In laying the foundation and conditions for the delivery and sustainability of good quality education, the formulation of strong legal frameworks and effective policies and plans remains central to achieving education development goals and promoting lifelong learning. As a recent history of education shows, the education sector is not short of ideas but often struggles to put them into practice. Well-worded policies may remain irrelevant in practice unless the right policy levers are used to address the persistent implementation gap. This report focuses on three strategic policy levers that together can help governments reach higher levels of education quality, equity and inclusiveness. It clearly demonstrates the untapped potential of adequate governance, effective and instructional school leadership, and better monitoring and evaluation systems that could be critical to the achievement of the SDG 4 – Education 2030. This report presents the main findings and resulting recommendations of a series of comparative studies on promising education policy levers developed by UNESCO over the past biennium. The focus of this report is on school systems; however there are implications for all levels and types of education. Considering the multiple interests involved, the intention of this study is therefore not to produce any ‘best’ framework or model, but rather to promote an active dialogue and intensive research on critical issues to help policy-makers, planners and education practitioners, especially at the national level, better and more strategically use governance, school leadership, and monitoring and evaluation in the pursuit of the internationally agreed education agenda.