Back to school time: “Think beyond grades – to life”

Facebook Live session with Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

by Marilyn Achiron, Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

This back-to-school moment is a great time to grab a few minutes with Andreas Schleicher, head of the Directorate for Education and Skills, to get his thoughts about preparing for – and succeeding in – the school year ahead.

In our Facebook LIVE interview yesterday, he said that “there’s always something interesting happening in school”, and suggested that students “think beyond grades – to life”. Schleicher said of teaching that “there’s probably no tougher job today”.

What is common to the best-performing countries in PISA? According to Schleicher, these countries “believe in the future more than in consumption today; they make an investment in education”; “they believe in the success of every child”; and “they can attract the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms”.

We also talked about student anxiety, class size, homework and the kinds of skills students today need to acquire.

Schleicher also hinted at some interesting data, to be published next Tuesday in Education at a Glance 2017, on who studies what, and what that means for employment and earnings later on.

Take a look!

Links

Education at a Glance (EAG) 2017 will be launched on 12 September 2017 at 11:00 am, Paris time
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

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Awarding – and imagining – teaching excellence

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Tonight, the winners of the Higher Education Academy’s newly launched Global Teaching Excellence Award will be announced. The award is a milestone in advancing the higher education agenda. It’s time for teaching excellence to attain the same status and recognition as academic research, which still seems the dominant metric for valuing academic institutions, whether we look at rankings published in the media or research assessment frameworks or at performance-based funding for research.

There are compelling reasons to change this, and the award makes a start.

Tertiary qualifications have become the entrance ticket for modern societies. Never before have those with advanced qualifications had the life chances they enjoy today, and never before have those who struggled to acquire a good education paid the price they pay today. There are always those who argue that the share of young people entering higher education or advanced vocational programmes is too large. But they are usually talking about other people’s children. In the past century, they would have probably argued that there are too many children in high school.

The evidence is clear. On average across OECD countries, men with at least a bachelor’s degree earn over ÚSD 300 000 more than what they paid for their education or lose in earnings while studying, compared with those who only have a high school degree. And taxpayers too realise a return of over USD 200 000 per tertiary graduate in higher public revenues and lower social transfers. It is hard to think of a better investment at a time when knowledge and skills have become the currency of modern societies and economies. And despite the burgeoning number of graduates, we have seen no decline in their relative pay, which is so different from those with fewer qualifications.

But it’s also clear that this entrance ticket to the knowledge society is expensive; and people are generally allotted just one. That makes it so important to get it right. And this is where teaching excellence comes in. We all know that more education alone doesn't automatically translate into better jobs and better lives. We might know graduates who can’t find a job even as we hear employers lament that they can’t find people with the skills they need. Teaching excellence is about ensuring that the right mix of knowledge and skills is delivered in effective, equitable and efficient ways.

And the value of teaching is only bound to rise as digitalisation unbundles educational content, delivery and accreditation in higher education. In the digital age, anything that today you call your proprietary knowledge and content is going to be a commodity available to everyone tomorrow. Accreditation still gives universities enormous power to extract monopoly rents, but just think a few years ahead. What will micro-credentialling do to this system? Or think of what happens when all employers can see beyond degrees to the knowledge and skills that prospective employees actually have. That leaves the quality of teaching as perhaps the most valuable asset of modern higher education institutions. It becomes harder for universities to hide poor teaching behind great research. We are living in this digital bazaar and anything that is not built for the network age is going to crack apart under the pressure.

Future jobs are likely to pair computer intelligence with the creative, social and emotional skills, attitudes and values of human beings. It will then be our capacity to innovate, our awareness and our sense of responsibility that will harness the power of the machines to shape the world for the better. That means faculty need to look for outcomes that are fresh and original, that contribute something of intrinsic positive worth. Achieving these outcomes is likely to involve entrepreneurialism, imagination, inquisitiveness, persistence and collaboration.

As a result, universities’ previous priority of preparing a select few for research has given way to providing up to half the population with advanced knowledge and skills. The result has been the rapid expansion of the higher education sector and the establishment of more diverse types of higher education institutions. There are now over 18 000 higher education institutions in 180 countries that offer at least a post-graduate degree or a four-year professional diploma.

This historic shift has been accompanied by changes in funding regimes. The rising costs of higher education are increasingly borne by students themselves (see, for example, the United Kingdom). So it follows that students are becoming more discriminating consumers. And in choosing between universities, they are also thinking ahead about securing future employment. In response, institutions are competing to provide more relevant knowledge and skills through more effective teaching.

