A chance to design the way forward for education

by Michael Ward
Senior Policy Analyst, the Development Co-operation Directorate

Want to get involved in shaping the future of education? As the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) reach their 2015 deadline, several international groups, including the OECD, are formulating a new set of goals and targets for sustainable development… and we’d like to know what you think.

The Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG), a UN-appointed task force, has proposed an agenda for development that includes goals for education, and educators from around the world have developed a set of specific education and learning targets that are closely aligned with that agenda.

The task now is to develop indicators so that progress towards achieving these new goals can be monitored.

To that end, a Technical Advisory Group, co-ordinated by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and including members from the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, the OECD, UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank, has proposed a set of indicators, which you can find here.

We’d like to hear from you

What do you think about the indicators?

Between today and 30 January 2015 you are invited to comment on each indicator or to respond to these questions:

1. For each target, does the report identify the best indicators that are most aligned with the concept and are already being tracked in a large number of countries?

2. What new indicators could be developed to be more closely aligned with the proposed targets and have the potential to be globally comparable?

3. For each target, please identify or propose the two most important indicators.

4. Are there key issues that the document has not addressed satisfactorily or other issues that also need to be taken into consideration?

Please visit the UIS website for details on how to submit your comments.

To ensure that the consultation is open to as many people as possible, we invite you to spread the word among your networks and social media, referencing #Education2015.

After 30 January 2015, the Technical Advisory Group will review the list of indicators based on your feedback. The final proposal will be submitted for endorsement at the World Education Forum in Incheon (Korea) in May 2015. The final documents will then form the basis of the discussions at the UN General Assembly in September 2015 on the new UN goals for education.

Join the discussion on twitter via @EFAReport @UNESCO @WBEducation @OECD_Edu @UNICEFEducation and #Education2015.

Links:
OECD PISA for Development
Photo credit: ©UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)

The socio-economic divide in pre-primary education

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

The metaphor “levelling the playing field” crops up a lot in discussions about pre-primary education.

As well it should: attendance in those programmes has been shown to improve education outcomes later on. But as this month’s PISA in Focus shows, not even a steamroller can level the playing field of formal education if disadvantaged students are sidelined from the beginning.

PISA consistently finds that 15-year-old students who had attended pre-primary education tend to perform better than those who had not attended pre-primary education, even after accounting for the students’ socio-economic status. 51 points – the equivalent of substantially more than a year of formal schooling.

In 2012, the vast majority of 15-year-old students in most PISA-participating countries and economies reported that they had attended pre-primary education; and PISA data confirm that enrolment in those programmes has grown over the past decade. In 2003, 69% of 15-year-olds across the OECD countries that have comparable data between 2003 and 2012 reported that they had attended pre-primary school for more than one year; in 2012, 75% of students reported so.

But PISA also finds that while 15-year-old students in 2012 were more likely than 15-year-olds in 2003 to have attended at least one year of pre-primary education, pre-primary enrolment is higher among advantaged students than disadvantaged students, and higher among students attending advantaged schools than those attending disadvantaged schools. In 2012, an average of 67% of disadvantaged students had attended pre-primary education for more than one year, while 82% of students in advantaged schools had done so.

This difference in enrolment between advantaged and disadvantaged students is seen in almost all PISA-participating countries and economies. It is largest – 48 percentage points – in Poland, and between 25 and 30 percentage points in Portugal, the Slovak Republic and Uruguay. This means that the students who could benefit the most from these programmes – those from disadvantaged backgrounds – are less likely to participate in them. This socio-economic divide widened in the Slovak Republic between 2003 and 2012 as it did, to a lesser extent, in Finland, Greece, Latvia, Luxembourg, Poland and the Russian Federation; it narrowed, however, in Germany, Korea, Macao-China, Portugal and Uruguay. 

That pre-primary enrolment rates are growing faster among advantaged students than among disadvantaged students signals that countries have to work harder to ensure that all families, particularly disadvantaged families, have access to high-quality pre-primary education, and to information about such programmes, near where they live. An investment in early education, both for parents and for governments, pays dividends later on in life. Which brings to mind another apt expression: “You can’t win if you don’t play.”

