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Education is key to economic growth and to people’s ability to earn a living. Education is important for societies, too, as they respond to increasing cultural and ethnic diversity, inequality and the needs of disadvantaged people. The OECD’s Directorate for Education works to help countries promote learning opportunities for all - regardless of age, gender or social background. Find out more.
What's new
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29-May-2012
Skills have become the global currency of the 21st century. Without proper investment in skills, people languish on the margins of society, technological progress does not translate into economic growth, and countries can no longer compete in an increasingly knowledge-based global society. But this “currency” depreciates as the requirements of labour markets evolve and individuals lose the skills they do not use. Skills do not automatically convert into jobs and growth.
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24-May-2012
Ministers from OECD countries met under the Chairmanship of the Republic of Turkey and the Vice-Chairmanship of Chile and Poland in Paris on 23-24 May under the heading “All on Board: Policies for Inclusive Growth and Jobs” to define the policy strategies needed to support the recovery from the worst financial and economic crisis of our lifetimes, promote inclusive growth and deliver much needed jobs. They issued the 2012 Ministerial Council Statement, which provides Ministerial guidance on the current and proposed OECD programme of work.
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29-May-2012
by Kristen Weatherby, Senior Analyst, Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)
More and more countries are having discussions about how to evaluate the quality of their teaching workforce and, subsequently, how to reward teachers for their work. The OECD’s newest series of briefs, Teaching in Focus, launches this month with a discussion of the appraisal and feedback teachers receive and the impact of both on their teaching.
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21-May-2012
The OECD has launched its Skills Strategy to help governments build economic resilience, boost employment and reinforce social cohesion. Despite the pressure on public finances, spending on education and skills is an investment for the future and must be a priority.
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24-May-2012
With his vantage point at the helm of the largest youth platform in the world, European Youth Forum (YFJ) President Peter Matjašic is well placed to assess the state of education and skills across Europe. Indeed, the YFJ represents millions of young people by way of national councils from Iceland to Azerbaijan, lobbying such important international bodies as the European Union, the Council of Europe and the United Nations to adopt policies that are in the best interests of European youth.
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24-May-2012
Sanjit Bunker Roy figured out pretty early on that it does, indeed, take a village; in fact, it takes a village to keep a village. He founded the Barefoot College in India in 1972 on the premise that for any rural development activity to be successful and sustainable, it must be both based in the village and managed and owned by those whom it serves.
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23-May-2012
by Michelle Bachelet - United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women
The global economic crisis, with high levels of unemployment, especially among youth, and rising inequality, with large wage gaps between high- and low-skilled workers, has added urgency to the need for better skills. This is especially important for women, who already face barriers to participating fully in the economy. Investing in their skills from early childhood, through compulsory education, and throughout their working life can transform women’s lives and drive economies.
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21-May-2012
by Andreas Schleicher
Skills transform lives and drive economies. Without the right skills, people are kept on the margins of society, technological progress does not translate into economic growth, and countries can’t compete in today’s economies. But the toxic co-existence of unemployed graduates and employers who say that they cannot find the people with the skills they need, shows that skills don't automatically translate into better economic and social outcomes. The OECD has put together a strategy that helps countries transform skills into better jobs and better lives.
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21-May-2012
The OECD has just formulated a Skills Strategy to help countries make the most of their peoples’ talents. How does one even begin to consider an issue as complex as skills? We found that visualising the supply of skills as a talent pool helps. The idea is to create a larger and larger pool of people who have fully developed their skills, encourage those people to supply their skills to the labour market, and then ensure that those skills are used effectively on the job. This new animated video will show you what we mean.
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21-May-2012
The OECD has launched its Skills Strategy to help governments build economic resilience, boost employment and reinforce social cohesion. Despite the pressure on public finances, spending on education and skills is an investment for the future and must be a priority. For more info please visit: http//skills.oecd.org
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23-May-2012
The winners of the 2012 OECD Video Competition hail from no fewer than three continents and four very different countries: Uganda, India, South Korea and Australia. Yet despite this, the videos they made on education and skills all highlight the need for major change in education systems if they are to provide young people with the skills necessary to thrive in the 21st century.
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18-May-2012
By Charles Fadel - Founder & chairman, Center for Curriculum Redesign
It has become clear that teaching skills requires answering “What should students learn in the 21st century?” on a deep and broad basis. Teachers need to have the time and flexibility to develop knowledge, skills, and character, while also considering the meta-layer/fourth dimension that includes learning how to learn, interdisciplinarity, and personalisation. Adapting to 21st century needs means revisiting each dimension and how they interact.