These sweeping developments in the higher education marketplace are intensifying competition. Indeed, a global education market has emerged. In 2015, there were 3.3 million students travelling across OECD countries to study. Others look to the new, internationally available, digital platforms to provide or supplement their learning.

Taken together, these developments have created an urgent demand for data to measure and improve the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Institutions need data to build on competitive strengths and address weaknesses. Governments need data to determine policy and funding priorities. Employers need data to assess the value of qualifications. And, perhaps most important, students themselves need data so that they can make informed decisions about their preferred place of study and show prospective employers evidence of what they have learned.

But these demands are still often unmet. Without such data, judgements about the quality of higher education institutions will continue to be made on the basis of flawed rankings, derived not from outcomes, nor even outputs, but from idiosyncratic inputs and reputation surveys.

Everyone knows how important data are to me, but I’m also well aware that throwing data into the public space does not, in itself, change the ways students learn, faculty teach and universities operate. We need to get out of the “read-only” mode of our education systems, in which information is presented in a way that cannot be altered. To really change education practice, we need to combine transparency with collaboration.

I am always struck by the power of “collaborative consumption”, where online markets are created in which people share their cars and even their apartments with total strangers. Collaborative consumption has made people micro-entrepreneurs; and collaborative consumption is fuelled by building trust between strangers.

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of technology is not only that it serves individual learners and educators, but that it can create an ecosystem around learning. Technology can build communities of learners that make learning more social and more fun. And it can build communities of faculty to share and enrich teaching resources and practices. Imagine the power of a higher education system that could meaningfully share all of the expertise and experience of its faculty.

What if we could get faculty working on curated crowd-sourcing of best teaching practice, and perhaps even across institutional and national borders? Technology could create a giant open-source community of faculty, unlocking the creative skills and initiative of so many people simply by tapping into the desire of people to contribute, collaborate and be recognised for it. And we could use technologies to liberate learning from past conventions, connecting learners in new ways, with new sources of knowledge, with innovative applications and with one another. Maybe that’s something for next year’s teaching excellence award.


For the latest data on tertiary education, look out for Education at a Glance 2017, which will be published on 12 September.

Links

Global Teaching Excellence Award

Education at a Glance 2016: OECD Indicators

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What happens with your skills when you leave school?

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Mean literacy and numeracy score, by age and education enrolment status
OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), 2012 or 2015

Moving from the world of school to the world of work is one of the most dramatic changes in the lives of young people. And for many youngsters this transition does not go smoothly. Spells of frictional or longer-term unemployment, job insecurity because of low-paid or temporary contracts, and the uncertainties associated with starting to live autonomously produce a challenging phase in young people’s lives. The most vulnerable people are those who fall between the two systems: the so-called NEETs (not in employment, education or training), who are no longer in school and are either unemployed or inactive. Some 6% of 15-19 year-olds in OECD countries – in other words, half of those of that age who have left school, or around 5 million young people – are NEET.

A new Education Indicators in Focus brief looks at the transition from school to work across different age groups. It reconfirms that leaving school is much less difficult if one has acquired an upper secondary qualification, which functions as a kind of security mechanism against most of the hardships associated with the transition. The share of 20-24 year-old NEETs who do not have an upper secondary qualification (36%) is double the share of employed 20-24 year-olds who have not attained that level of education (18%).

But an educational qualification is one thing; the actual skills that people have are another. The brief publishes some new and interesting findings about the skills disparities among young people in different age groups in and out of school. The chart above shows the difference in mean literacy and numeracy skills between people in and out of education in three different age groups. The differences are remarkable. Among 16-19 year-olds, the difference in skills amounts to the equivalent of around 2.5 years of schooling. But the differences among older age groups are also considerable – and they remain significant even after controlling for educational attainment.

The finding lends itself to various possible explanations and observations. The most obvious one is that the results reflect a selection effect: more-skilled young people tend to stay in school while the less-skilled leave. A skills-selection effect does not seem to be problematic among 20-24 and 25-29 year-olds, when continuing one’s education is based on educational merit. For the younger age group, however, the difference in skills signals an efficiency problem in our education systems. Less-skilled young people should leave school only after they have acquired a foundation level of skills. When dropping out of school at an early age is the result of a skills-selection mechanism, than we are not serving our most vulnerable youngsters well.

Another possible explanation looks at the skills difference from the other side of the transition: the labour market and the world of work. This hypothesis suggests that leaving school and entering the labour market is accompanied by a process of de-skilling. When skills are not used in employment, they erode. A difficult school-to-work transition can have a scarring effect that can last throughout an entire career. De-skilling can happen through unemployment, but also through employment in precarious jobs, where workers do not fully use their skills, or through employment in an ill-matched job. This hypothesis suggests that a difficult transition process can undermine what should be a social benefit: essentially, the investment in skills acquisition is wasted.

