This week, education and skills ministers from around the world are in London for the Education World Forum. It is, by most measures, the largest annual gathering of its kind: ministers from over a hundred countries alongside senior representatives from multilateral organisations, development agencies, and the private sector. This year's theme is ambitious and expansive: educating for a shared future, organised around peace, planet, purpose and pathways. The panels will be thoughtful. The communiqués will be carefully worded. The networking will be excellent.
And then the ministers will leave London. That is when the real question begins.
Forums produce consensus. They do not produce accountability.
The pattern we know too well
International education gatherings follow a rhythm that anyone who has worked in this field will recognise. Ministers arrive, often with delegations of senior officials and advisers. They participate in sessions framed around the urgent challenges facing education systems globally: learning poverty, the climate crisis, the disruptive force of artificial intelligence, the 273 million children still out of school. Commitments are made. Language is agreed. Partnerships are announced. Then everyone flies home to the same fiscal constraints, the same institutional inertia, and the same political calendars that made progress difficult before they left.
This is not cynicism. It is observation. The Education World Forum, and events like it, serve a genuine purpose. They create space for ministers to learn from one another, to build relationships across borders, and to signal political intent. The forum's own framing this year acknowledges that no country can tackle education's challenges alone. That is true. But acknowledging interdependence and building the infrastructure to act on it are very different things, and the gap between the two is where good intentions go to quietly expire.
The history of international education commitments is littered with examples. The Millennium Development Goals set targets for universal primary education by 2015 that were not met. The Sustainable Development Goals replaced them with even broader ambitions for 2030 that are, by every credible assessment, dramatically off track. The Transforming Education Summit in 2022 produced national statements of commitment from over 140 countries. Tracking what happened next has proved considerably harder than drafting the statements themselves.
The accountability deficit
The core problem is not a lack of good ideas. It is a lack of the mechanisms that would make commitments stick. When a minister stands on a stage in London and pledges to increase domestic education spending, or to reform teacher training, or to close the digital divide, there is no binding framework that holds that commitment in place once the political weather changes back home. There is no penalty for quiet abandonment. There is, in most cases, no independent body tracking whether the pledge was honoured, diluted, or simply forgotten.
Compare this with other domains of international cooperation. Trade agreements come with enforcement mechanisms. Climate commitments under the Paris Agreement are subject to a transparency framework that requires countries to report on progress and submit to review. These mechanisms are imperfect, but they exist. Education has the Global Education Monitoring Report, which tracks progress towards SDG 4 and names where countries are falling short. It is valuable work. But it is monitoring, not accountability. Countries are not required to respond to its findings, submit to review, or explain why commitments have not been met. The field still relies overwhelmingly on voluntary commitment, peer pressure, and the assumption that shared concern will translate into sustained action. It rarely does, at least not at the pace or scale the challenges demand.
The Global Partnership for Education has tried to build accountability into its model, tying funding to the quality of national education sector plans and requiring countries to demonstrate commitment to domestic financing. It is one of the few mechanisms in global education that attempts to connect money to performance. But GPE operates within constraints of its own: its funding depends on donor replenishment cycles, its influence is limited to the countries that choose to engage with it, and its accountability framework, while stronger than most, still relies substantially on trust and goodwill rather than enforceable consequence.
What would need to be different
If forums like EWF are to produce more than rotating consensus, several things would need to change.
The first is a serious investment in tracking and transparency. Commitments made at international gatherings should be publicly recorded, time-bound, and independently monitored. This does not require a new institution. It requires political will and modest funding for the kind of independent accountability infrastructure that other fields have built. Civil society organisations are well placed to do this work, but they need resources and access, and they need the political space to hold governments to account without being treated as adversaries.
The second is sustained political engagement between summits. The annual rhythm of international convenings creates a dangerous illusion of progress. Ministers meet, recommit, and return home to the same set of competing priorities. What is missing is the connective tissue between events: the national-level advocacy, the parliamentary scrutiny, the media attention, and the organised public demand that would keep education commitments visible and politically costly to break. This is the infrastructure that the climate movement built over decades, and that education has largely failed to invest in.
I have written before about the advocacy gap in education philanthropy: the tendency to fund programmes well while neglecting the political work that turns programmes into policy. That gap is directly relevant here. Ministerial forums produce the consensus. But without national-level advocacy infrastructure to translate that consensus into domestic action, the consensus is performative. It satisfies the requirement to have been seen to care without creating the conditions under which caring leads to change.
The role philanthropy is not playing
Private philanthropy has the independence, the risk tolerance, and the time horizon to fund exactly the kind of accountability and advocacy infrastructure that forums like EWF need in order to matter beyond their closing ceremonies. It is, for the most part, not doing so.
Education philanthropy remains overwhelmingly focused on programme delivery. The organisations that track government commitments, that run national campaigns for education spending, that build the communications capacity to keep education on the front page between summits, are chronically underfunded. In many countries, they do not exist at all. The result is a structural asymmetry: there is ample funding for what education systems should do, and almost none for the political work of ensuring they actually do it.
This is a choice, not an inevitability. Climate philanthropy made a different choice. Foundations like the European Climate Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies invested heavily in advocacy, litigation, communications, and political mobilisation, understanding that the energy transition would not happen through demonstration projects alone. They funded the organisations that held governments to their Paris commitments and made the political cost of backsliding visible. Education philanthropy has not made an equivalent bet, and the consequences are apparent in the gap between what gets promised at forums and what gets delivered afterwards.
Civil society as the missing bridge
If there is a bridge between what ministers say in London and what happens in national capitals, it is civil society. National education coalitions, teacher unions, parent organisations, and independent research bodies are the actors best positioned to translate international commitments into domestic pressure. They know the local political landscape. They have the relationships with parliamentarians, journalists, and communities that international organisations do not. They are, in many cases, already doing this work with minimal resources and against considerable headwinds.
What they lack is sustained investment. The funding model for civil society advocacy in education is project-based, short-cycle, and tied to reporting requirements that incentivise visible outputs over long-term political strategy. Building the kind of national advocacy capacity that can hold a government to a commitment made at EWF requires patient, flexible, multi-year funding, and it requires funders who understand that the returns will be measured in political shifts rather than programme metrics.
This is where philanthropy could make a decisive difference. Not by replacing civil society, but by backing it with the resources and the time horizon that political work demands. The organisations that monitor education budgets, that campaign for teacher salaries, that track whether promises made on international stages translate into line items in national budgets, these are the organisations that determine whether forums like EWF are consequential or ceremonial.
The test is not London
The Education World Forum will end on Wednesday. The ministers will return home. Some will carry genuine conviction and the political capital to act on it. Others will file the conference materials alongside last year's and move on to the next set of competing priorities. The forum itself cannot control which of those outcomes prevails.
But we can ask better questions about the infrastructure that sits between international commitment and national action. We can ask whether the accountability mechanisms exist to track what was promised. We can ask whether civil society has the resources to hold governments to their word. We can ask whether philanthropy is funding the political work that forums like these depend on but cannot themselves provide.
The test of EWF 2026 is not the quality of the sessions or the ambition of the theme. It is what happens in the months and years that follow, in national budgets, in parliamentary debates, in the classrooms where commitments either become real or do not. Right now, the infrastructure to make that happen is dangerously thin. Building it is not glamorous work. It does not lend itself to keynote speeches or communiqué language. But it is the work that determines whether forums like this one matter.
The commitments are never the problem. It is what happens to them afterwards.