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This paper was commissioned by the Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM Report) as background information to assist in drafting the 2016 report. This paper highlights that the SDGs offer a new range of possibilities for gender equality in education, including both political opportunities and funding streams, along with new thinking around ever-increasing amounts of data on education. However, as the discussions in this paper have shown, it is important to learn from the challenges and limitations of the MDGs, and to recognise the importance of thinking about gender equality in a more substantive sense. The new phase of efforts must include moving beyond instrumentalist discourses that foreground access and individual, narrow notions of empowerment; and ultimately, building a transnational movement focusing on substantive gender equality in education.