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16-May-2012
This report using PISA 2009 data, examines the performance of immigrant students in PISA and provides an in-depth look at factors such as language and socio-economic disadvantage, that can hinder full integration of immigrant students into their host societies.
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15-May-2012
Thanks largely to the OECD’s work in compiling internationally comparable data on education, the issue of teachers’ pay has quietly crept up the political agenda in more than a few countries (take the recent French presidential election and the current US presidential campaign, to name just two). PISA takes the discussion a step further. It asks: does basing teachers’ pay on their effectiveness as teachers help to improve an education system’s overall performance.
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15-May-2012
'PISA in Focus 16' discusses the relationship between performance-based pay in the teaching profession and student performance in PISA.
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11-May-2012
Education begins at home. The first word a parent speaks to an infant opens the world of language to the child and sets the child on the path of exploration and discovery. When formal schooling begins, many parents believe that their role as educators has ended. But education is a shared responsibility of parents, schools, teachers, and various institutions in the economy and in society. New findings from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that parental involvement in education is pivotal for the success of children throughout their school years and beyond.
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11-May-2012
by Barbara Ischinger - Director for Education
Earlier this week I attended the Transforming Education Summit in the Emirate state of Abu Dhabi. Some 15 ministers and former ministers from all regions of the world found—perhaps surprisingly—a lot they could agree on when it comes to education: the importance of raising the status of the teaching profession so that qualified candidates apply, the need to strike a better gender balance among teachers, and the need for trust in education systems—trust between governments and teachers, and trust between parents and teachers.
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from 07-May-2012 to 09-May-2012
The Abu Dhabi Education Council, with its partners OECD, Booz & Company and ATIC is organising the first annual Transforming Education Summit (TES) in May 2012.
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26-Apr-2012
Professor Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, answers questions posed by educationtoday's editor Cassandra Davis during his visit to OECD to present at the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation conference on Educating for Innovative Societies.
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25-Apr-2012
The Czech Republic should build on the strengths of its preschool education framework to further enhance the quality of its early childhood education and care services, according to a new OECD report.
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24-Apr-2012
Tokyo, 24th April 2012 - Remarks by Angel Gurría, OECD Secretary-General, delivered at a lunch hosted by Mr. SAITO, Vice-Chairman of BIAC, with members of Keidanren.
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19-Apr-2012
Anger over an oil spill off the coast of California prompted a US senator to call for a day-long national “teach-in” to raise awareness about the environment. For this 42nd Earth Day, we wanted to find out how “green” today’s students are and where most of their information about the environment comes from. According to the latest issue of PISA in Focus, students who have high levels of environmental literacy are still the minority; but all students get most of their information about environmental issues at school.
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20-Apr-2012
It is crucial for countries competing in an advanced economy to have a skilled workforce. But with labour markets changing so fast, how can workers keep up? The OECD Skills Strategy, due to be launched in May together with a comprehensive new survey of adult competencies, will help provide answers.
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16-Apr-2012
Several months ago, we described how PISA results show that, when it comes to the question of private versus public schooling, it’s the students who make the school. Both private schools and public schools with student populations from socio-economically advantaged backgrounds benefit the individual students who attend them. But PISA results also showed that there is no evidence to suggest that the proportion of private schools in a country, in and of itself, is associated with higher performance of the school system as a whole.
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12-Apr-2012
'Public and Private Schools' examines the socio-economic profiles of the public and privately managed schools that participated in the PISA 2009 survey.
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13-Apr-2012
According to US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Andreas Schleicher “understands the global issues and challenges [of education] as well as or better than anyone I have ever met.” And Schleicher is using this knowledge, based on global testing data, to galvanize change. An outspoken critic of government policies that don’t prioritize education, Schleicher has been influential in translating hard data into real-world guidance for policy-makers struggling to prepare students for the demands of the 21st century.
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from 17-Sep-2012 to 19-Sep-2012
IMHE General Conference 2012, Attaining and Sustaining Mass Higher Education, OECD Headquarters, Paris, France
Register now at www.oecd.org/edu/imhe/generalconference - early bird rate until 1 May 2012.
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03-Apr-2012
If you were to ask someone which countries tend to bear the brunt of a shortage of skills in this era of globalised trade, you couldn't fault them for thinking of developing countries. While this is certainly true, the problem is by no means limited to poorer countries. Indeed, even in countries at the forefront of the developed world and consistently at the top of the PISA rankings, skills shortages can plague the economy. Two such countries are Australia and Canada.
