seek parliamentarians' support for building the necessary political will and momentum to push this agenda forward.
This seminar will be held at OECD headquarters on 23 February, the day following the meeting of the Economic and Social Committee of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. Members of this Parliamentary Assembly will be invited to participate, along with a number of other parliamentarians from OECD countries.
The seminar will be held from 10am to 5pm and include a working lunch.
Background
More than 250,000 15-year-old students in 41 countries took part in the Programme for International Student Assessment 2003 (PISA), the second three-yearly survey of its kind. The survey involves pencil and paper tests lasting two hours, taken in the students' schools. The main focus in PISA 2003 was on mathematics, but the survey also looked at student performance in problem-solving, science and reading and at students' approaches to learning and attitudes to school.
Finland already led in the PISA 2000 reading assessment, and in PISA 2003 it maintained its high level of reading literacy while further improving its performance in mathematics and science. In mathematics, where the PISA 2003 tests sought to establish how well students can develop and apply mathematical models to deal with real-life tasks and interpret, validate and communicate the results, top-performing OECD countries also include the Netherlands.
Most other countries' relative positions in the PISA 2003 survey remained broadly similar to those in PISA 2000, but some showed notable changes. Poland's overall performance rose thanks to big improvements among lower-performing students in the wake of a major reform of the education system in 1999. Smaller but still noteworthy improvements in at least two assessment areas also occurred in Belgium, the Czech Republic and Germany.
Some low-performing countries showed only small improvements or actually did less well, widening the gap between the best and poorest performers.
Overall, wealthier countries tend to do better in educational terms than poor nations, but there are exceptions: Korea's national income, for example, is 30 per cent below the OECD average but its students are among the best performers in OECD countries. Nor is high expenditure necessarily a key to success: a number of countries do well in terms of "value for money" in their education systems, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands, while some of the "big spenders" perform below the OECD average. (Data for the United Kingdom are not included, due to insufficient response rates of students and schools. In PISA 2000, data for the Netherlands were excluded for the same reason).
The results of PISA 2003 suggest that both students and schools perform best in a climate characterised by high expectations that are supported through strong teacher-student relations, students who are ready to invest effort and who show interest and lower levels of anxiety with mathematics, and a positive disciplinary climate. In most of the countries that performed well, local authorities and schools also have substantial responsibility for educational content and/or the use of resources, and many set out to teach heterogeneous groups of learners. Further information on Pisa can be found at
www.oecd.org/pisa.
The quality of the teaching workforce is a major consideration in any nation’s aspirations for an educational system of high quality. Teachers form the core of the school system and a wide range of research studies has confirmed the importance of teacher quality for student learning. Thus, the development of policies seeking to improve the quality of teachers and ensure that all students receive quality teaching is a central concern for governments.
Teacher policy is currently high on the agenda of OECD countries. Substantial policy initiatives are under way in a range of areas including improving teacher recruitment and supply, reforming initial teacher education and professional development, restructuring teachers’ work and careers, and strengthening leadership in schools. In addition to questions about the changing roles of teachers and the attractiveness of teaching overall, there are also important issues concerned with diversification of teachers’ roles, more flexible pathways into teaching, incentive structures rewarding the skills and performance that most closely relate to student learning, as well as teacher development and accountability.
Higher education has become increasingly international in the past decade as more and more students choose to study abroad, enrol in foreign education programmes and institutions in their home country, or simply use the Internet to take courses at colleges or universities in other countries. This growth is the result of several different, but not mutually exclusive, driving forces: a desire to promote mutual understanding; the migration of skilled workers in a globalised economy; the desire of the institutions to generate additional revenues; or the need to build a more educated workforce in the home countries, generally as emerging economies.
But the growth and diversification of cross-border education raises a number of questions for governments and higher education institutions. Is capacity being increased to meet growing demand? Is access being widened? Are costs being lowered for students or governments? Is liberalization an answer to the growing importance of private provision as well as the rise in the demand for higher education?
Relevant Documents
1.
The Internationalisation of Higher Education
2.
The Quality of the Teaching Profession
