Learning profiles have the potential to change how people think about learning. Part of their power comes from their simplicity: learning profiles are line graphs tracing out how much children know and which skills they acquire over time in a particular context. However, analysed in the right way, learning profiles can help us answer urgent questions about the learning crisis and what will - and will not - redress it. How much do children learn each year in school? When do they begin to fall behind? If every child finished lower secondary school, how much more would they learn? What if girls received just as much schooling as boys and learned just as much during their years in school? These are the kinds of questions that learning profiles can answer, as demonstrated in this document.