OECD Skills Strategy Spotlight - Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: Apprenticeships and Workplace Learning - How do apprenticeships and other forms of workplace learning help people to make a successful transition from school to work? Global economic competition requires a labour force with a range of mid-level trade, technical and professional skills alongside the high-level skills typically associated with university education.

What makes a NEET? - NEETS - young people aged between 15 and 29 years old who are not in employment, education or training - are a potential problem both for society and for themselves. The proportion of young people neither working nor studying offers an insight into how well economies manage the transition between school and work – better than youth unemployment rates, which do not take into account the numbers in education.

Skills for the digital economy  - Digital economies are powered by skills. People with the high-end skills needed to invent and apply new technologies are in high demand the world over. At the same time, the portfolio of basic skills needed to navigate technology-rich environments and function effectively in our connected societies has expanded. How severe is the shortage of ICT skills? And what needs to be done to fill the gaps?    

A Women’s Day Challenge - by Barbara Ischinger, Director for Education and Skills

On this International Women’s Day I’d like to be just a bit provocative and suggest that we start paying a little more attention to boys. Boys are getting lost in today’s life and we don’t really understand why. A recent study finds that boys’ behaviour costs them dearly in school marks (our next PISA in Focus, due out on 14 March, has a few other interesting things to say about how teachers award marks to girls and boys); and a school in Shanghai, China – which was the best-performing school system in the 2009 PISA survey  – has just introduced boys-only classes  in an effort to turn around the decline in boys’ performance in university entrance exams.

Trends Shaping Education 2013 - Written for a broad audience, this book is designed as a robust, non-specialist source to inform strategic thinking and stimulate reflection on the challenges facing education. It includes 70 different trends based on high-quality international data, primarily from the OECD, the World Bank and the United Nations. The charts contain dynamic links so that readers can access the original data.

2much 2handle? Schools, social networks, and cyber bullying - A just released OECD publication looks at how rapid technological development has changed the way we interact with each other and our communities. Despite the enormous potential of the Internet to reshape our world, there is a downside to infinite connectivity. Internet fraud, privacy concerns and identity theft are all part of the online world. For parents and children, worries about cyber bullying and protecting children from explicit content and online predators are crucial.

Making education more equitable - Most of us think of education as the great leveller; but are our education systems really doing all they can to ensure that boys and girls from all backgrounds have an equal shot at a high-quality education? As this month’s PISA in Focus reports, some countries have been more successful than others in levelling the playing field for their students.

Dynamic educational data award - Last September, we opened a competition challenge in collaboration with Visualizing.org, requiring graphic designers to construct a clear and compelling visualisation on the economic costs and returns on education.

The winners were Krisztina Szucs and Mate Cziner from Hungary. Their interactive chart condenses highly complex data on the costs and benefits of education around the world. It highlights important facts showing students, parents and policy makers where the real costs and benefits lie for them in relation to education.  It takes a detailed look at public versus private costs, per men and women for three simultaneously selected countries, while reflecting the benefit comparison between upper-secondary and tertiary education.

OECD Education Today… and tomorrow (Barbara Ischinger, Director for Education) - If you want to know what we’ve been doing over the past year or so, I invite you to take a look at the latest edition of Education Today. It covers the most important results and policy recommendations that have emerged from our work in early childhood education, compulsory schooling, higher education and lifelong learning. It also discusses such overarching topics as equity of opportunity, the benefits of education, and innovation.

Education Today 2013 - The OECD Perspective - What does the OECD have to say about the state of education today? What are the main OECD messages on early childhood education, teacher policies and tertiary education? What about student performance, educational spending and equity in education? OECD work on these important education topics and others have been brought together in a single accessible source updating the first edition of Education Today which came out in March 2009.