Policy paper

About results estimates for children the FCDO supported to gain a decent education

Updated 19 February 2024

Since 2015, the UK has supported an estimated 19.8 million children to gain a decent education. Of these, 10 million are girls and 9.5 million are boys (with the gender of around 0.3 million children not recorded).

These are results estimates. The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) will publish updated results as more data becomes available. Updated results will be more complete and will incorporate data from more bilateral and multilateral programmes.

Indicator methodology

This indicator estimates the number of children supported by FCDO to gain a decent education. It tracks the full-time equivalent number of children that FCDO has supported in education for at least a year. View the indicator methodology note.

Each included programme supports a decent education in one or more of these ways:

• providing a quality education
• improving the quality of existing education provision
• providing an education where there is no alternative, for example in emergency settings

Providing or improving a quality education means a programme works to improve children’s learning outcomes.

The indicator includes children who are 17 years and younger. This typically corresponds to pre-school to upper-secondary aged children. Young people (up to the age of 24) attending education programmes designed for children are also included. This includes young people who are learning at the upper secondary-level.

We collect data underpinning these results from FCDO bilateral and multi-country Official Development Assistance (ODA) programmes. All children are included if their education is benefiting from FCDO funding in one or more of the ways defined as providing a decent education. The result is the full-time equivalent number of children. This accounts for circumstances where the FCDO is only providing partial support, and ensures consistency between different types of education programmes with different intensities of support.

All children are included when the FCDO is clearly providing more than 75% of their funding or learning experience. When the FCDO is providing less than this, its share of the result is calculated, usually based on funding shares.

When aggregating the number of children supported from programmes within and across countries, we check that each child is only counted once. Quality assurance is first carried out by statistics advisers or other competent advisers at our posts abroad or in reporting departments, and then by central FCDO advisers.

Data limitations

Most results come from our delivery partners’ reporting or management information systems, which are generally reasonably accurate and timely. Programme results are reported in programme review documents, available on Development Tracker.

Gender disaggregation is estimated. We base it on a mix of actual results collected by gender and estimates, based for example on sample proportions recorded in programme monitoring or evaluation processes.

Results are estimated using the best available data at the time. Data quality varies and there are data gaps in some circumstances, for example non-FCDO financial information. In these cases, we use partial or proxy estimates.

View the full methodology note that programmes use to calculate results.

How to use the data

FCDO’s education results aim to give an overview of the return on the UK’s ODA spend on education, and enable us to report publicly on our work.

This result covers children supported since 2015. Some provisional methodological adjustments have been made between the previous results release in 2020 and this estimate. Use caution when comparing to the previous release, you should only use it as an indicative trend. We will included details of any methodological adjustments with the next results estimate.

These provisional results only capture part of FCDO support to education. We do not advise comparison to total education aid spend.

Statement of voluntary compliance for statistics

These provisional estimates monitor the number of children the FCDO has supported through our work that qualifies for Official Development Assistance (ODA) funding. Although the results estimates are not official statistics or National Statistics, where possible we follow the UK’s Code of Practice for Statistics in producing them.

View the full statement of voluntary compliance for statistics.

Contact

We are keen to enhance the value of these statistics and welcome your feedback or questions by  email: statistics@fcdo.gov.uk.

Go back to girls’ education results. You can also find out more about UK government support for girls’ education worldwide.