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10-Apr-2012
How can student assessment, teacher appraisal, school evaluation and system evaluation bring about real gains in performance across a country’s school system This report on Portugal provides, from an international perspective, an independent analysis of major issues facing the evaluation and assessment framework, current policy initiatives, and possible future approaches. This series forms part of the OECD Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes .
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28-Mar-2012
26/03/2012 - The OECD has launched an initiative with the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Fukushima University and local schools for students in the Tohoku region to create and organise an event that will showcase the country’s recovery from the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake.
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from 14-Mar-2012 to 15-Mar-2012
The U.S. Department of Education, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Education International (EI), the global federation of teacher unions, will again join U.S.-based education partners—the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Asia Society, the Council of Chief State School Officers(CCSSO), the National Education Association (NEA), and public broadcaster WNET—to hold the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession: Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders.
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05-Mar-2012
'PISA in Focus 14' compares the career expectations of the 15-year-old girls and boys who participated in PISA.
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21-Feb-2012
Finnish students have earned top marks from the OECD’s landmark PISA study, which tests the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in more than 70 countries. Participants at the OECD conference entitled “A Recipe for Success: Transforming Learning Environments through Dynamic Local Partnerships " taking place in Finland from 22-24 February, will be able to observe, experiment, and learn first-hand some of the many approaches to effective learning environments used in Finnish schools.
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23-Jan-2012
Governments should establish quality standards and goals in early childhood education and care in order to boost child learning and development, according to a new OECD report.
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19-Jan-2012
'PISA in Focus N°12' compares the performance of 15-year-old girls and boys in digital reading tests.
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17-Jan-2012
The concept of a stay-at-home parent seems outdated. Who can afford not to work these days? So what are kids up to during those precious, formative early years after their parents go back to work and before compulsory school begins around age 5 or 6? Who are the people we turn to for help in the immensely important role of raising our young children? And can we value them as much as we depend on them?
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21-Dec-2011
OECD countries and a number of partner countries are currently implementing the Programme for the Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) that will assess key skills in the adult population, how these skills are used at work and how improved skills translate into better economic and social outcomes. While PIAAC sets new standards both methodologically and in terms of the coverage of countries, important elements of it build on the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALLS) that was developed by Statistics Canada. The publication Literacy for Life presents new analyses from ALLS.
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16-Dec-2011
Ten additional economies participated in the PISA 2009 assessment in 2010. Consult the full report released by ACER here (13MB)
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from 22-Feb-2012 to 24-Feb-2012
Organised by OECD/CELE, University of Turku, Municipality of Kaarina, and Finnish National Board of Education, this conference will bring together a dynamic range of local and regional players from universities, local businesses and school communities to discuss the catalysts and drivers for transforming today's learning environments into dynamic learning communities of the future. For further information, consult the conference web site at http://congress.utu.fi/CELE2012/ or contact: Hannah.vonAhlefeld@oecd.org.
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from 12-Apr-2012 to 13-Apr-2012
"What Works" Conference on Internationalisation for Job Creation and Economic Growth, New York City, organised with the State University of New York
This conference will examine the key role multiple actors play together in tackling the effects of the global financial crisis and fostering recovery policies, especially job creation, innovation, and wealth generation.
Register now at: http://www.suny.edu/global/strategicinitiatives/oecdconference.cfm
www.oecd.org/edu/imhe/whatworks
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05-May-2011
In a globally competitive, knowledge-based economy, having skills is no longer just the advantage but a necessity. While many countries have developed strategies to improve the skills level of their citizens, their success in implementing them varies widely.To help them, the OECD is preparing a Skills Strategy with the aim of fostering a cross-government, peer-learning approach towards improving the supply of, and anticipating the demand for, skilled workers.
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See more news and events…
Top of page
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Focus
Learning beyond Fifteen focuses on the development of reading proficiency between the ages of 15 and 24 using the results of a Canadian study that combines PISA data with a follow-up survey, the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS)
Learning Beyond Fifteen - 10 years after PISA
Focus
PISA 2009 Results presents the findings from the most recent PISA survey, which focused on reading and also assessed mathematics and science performance.
PISA 2009 Results
Focus
This report will prove to be an invaluable resource for all those interested in the broad international picture of education, as well as for those wanting to know more about OECD work in this important domain.
Education Today 2010: The OECD Perspective
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A video series profiling policies and practices of education systems that demonstrate high or improving performance in the PISA tests
PISA - Measuring student success around the world
PISA - midiendo el éxito escolar en el mundo
