This report is produced by the Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM) team and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, to shed light on the meaningful actions taken since 2017 to approve national standards on selected SDG 4 indicators, including early childhood education attendance, school drop-out rates, completion rates, gender gaps in completion rates, minimum proficiency rates in reading and mathematics, trained teachers, and public education expenditure. Will countries achieve the benchmarks they set? Will the world reach SDG 4 by 2030? How will the impact of the pandemic on education development be reviewed in coming years? This report answers all these questions as it presents the efforts made by countries to set their benchmarks, monitoring mechanism and an in-depth description of how benchmarks were identified in 12 countries around the world towards the achievement of SDG 4. The benchmarks also remind all countries of the importance of education, national target setting and of financing them properly.