With 2030 approaching, racism remains a major obstacle to equal education

2026 marks 25 years since the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.  

We call on UNESCO, GEMR, and their many stakeholders to demonstrate global leadership and action on the UN’s anti-racist mission through their policy and monitoring programmes for SDG4. The most basic first step is to stop the pretence that educational equity can be achieved without attending to the structural conditions of racism. 

The UN will soon launch the 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report (GEMR) and once again there is a glaring omission in its approach to SDG4 – the global education goal.  

Despite ‘access and equity’ being named as the core theme for the 2026 GEMR, UNESCO’s recently published concept note remains silent on the structural conditions of racism, casteism, and religious, ethnic, and linguistic discrimination. These are the very conditions which hinder children from minoritised communities across the world from accessing and participating in education.  

Structural racism, in all its varied forms, must be understood as a barrier to achieving SDG4. Not recognising racism as an issue of ‘equity’ is precisely how racism is allowed to persist and how the global development goals will fail.  

We identify three myths which global and national education policy communities must urgently challenge in the ‘countdown’ to 2030. 

Myth 1: Racism is only an issue in some countries   

Discrimination of groups by culture, language, ethnicity, caste or religion occurs in societies across the world. Such divisions are often connected to past and present forces of colonialism and ethnonationalism. While it might not always be termed in the language of ‘race’, group-based oppression creates hierarchies of access, inclusion, participation, and representation in education systems. This production of hierarchies reflects the forces of structural racism. 

While the SDGs offered an integrated framework for understanding development, bringing together the global north and south, it has failed to acknowledge that the varied forms of racial discrimination that occur across the world are also a global problem. Our research on anti-racist initiatives across the world – from Lebanon to India, New Zealand, Bangladesh, Senegal, Brazil among many other contexts – demonstrates how structural racism is indeed a global issue. 

Any effort to address ‘equity’ in education must directly tackle – in all national contexts – the conditions that produce and sustain structural racism.   

Myth 2: We can’t talk about racism because we don’t have nationally comparable data on it 

The 2026 GEMR will focus on gender, wealth, location, and disability in its country reviews of educational access and equity. The concept note starkly overlooks measures relating to the educational experiences of minority language, cultural, racial, ethnic and religious groups. 

As the report notes, it can be difficult to access robust national-level data to assess progress on educational equity among particular groups. For example, in the absence of standard measures of disability across all countries, ‘alternative sources of information will be used, whose scope may not be global’ (UNESCO 2026). With a similar will and intention, such an approach could have also be taken for examining national articulations of structural racism. 

We acknowledge that collecting quantitative data by ethnicity, religion, or caste can be problematic; it risks creating fixed categories between groups. We also acknowledge that such data collection can be dangerous, particularly if misused by states and their agencies, not least in these times of rising ethno-authoritarianism. However, ignoring the existence of racism altogether is not the answer. 

We argue that national and global education policy communities must find ways to listen to the impact of structural racism on the educational lives and life-chances of children and families across the world. This might be through qualitative approaches, it might involve community-grounded methods, it might be through working in partnership with racial justice organisations in national settings.  

The GEMR has the responsibility to set an expectation that racism matters to educational equity by including it within their monitoring approaches – alongside gender, disability, and wealth/location. This will act as an important catalyst for global and national research and policy to tackle structural racism in education. 

Myth 3: Racism is too politically sensitive to address in SDG4  

Inequity in education is a political problem. It is through the actions of states and their markets that educational injustices are created and sustained. This means that the solution to inequity in education must also be political: naming the power relations that underpin injustice and working on ways to transform them.  

However, global policy approaches to SDG4, such as the Global Education Monitoring Reports, rarely name such systems of oppression. The reluctance to acknowledge the political production of racism is palpable. Indicators are framed to ‘show progress’ and these become the focus rather than identifying the social and economic systems that give rise to injustice. In doing so, ‘indicators’ can be used to overlook – and therefore perpetuate – the structures of racial discrimination.  

These kinds of technicist policy approaches give the veneer of political ‘neutrality’ but in sidestepping the difficult political questions of how and why oppression is produced, the SDGs risk normalising injustice.  This is why SDG4 cannot be achieved through political neutrality. We need global and national education policy communities to take bolder action against state-sanctioned racism, actively examining and addressing how racial discrimination impacts educational participation and outcomes in specific contexts.