2024 Global Education Outlook

Strategic Shifts & Trends in Education

HolonIQ analysis reveals 20 key shifts and 50+ trends across early childhood, K12, higher education, and workforce education. Over the next decade, expect a focus on skills, where new methods assess and develop essential future competencies. Technology will drive innovative learning models and experiences, while the gap between research and practice narrows, focusing on evidence-based approaches. Holistic education, nurturing both academic and personal growth, will be critical for learner success. Explore sector, sub sector and regional expectations on strategy, market conditions, demand, workforce changes and disruption for the year ahead and beyond.

Investment Trends

EdTech VC investment reached $3B in 2023, marking a 72% decrease from the previous year. North America contributed half of the global EdTech funding, with both India and China experiencing significantly reduced investments from Venture Capital. India's Byju's, previously cited as the largest EdTech company in the world, has encounters challenges, with knock-on effects across the whole Indian market. The ongoing impact of Chinese regulation continued into 2023. Notably, the year saw no VC deals in education exceeding the $100 million mark. In M&A, $7B was recorded across more than 421 transactions.

Sub Sector Trends

Across the 10 sub-sectors of the Open-Source Global Learning Landscape, and through the lens of the Global EdTech 1000, the 2023 Global EdTech 1000 shows growth in the broad category of ‘education management’, which captures EdTech supporting the digitization of processes at education institutions and companies, from analytics, to LMS’s, parent communication apps, financing education, and full-service administrative environments, indicative of the long-term move to build digital infrastructure in traditional education settings. STEAM is the next largest category globally, but with significant variation across geographies, from 1 in 5 in Africa and the Nordics to 7% in North America. STEAM cuts across K12 to Workforce, including upskilling in tech bootcamps and building core concepts in early learning. Globally, one quarter of this year’s most promising EdTech companies was launched in the previous 3 years, indicative of solid early-stage support. However, the range across geographies is significant with, generally speaking, emerging markets holding the highest ratio of early stage companies and mature markets favoring established startups, with Europe the outlier.

Capital Markets

Nearly 300 listed education companies hold a combined market capitalization around $200B at any one time, with major fluctuations over the past few years. The industry saw around 20 small to medium size IPOs in 2023 with no major transactions. Four major take privates commenced in 2023 as private equity found opportunities to rebase and rebuild or accelerate brands away from the public markets. As we close 2023, HolonIQ has advanced our stock index work to bring real-time insight into the performance of major education categories. Each index includes key global constituents with a square root market cap weighted basis to follow the major stocks with a balanced exposure of smaller to medium sized constituents. On a 12-month basis, only the HolonIQ K12 Index outperformed the S&P500. For the last 6 months however, all Education Indices except Publishing and Early Childhood outperformed the S&P500. Over last 3 months, all except Early Childhood outperformed the S&P500.

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