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by Dirk Van Damme Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills  There is now a widespread consensus that high-quality early childhood education is critically important for children. Research continues to find that early childhood education can compensate for a lack of learning opportunities at home, and can help children begin to develop the social and emotional skills needed for success later in life. Few policy makers would now question the benefits of high-quality early childhood education. As a result, early childhood education systems have expanded. As documented in Education at a Glance 2016 , on average across OECD countries enrolment in pre-primary education among 3-year-olds rose from 54% in 2005 to 69% in 2014, and among 4-year-olds from 73% to 85%. Expansion policies include the extension of compulsory education to younger children, free or universal early childhood education, and the creation of programmes that integr...

by Deborah Nusche Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills Back in 2013, when we launched the OECD's first international review of school resource policies, we may not have been fully prepared for the detective-type work we were getting into. The OECD Review of School Resources covers 18 school systems and aims to shed light on a part of education policy that has been surprisingly left in the dark. Today, we publish our first thematic report on the funding of school education. The research conducted for this study involved intensive field visits to 10 countries, which made tangible the challenges of reviewing school funding policies. In several systems, information on the formulas used to calculate funding levels for schools was not readily available. In a range of countries, including Denmark, Iceland and Sweden, school funding policies are a local responsibility and there may be as many different funding formulas as there are local authorities. But even in more cent...

by Andreas Schleicher  Director, Directorate for Education and Skills Small in size but not in its ambitions, Slovenia has a bold vision for a society in which people learn for and through life, are innovative, trust one another, enjoy a high quality of life and embrace their unique identity and culture. So how does a country of 2 million people, with an export-oriented economy still recovering from the financial crisis, realise such ambitious goals? People’s skills – what they know and can do with what they know – are at the heart of all countries’ prosperity. Technological change, globalisation and population ageing all magnify the importance of people’s skills. Recognising this, Slovenia embarked on a journey involving nine government ministries and offices and over 100 stakeholders to map Slovenia’s main skills challenges. A series of interactive workshops in Ljubljana in 2016 provided a unique forum in which educators, employers, students, employee representatives, government ...

by Rose Bolognini Communications and Publications Co-ordinator, Directorate for Education and Skills What do innovative learning environments around the world look like? How might they be led and evaluated? What policy strategies stimulate and support them? For the past decade the OECD’s Centre for Education Research and Innovation (CERI) has addressed these and similar questions in an international study called Innovative Learning Environments . Now drawing on their extensive research within this project  – from the nature of learning, to innovative cases, to leadership and strategies – CERI has translated these findings into a practical handbook , aimed at educators, leaders and innovative policy-shapers. It gives a set of tools based on this extensive international knowledge source as well as succinct summaries of the research accessible to practitioners. The handbook is divided into four chapters: i) The principles of learning to design learning environments; ii) The OECD “7+...

by Andreas Schleicher Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills Why do children in their last year of pre-primary education spend so much time playing and the year after sitting in large classes listening to their teacher? Why do we pay the teachers of our youngest children so much less than we pay the teachers of our oldest children? Why do first-year primary teachers know so little about the children from whom their pre-primary teachers have learned so much? The simple answer is that that’s the way we have always done this. But we have learned so much about how children learn and what they learn best at what stage of their development, that we can, and should, do a lot better. It is time for this knowledge and experience to shape education policy and practice more distinctly. To this end, the OECD has just published its first internationally comparative set of indicators on early childhood education and care and, more than that, we analysed what more can be done to shift ...

by Hélène Guillou Consultant, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills It’s 3pm in Finland. A bell rings, marking the end of classes in a middle school and time for students to go home. In a different part of the world, at the exact same time, other students are also just finishing  up classes. Except for these students, it’s not the middle of the afternoon, but night time, and they have just spent several hours studying in a “cram-school”, after a normal school day. Even if Finnish students study for a couple of hours after school, they will still have spent significantly less time cracking the books than some of their East Asian counterparts. Yet, when it comes to performance, Finland ranks among the top-performing countries in science. As this month’s PISA in Focus reveals, students spend considerably more time learning in some countries than in others, but this does not necessarily translate into better learning outcomes. Across OECD countries and economies, students rep...

by Nicholas Spaull Former Thomas J. Alexander Fellow, OECD Unlike earlier PISA reports, the 2015 PISA report ( Volume I  and  Volume II ) highlights differences in sample coverage – how many students were eligible to participate in PISA – between countries. Why is this important? Because you can’t really appreciate the magnitude of improvement in a country’s performance in PISA unless you also understand how access to education has expanded over time, too. Take the case of Turkey. Of the OECD countries that participate in PISA, Turkey has one of the lowest levels of performance and the highest rates of improvement in PISA scores. Between 2003 and 2012, Turkey managed to improve its mathematics score by 25 points while also narrowing the achievement gap between rich and poor students (in other words, improving equity in education). Over the same period, Turkey also managed to keep students in education longer and see them progress more steadily through grades – achievements tha...

by Tracey Burns Project Leader and Senior Analyst, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, so do the risks we face. A disease breaking out in a village in Africa, a bank crashing on Wall Street or a protest in a distant country can all potentially “snowball” and influence the world financial, health or security order. While very different topics, environmental degradation, financial crises, cyber-attacks and social instability both within and in between countries have all been identified as risks for OECD countries and indeed, the whole world. Their global nature means that all of these risks require a co-ordinated international response. Education has a key role to play: as a preventative tool, it can be used to raise awareness as well as shape the attitudes and responsible behaviours of a generation of conscious global citizens. Education can also mitigate the effects of risks by equipping students with the knowledge and skills nee...