Barometer — A Custom Research Platform for Global Education Rights Data
A Custom Research & Analytical Platform Tracking Human and Trade Union Rights in Education Worldwide
About the Project
Education International (EI) is the global federation representing teachers’ and education support personnel’s unions, giving voice to educators across more than 170 countries and territories. To translate that global reach into evidence-based advocacy, EI needed a dedicated digital platform capable of tracking, organising, and publishing detailed country-level data on the state of human and trade union rights in education.
Cyblance partnered with Education International to design and build the Barometer of Human and Trade Union Rights in Education a custom research and analytical tool that compiles comprehensive, comparable reports on the quality of education and the respect for human and labour rights in countries around the world. The platform examines every stage of the education journey, from early childhood through to tertiary education, and surfaces critical issues shaping the global education sector, including academic freedom, gender equality, provisions for students with special needs, the treatment of refugee and minority children, and the persistence of child labour.
The Objective
EI needed more than a content website it needed a living research instrument that its own team could operate independently, without ongoing developer involvement, while giving researchers, journalists, policymakers and union members a reliable, structured way to explore rights data by country.
- Give non-technical EI staff full control to create, update, and retire country profiles and their underlying statistics.
- Present complex, multi-country human rights and education data in a structured, easy-to-navigate format for a global audience.
- Support EI’s international membership base with multilingual access to the same body of research.
- Keep the platform connected to EI’s wider digital ecosystem, so news, articles and events stay current without duplicate content management.
- Build a sustainable revenue stream through a members-only premium tier, supported by flexible payment options.
- Ensure the experience holds up on any device and under real-world traffic, from a researcher’s desktop to a union member’s phone.
The Challenge
Human and trade union rights in education is an inherently data-dense subject: dozens of indicators, per country, that need to stay accurate, comparable, and easy to update as new research comes in. The core challenge was architectural building a custom CMS flexible enough to model country profiles and their statistics as structured, editable data, rather than static pages that would need a developer for every update.
Layered on top of that was the need for multilingual delivery to serve EI’s international federation of unions, a paid membership layer with recurring and one-time billing, and integration with EI’s parent website so that news, articles and events could be pulled in via web service rather than re-authored. All of this had to be delivered on a technology stack PHP and CodeIgniter built for long-term maintainability by EI’s own team, and had to perform reliably across desktop, tablet and mobile.
The Solution
Cyblance built Barometer as a bespoke web application on PHP and the CodeIgniter framework, with a custom-built CMS at its core purpose-designed around EI’s editorial and research workflows rather than a generic off-the-shelf content model.
Exclusive Features
Backend through which the EI team can add, edit, delete and view country profiles and manage their statistics.
Multilingual support across the website.
Backend configuration of statistics for each country profile.
Events, articles and news displayed via web service integration with EI’s parent website.
Paid membership tier offering exclusive services, with recurring subscription or one-time payment options.
Stripe and PayPal payment gateway integration.
Fully responsive design, compatible across tablet, mobile and desktop devices.
Optimised for caching and load performance.
Results & Impact
The delivered platform gave Education International a self-sufficient research and publishing tool: EI staff can independently manage country profiles and statistics rather than relying on developer support for routine updates, which keeps the Barometer current as new rights and education data emerges.
The multilingual architecture and integration with EI’s parent website extended the platform’s reach across EI’s international federation of unions, while the responsive build ensures researchers, journalists and union members can access country reports equally well from a desktop or a mobile device. The addition of a Stripe- and PayPal-backed membership tier gave EI a structured way to monetise premium content and services alongside its core advocacy mission, supporting the long-term sustainability of the research programme.
Industry Trends & Future Outlook
The context Barometer operates in has continued to evolve since launch. These are broader industry trends shaping research and advocacy platforms in the education-rights space today offered as forward-looking context, not as features delivered as part of this engagement.
- Persistent global reporting gaps: UNESCO’s 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report highlights that access and equity progress is still falling short of the SDG 4 target, underscoring the ongoing need for platforms like Barometer that make country-level rights and education data transparent and comparable.
- Rising demand for country-comparable indicators: as international bodies push for more consistent monitoring frameworks, custom CMS platforms that let non-technical staff maintain structured, per-country statistics (as Barometer already does) are becoming a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.
- AI-assisted research workflows: education and human-rights organisations are increasingly piloting AI tools for governed, verifiable tasks such as drafting summaries, flagging data anomalies and speeding up report production, always with human oversight retained for accuracy and ethical review.
- Stronger data governance and privacy expectations: as data-driven education platforms scale, sector guidance increasingly calls for clear data protection practices, transparent data handling and safeguards, particularly for platforms handling sensitive rights-related information.
- Continued growth in digital advocacy: youth and civil-society digital rights initiatives are expanding globally, reflecting rising expectations that advocacy organisations offer accessible, multilingual digital tools for research and engagement.
Conclusion
Barometer shows how a purpose-built CMS can turn a complex, research-heavy mandate into a tool that a non-technical team can run on its own. By combining flexible country-profile management, multilingual reach, integrated content syndication and a sustainable membership model, Cyblance gave Education International a platform that supports its core mission: making the state of human and trade union rights in education visible, comparable, and actionable across the world.
