Video - Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Netherlands In a drive to raise the quality of classroom teaching and boost student performance, Dutch education authorities are encouraging teachers to learn from each other through a process of peer review.

The “urban advantage” in education - Nearly half the world’s population now lives in urban areas. What does that mean for education? Results from PISA indicate that that could be good news for students who go to school in those areas. As the latest edition of PISA in Focus points out, an “urban advantage” in student performance is evident in nearly every country and economy that participated in the PISA 2009 assessment.

Education Policy Outlook - The Education Policy Outlook provides forward-thinking comparative analysis of educational policies and reforms, It brings together analysis of individual countries’ educational contexts, challenges, policies and comparative insight in the areas of trends, policies and reforms.

Learning from other countries’ experiences in education by Andreas Schleicher - Deputy Director and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary-General
Rather than prescribe actions, the OECD often prefers to show policy makers what everyone else is doing and how successful those initiatives have been. A new OECD series of individual Education Policy Outlook Country Profiles does just that: each profile describes how an individual country is responding to key challenges to improve the effectiveness of its education system. The idea behind the series is to offer policy makers easily accessible profiles of countries’ education systems, and the policies adopted to improve those systems, that could inspire reforms at home.

Synergies for Better Learning: An International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment - This report provides an international comparative analysis and policy advice to countries on how evaluation and assessment arrangements can be embedded within a consistent framework to improve the quality, equity and efficiency of school education.

Evaluation and assessment is for everyone - Some may ask if all the time, money and effort invested in evaluation and assessment is worth it. The terms evaluation and assessment may strike fear into the hearts of some students, teachers and parents. Are they not just a way to control and constrain what goes in the classroom? Is this just not more unnecessary work for us? What on earth do they have to do with student learning?

PISA-Based Test for Schools - The PISA-Based Test for Schools [In the United States, the assessment is known as the OECD Test for Schools (based on PISA)] is a student assessment tool geared for use by schools and networks of schools to support research, benchmarking and school improvement efforts. It provides descriptive information and analyses on the skills and creative application of knowledge of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics, and science, comparable to existing PISA scales (when administered under appropriate conditions).

Does it matter which school a student attends? - Successful education systems guarantee that all students succeed at high levels. As this month’s PISA in Focus notes, some school systems not only do well on international assessments, like PISA, they also manage to minimise the difference between the best- and poorest-performing students.

2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession - The theme of the third annual International Summit on the Teaching Profession, to be held in Amsterdam on 13-14 March 2013, focuses on teacher evaluation and professional standards. During the summit, delegates will have discussions guided by the following questions:

• How is teacher quality defined by policy makers, the teaching profession and society? What standards are set and by whom?
• How is teacher quality evaluated? What systems are in place and how are the evaluations carried out?
• How do evaluations contribute to school improvement and teacher self-efficacy? What impact can be expected on teaching and learning from teacher evaluation?

Grade expectations - They’re a source of both anxiety and pride, but school marks can also have long-term consequences for students. Most teachers reward student achievement, but also the skills, attitudes, habits and behaviours that are necessary for lifelong learning. However, as this month’s PISA in Focus  points out, the tendency of teachers to award higher marks to girls and socio-economically advantaged students than to boys and disadvantaged students – even if they perform equally well in school and have similar positive attitudes towards learning – is cause for some concern.

Who says she’s a great teacher? - by Andreas Schleicher, Deputy Director for Education and Skills, Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

Most of us have been lucky enough to have had at least one great teacher in our lifetime: a teacher who inspired us to work hard and take risks, who opened up new worlds for us; a teacher whom we remember years, even decades, after the brief intersection of our two lives as someone who changed the course of our life or deepened the meaning of it

(TED Talk) Andreas Schleicher: Use data to build better schools - How can we measure what makes a school system work? Andreas Schleicher walks us through the PISA test, a global measurement that ranks countries against one another -- then uses that same data to help schools improve. Watch to find out where your country stacks up, and learn the single factor that makes some systems outperform others.

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.

A class act: giving teachers feedback  - When I think back on my first experiences as a student teacher of English language and literature to 13- and 14-year-olds, I don’t really remember the successes; I am not sure there were many during my teaching practice. Rather, I am reminded of the more colourful episodes of classroom management and student behaviour that seemed to occur all too frequently. For example, there was the time I looked up from reading to the class to see one student staring back with a green mustache and eyebrows. Another time one student jumped up from his desk and threw another student’s books out the window before I could blink. And then there were the countless times that I had to take away combs, brushes and makeup from both girls and boys in an effort to turn my classroom from a beauty salon into a place of learning. Needless to say, in these moments I didn’t feel like a very effective teacher.

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.

Quality Matters in Early Childhood Education and Care: Sweden - This publication is intended to be a quick reference guide for anyone with a role to play in encouraging quality through Sweden’s early childhood education and care (ECEC) curriculum. There is a growing body of evidence that children starting strong in their learning and wellbeing will have better outcomes when they grow older. Such evidence has driven policy makers to design an early intervention and re-think their education spending patterns to gain "value for money". At the same time, research emphasises that the benefits from early  interventions are conditional on the level of "quality" of ECEC that children experience.

Creativity in schools: what countries do (or could do)  - Are we really serious when we say that schools should nurture creativity and other skills for innovation? An increasing number of countries see fostering of creativity and critical thinking as the next educational challenge: traditional good grades may no longer suffice to equip the workforce with the skills needed to fuel innovation-driven economic growth.

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.

Grade Expectations: How Marks and Education Policies Shape Students' Ambitions - This new PISA report reveals some of the factors that influence students’ thinking about further education. The report also suggests what teachers and education policy makers can do to ensure that more students have the skills, as well as the motivation, to succeed in higher education.

Got any good ideas about how to improve education?  - Do you have an idea about how to improve quality and equity in education in your country or region, but need some time and support to research that idea? You might find what you’re looking for through the OECD’s new Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship Programme

Starting Strong III - A Quality Toolbox for Early Childhood Education and Care. This new publication focuses on quality issues: it aims to define quality and outlines five policy levers that can enhance it in ECEC.

PISA - Measuring student success around the world This video will help you to understand why the OECD's number-crunchers trigger such intense debate about the state of education around the world every time they release the results of the latest PISA survey.

OECD Work on Education - Brochure. All pages of the brochure are selected by default. Simply: "Download your selection" to download the entire brochure. For parts of the brochure, deselect the pages you don't require and "download your selection". 

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