273 Million Children Have No School — Why the Number Keeps Rising | Craig Miles

In March 2026, UNESCO published its Global Education Monitoring Report. The headline finding was not new. The number of children and young people out of school worldwide has risen for the seventh consecutive year, reaching 273 million. One in six school-age children on Earth is excluded from education. At current rates, UNESCO estimates the world will not achieve 95 percent upper secondary completion until 2105.

Two thousand one hundred and five.

I have been thinking about the education access gap since before I gave my TEDx talk on it in 2023. I have been building ReachED around it since then. And I find, every time I read a new UNESCO report or a new UNICEF data release, that the number that stops me is not 273 million. It is the direction of travel. Not 273 million children out of school despite everything. 273 million children out of school and rising, for seven years in a row, during a period when the world has spent more on international development, more on EdTech, and more on education access initiatives than at any previous point in history.

Something structural is wrong. And I think I know what it is.

The progress story — and why it does not reach the most excluded
The 2026 GEM Report is careful to note genuine progress. Since 2000, enrolment in primary and secondary education has increased by 327 million — a 30 percent increase globally. Some countries have reduced their out-of-school rates by more than 80 percent. The picture is not uniformly bleak.

But the progress has stalled precisely where it matters most. After falling by 33 percent between 2000 and 2015, the out-of-school population has risen for seven consecutive years. Progress has decelerated across almost every region since 2015 — the year the SDG4 commitment to universal quality education by 2030 was made.

The explanation is not mysterious. The children who have been brought into education since 2000 were the easier cases — children in communities with some infrastructure, some access, some proximity to existing schools. The 273 million who remain outside the system are not there because no one has thought about them. They are there because the approaches that worked for the first wave of enrolment expansion do not work for them. They are in the last mile. And the last mile is, by definition, the hardest and most expensive to reach through conventional means.

Who the 273 million are — and where they are
The 273 million is not a homogeneous population. It includes children in active conflict zones — over one in six children globally lives in a conflict-affected area — whose exclusion from education is immediate and catastrophic. It includes girls in countries where cultural or legal barriers prevent female education. It includes children with disabilities in systems that have not yet built inclusive education capacity.

But the largest and most structurally persistent group — the group that ReachED is specifically designed to reach — is different from all of these. They are children in remote, rural, low-income communities where there is no school within accessible distance, no teacher willing to relocate to their village, no road that is passable in the rainy season, and no economic case for a government or private investor to build the terrestrial infrastructure that would make conventional schooling possible.

Their exclusion is not the result of a policy failure or a cultural barrier or a conflict. It is the result of geography and economics. The school is not there because building it and staffing it and supplying it is more expensive than the available budget permits, and the community is too small and too remote to be prioritised in national infrastructure planning.

This is the problem that has not been solved. And it is the problem that cannot be solved by the approaches that have been tried so far — because those approaches all depend, at their foundation, on terrestrial infrastructure that will not arrive.

Why the conventional approach cannot close this gap
The conventional approach to education access is built on physical infrastructure: schools, teachers, roads, electricity, internet connectivity. Build the school. Train the teacher. Provide the curriculum. Connect the school to the internet so digital learning tools can supplement the teacher’s work.

This approach works. It works extremely well in the communities that already have most of the infrastructure in place and need the last components — the school building, the trained teacher, the internet connection — to be supplied. Those are the communities that the progress since 2000 has reached.

It does not work for the 273 million who remain outside the system. For those communities, the infrastructure is not almost there. It is absent. The road does not exist. The electricity grid does not reach. The mobile tower was never built because the operator could not make the economics work. The nearest qualified teacher lives three days of travel away and has no reason to relocate to a community of three hundred people with no secondary economy.

The Giga initiative — UNICEF and ITU’s joint effort to connect every school to the internet — has done extraordinary work mapping school connectivity globally and identifying where the gap is most acute. What that mapping reveals is that the schools that remain unconnected are concentrated in precisely the communities where terrestrial infrastructure — fibre, towers, roads — will never arrive economically. The gap is not almost closed. It is structurally permanent without a different approach.

Fibre cannot be laid to a village of three hundred people in the Sahel at a unit cost that makes sense for a development budget. A mobile tower cannot be operated commercially in a community with no economic activity that would generate subscriber revenue. A diesel generator cannot reliably power a school in a community that cannot afford the fuel and has no supply chain to replenish it.

