English Impact 2017 provides robust policy-relevant data evidencing English language capability of a representative sample of 15-year-old students in four regions of the world: two municipalities – Madrid, Spain, and Bogota, Colombia; and two countries – Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The concept of language capability combines current achievement and future opportunity to succeed, by uniting information about levels of ability with information about the participants’ language learning context and personal motivations. The project was driven by the aim to provide a comparable baseline of evidence showing levels of English language capability at the heart of where government policy makes an impact; in publically funded school classrooms. The sampling design for this research was developed in conjunction with the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).