Links:
PISA 2012 Findings
PISA in Focus No. 40 : Does pre-primary education reach those who need it most?
Photo credit: Kids Hands / @Shutterstock

The “urban advantage” in education

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

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. 

PISA has shown that while large cities can be a challenge to educators, they are mostly a boon, particularly when all students can take advantage of the wealth of cultural and social opportunities that big cities offer. PISA results also show that schools in urban areas differ from schools in less-populated areas – in ways that are usually associated with better student performance.

On average across OECD countries, students who attend schools in cities of more than 100 000 people perform better in PISA than students who attend schools in villages, rural areas, or towns with up to 100 000 inhabitants. This difference in performance translates to about 20 PISA score points – the equivalent of half-a-year of schooling. In many countries and economies, the performance difference between the two groups of students reflects families’ decisions about housing and employment, which, in turn, influence how students’ socio-economic status is distributed geographically.

In all countries and economies except for Austria, Belgium, Germany, Israel, Korea, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, students who attend schools in urban settings come from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds. In Denmark, on the other hand, students whose parents have high levels of education and high-status occupations are more likely to attend schools in rural locations or in towns of up to 100 000 people. 

But the socio-economic status of students is only one of the factors that is associated with the better performance among students who attend school in cities. These schools have certain characteristics that PISA shows are positively related to performance. Urban schools are usually larger, enjoy greater responsibility for resource allocation, are less likely to experience staff shortages, are more likely to have a higher proportion of qualified teachers, and have higher student-teacher ratios than schools in rural areas and towns, especially in partner countries and economies.

An analysis of questionnaires distributed among students participating in PISA 2009 also finds that in Australia, Dubai (UAE), Estonia, Iceland, Israel, Montenegro, New Zealand, Qatar and Sweden, students who attend schools in urban areas tend to enjoy a better disciplinary climate in their classes than students who attend schools in less-populated areas (in Brazil, Mexico, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Tunisia, the opposite is true). In 15 countries, students who attend schools in urban settings are more likely to be able to choose from among a greater number and wider range of extracurricular activities.

What this tells us is that some of the conventional wisdom about big city schools may be a little off. Given the heterogeneity of the student population, large schools might actually offer students more, not less, stimulation and inspiration; and with more autonomy in allocating resources, urban schools may be better able to meet the needs of all their students.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No. 28: What makes urban schools different?

Photo credit: Urban Globe/ Shutterstock

Skills revolution will come from the grassroots

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. The College, a non-governmental organisation, serves rural men and women of all ages, all of whom are barely literate (if at all) and have no hope of getting even the lowest government job, by providing training in such skills as solar engineering, water drilling, hand-pump engineering, masonry, architecture, and computing.

Marilyn Achiron, Editor of the Education Department caught up with Roy when he was in Paris to speak at the OECD Forum. He’s not one to mince his words:

“We are facing a disaster of monumental proportions,” says Roy. “We’re training people to leave the village, not to stay in the village. We’re encouraging migration at a colossal level from village to city. As a result, we’re losing all the traditional knowledge and skills that used to be in the village. Does anyone at the mover-and-shaker level have the courage and vision to turn this around? We’re already set in a pattern that we can’t break.”

According to Roy, whom Time magazine named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010, the big international donors are part of the problem, and not enough of the solution. “People aren’t listening enough. The biggest problem with the big donors is that they don’t have the ability or the humility to listen to what’s happening on the ground. We need to respect traditional knowledge and skills; you cannot be educated at the expense of tradition. It’s a balance. There’s a real urgent situation out there and we’re not treating it with urgency.”

A dissatisfaction with policies designed in the relative comfort of developed-world capitals while more than one in five people in the world live on less than USD 1.25 a day comes across clearly. The OECD is not spared Roy’s frustration: “The OECD’s attitude towards education is outdated. In the non-organised, informal world, people have no access to water, electricity, formal education. The OECD’s attitude is dangerous. They have to revisit it and adapt it to the reality on the ground. They have lost touch.” Even the OECD Skills Strategy, released earlier this week already needs updating:  “There will be a skills revolution from the grassroots. The current thinking has to change. The question is: How do you recognise skills that people already have and apply them in the situation in which they live? The OECD is very backwards in its thinking.”