The conventional infrastructure approach has a hard floor. Below that floor — which is where 273 million children live — it cannot go. And no amount of additional funding for the conventional approach changes that structural reality, because the constraint is not financial. It is architectural.

The second failure mode: technology that requires connectivity to work
The EdTech response to the education access gap has generally followed a different logic: if we cannot build schools in remote communities, we can deliver education digitally. Tablets. E-learning platforms. AI-powered tutoring. Video curriculum. The technology exists. The content exists. The question is how to get it to the children who need it.

The problem is that almost all of these solutions require a continuous internet connection to function. A streaming video curriculum requires broadband. A cloud-based AI tutoring system requires connectivity to the server. An adaptive learning platform that adjusts to the child’s progress requires a persistent data connection to maintain the learning state.

In communities with reliable connectivity, these tools work. In communities without it — the communities where 273 million children live — they do not. The technology that could transform education access is designed for the world that already has the infrastructure, not the world that needs it most.

One Laptop Per Child. Various satellite broadband initiatives that required ground terminals costing thousands of dollars. E-learning platforms that assumed a school with electricity and a teacher to facilitate sessions. The history of technology-for-education is a history of solutions designed for connected communities being delivered to unconnected ones, with predictable results.

What a different architecture looks like
The architecture that ReachED is developing starts from a different set of assumptions. Not: what infrastructure do we need to build? But: what already exists in these communities that we can build around?

What already exists, in many of the communities where the 273 million live, is a smartphone. Not in every household. Not always a recent one. But GSMA data consistently shows that device ownership runs significantly ahead of connectivity in developing markets — people have smartphones that work, that have cameras and screens and batteries that last a day, and that connect to nothing because there is nothing to connect to.

What does not exist — yet — is a way to get educational content to those devices without terrestrial connectivity. That is the gap that LEO direct-to-device satellite closes. Not by building ground infrastructure. By delivering connectivity from overhead, through the same device that the child already has, without requiring anything new to be installed in the community.

And what has changed in 2026 is that this is no longer a theoretical possibility. The FCC granted AST SpaceMobile commercial authorisation for direct-to-device satellite broadband in April 2026. Starlink Direct to Cell is operational in multiple markets. The 3GPP Release 17 standard has made NTN connectivity a feature of the standard mobile chipset. The infrastructure is overhead — not requiring permission from a local operator, not requiring a cable to be laid, not requiring a tower to be built.

Combine that connectivity with offline-capable edge AI — which runs on the existing device, without a server connection, adapting learning to the child’s pace and level — and you have an education system that does not depend on any infrastructure being in the community at all. The school is the device. The teacher is the AI. The connectivity is the satellite pass that synchronises content and progress once or twice a day.

This is the ReachED model. Not a replacement for schools where schools are possible. Not a competitor to teachers where teachers exist. A genuinely different architecture for the communities where neither is coming.

The number rising for seven years in a row is not inevitable
The 2026 GEM Report notes that the out-of-school population is undercounted by at least 13 million once humanitarian data sources are used to correct the gaps in conflict-affected contexts. The real number is worse than the headline figure suggests.

But the report also documents something that deserves more attention than it typically receives: the countries that have made the most dramatic progress — Madagascar, Togo, Morocco, Vietnam, Georgia, Turkey — share a common characteristic. They prioritised the furthest behind, rather than extending services from where they already existed. They designed systems around the excluded, not around the convenient.

That is the design principle ReachED is built on. Start from the child who has nothing. Design the system around what she has — a device, perhaps, and overhead satellite connectivity that no one can charge her for — and build upward from there.

The number rising for seven years in a row is a signal that the current approach has reached its limits. It is not a signal that the problem is unsolvable. The technology to solve it exists, for the first time, in 2026. What remains is the will to use it differently.

That is what ReachED is for.

If you work in international development, education policy, satellite operations, EdTech, or development finance and want to understand more about the ReachED model — or if you believe this problem deserves a different kind of solution — get in touch or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Craig Miles is a wireless communications engineer, TEDx Brayford Pool 2023 speaker, and founder of the ReachED Foundation — an initiative using LEO direct-to-device satellite connectivity, offline edge AI, and recycled smartphones to deliver secondary-education-standard learning to the 273 million children globally without school access. The 273 million figure is sourced from UNESCO’s 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report, published Ma