own history - sampled timelines run from 1972 through 2025, and older series coexist with measures only a few reporting cycles old. The current vintage is the February 2026 drop, and working from the latest vintage matters because earlier years get revised as countries clean their returns.

Granularity is strictly one annual observation per indicator x country x year. There is no sub-national detail here at all - no provinces, no districts, no schools. Pair it with a national source when you need to descend below the country line; use it when the job is putting forty economies on one axis.

Think of the international education shelf as depth versus breadth. The OECD's education flows run deepest for its 38 members - teacher salaries, class sizes, graduate earnings - but stop at the membership line. **Eurostat's educ_* tables** give the EU27 and EFTA a tightly harmonised frame with the same ISCED ladder. Both are richer than UIS inside their borders and silent outside them.

UIS is the opposite trade: fewer analytical cuts per country, but every country on earth that reports, on the indicators the SDG framework actually monitors. When a board deck needs an out-of-school rate for markets the OECD has never heard of, or an impact report needs the citation every multilateral uses, this is the table. Most serious education-market models end up joining both - breadth from UIS, depth from the regional collections.