Between 2007 and 2011, the Barefoot College trained some 300 grandmothers, from 29 countries throughout Africa, in solar technologies. After their six-month training course—paid for, along with their air fare, by the Indian government—they went back to their villages and solar electrified some 15,000 houses. Says Roy, “These illiterate grandmothers know more about the repair and maintenance of solar lamps and installations than any graduate of any five-year university anywhere in the world. And if anyone wants to challenge me on it, I’d be delighted.”

Links:
Barefoot College
Watch the TED Talk: Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement
OECD Skills Strategy
Visit our interactive portal on skills: http://skills.oecd.org
OECD Forum 2012
Photo credit: Colourful feet / Shutterstock

17 top OECD tweeters to follow on education

by Cassandra Davis and Julie Harris
Communications, Directorate for Education

Like us, you are looking for the best and latest information on education when you trawl blogs and twitter streams, Google search results and RSS feeds from news sites. You're seeking quality content, timely content, new research and answers to age-old questions. Years ago, we ploughed through papers found in online libraries, on websites and links sent by colleagues. Today, we have a number of new, well-informed sources at our fingertips (on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and even Pinterest). Some see these as contributing to information overload. Others have learned to use them as powerful filters.

Some of the most reliable filters are knowledgeable people who care enough to share. So who are the "filters" and sources tweeting here at the OECD on education? Take a look below, follow a few, and let us know who we should be following in the comments below. Together, we will learn, share and tweet the very best in education information from across the world.

@OECD: Our main twitter channel for OECD communications on better policies for better lives.

@OECD_EDU: Bringing you all the latest news on OECD work on education proving information to improve the quality of education world wide.

@YLeterme: Yves Leterme is Deputy Secretary-General of the OECD and tweets on social affairs, education, governance and entrepreneurship.

@SchleicherEDU: Andreas Schleicher advises the OECD Secretary General on education policy and is Deputy Director for Education. He tweets on #OECDskills that matter and how to turn them into better jobs and better lives.

@DebRoseveare: Deborah Roseveare heads the Skills Beyond School Division tweeting on all aspects of #OECDSkills:  the development, utilisation and measurement of skills for youth and adults, and building skills through more effective vocational education and training and higher education.

@RichardJYelland: Richard Yelland heads the Policy Advice and Implementation Division and tweets on education policy across all sectors.

@VanDammeEDU: Dirk Van Damme heads the OECD Education Directorate’s Innovation and Measuring Progress Division and the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation #OECDCERI. He tweets on all educational issues and more specifically on the topics of measuring progress, research, indicators and innovation.

@jhwordsmith:  Julie Harris is a social media consultant to the OECD Directorate for Education. She is passionate about learning, skills for the 21st century, technology and education reform. She tweets on these topics and more.

@Kristen_TALIS: Kristen Weatherby is a former classroom teacher, she is the tweet lead for OECD's Teaching and Learning International Survey, tweeting on issues that affect teachers.

@AlastairBlyth: Alastair Blyth is a former practicing architect and tweets on design, procurement, and use of school & higher education buildings #OECDCELE

@Valafon: Valerie Lafon is the lead for #OECDIMHE the Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE).

@FabriceHENARD: Fabrice is an analyst tweeting on  Higher Education issues including quality teaching, learning outcomes-AHELO, Internationalisation for #OECDIMHE in English and French.

@OECDLive: OECD’s Livestream tweeting our conferences and events in real time.  Tune in for the launch of the #OECDSkills Strategy during #OECDweek on 22-24 May.

Last but not least:
@OECDBerlin; @ocdeenespanol ;@OCDE_Français; @OECDTokyo: the official OECD twitter channels retweeting our news in German, Spanish, French and Japanese.


Photo credit: Julien Tromeur / © Shutterstock