The policy consequences are clear: there are many reasons for governments to be concerned about the school-to-work transition. Dropping out of school at an early age without a proper qualification has a huge social cost. Policies to provide guidance and support to young people during that transition pay off: there is less risk that people become unemployed or fall between the cracks and become dependent on welfare systems. And such policies should encourage people to maintain their skills and give them the opportunity to improve their skills through quality work and training. The political responsibility to ensure a smooth transition is enormous, but it is also shared between the work of education and the world of work.

Links

Education Indicators in Focus No. 54 - Transition from school to work: How hard is it across different age groups? 

Education Indicators in Focus 

Education at a Glance 2016: OECD Indicators

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Chart source: OECD (2017), in Education Indicators in Focus No. 54, Figure 3. 

Do countries have to choose between more educated or better-educated children?

by Francesco Avvisati
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

While Joana, a 15-year-old girl from Fortaleza in Brazil, was sitting the PISA test in 2015, her cousin, also 15 but living in the countryside, was busy working in the family business. In fact, by the time they turn 15, many adolescents in low- and middle-income countries are no longer enrolled in school (or have never been), particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia. But soon, those children may be able to sit a PISA test specifically designed for out-of-school youth.

Increasing the educational attainment of young adults has been the focus of much effort over recent decades. But we all know that having children spend more time in school does not guarantee that every student will learn. For this reason, the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG4), which defines the new global agenda for education and was adopted by the United Nations in September 2015, emphasises improvements in the quality of education and learning outcomes, rather than increases in time spent at school.

This challenging goal urges countries not only to increase access to education, but also to improve the skills of students who are already in school. If you think it is impossible to do both at the same time, you probably have not yet read the latest PISA in Focus.

This month’s issue investigates what happened to the PISA results of countries, such as Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Jordan, Mexico, Turkey and Uruguay, all of which expanded their education systems to include previously excluded – and mostly disadvantaged – populations. Perhaps surprisingly, for many of them, average performance improved.

PISA shows that the goals of more inclusive and better-quality education can go hand in hand in low- and middle-income countries when governments are committed to measuring the outcomes of schooling. In other words, it shows that countries do not have to choose between quality and quantity. While dismantling the barriers to schooling, countries can also help every student acquire the skills they need to thrive in increasingly knowledge-intensive economies.

Links

PISA in Focus No. 75: Does the quality of learning outcomes fall when education expands to include more disadvantaged students?

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

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“Youth are not the future; they are the present”

Interview with Oley Dibba-Wadda, Executive Secretary of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) 

by Marilyn Achiron, Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Oley Dibba-Wadda is the dynamic (and first female) Executive Secretary of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA). The organisation’s mission is to assist in “the transformation of education and training to drive Africa’s accelerated and sustainable development”. We spoke with Dibba-Wadda in June when she participated in the OECD Forum in Paris.

Marilyn Achiron: What do you consider to be the greatest challenge facing African youth today? 

Oley Dibba-Wadda: The challenge that youth are facing, first and foremost, is skills for employability. It is a fundamental issue. What we have realised in education is that going to school has not necessarily translated into quality learning. The learning being taught in schools does not resonate with the current job market. Then there is the issue of financing capital investment for youth who want to go outside of the formal employment system, to go into small and medium enterprises, to go into agriculture, to start their own little businesses.

MA: Do you feel that these challenges are qualitatively different from the challenges facing youth in Europe or America right now?

OD-W: I don’t think they’re qualitatively different. Youth in Europe have better opportunities; but the mindset, the needs, the wants, the thinking, the aspirations are the same. There are better opportunities here [in Europe] than on the African continent, and for me, that’s what the difference is.
All youth are asking for is opportunities, opportunities, opportunities. They know what they want, they know where they want to go, they know how to get there. What they’re challenged with is the financing to do what they want to do, and to have youth champions: adults in influential positions who can be champions to advocate for [them]. Youth want agency: they want to be able to do things the way they want to. We keep saying “they are the future”. They’re not the future; they are the present. We need to acknowledge and appreciate that.

MA: What would be needed to improve the alignment between what students are learning in school and what the labour market demands?

OD-W: First of all, we have to appreciate that the African continent is very diverse. The education system in Francophone West Africa is completely different from the education system in Francophone Central Africa; the education system in Anglophone West Africa is different from that in Anglophone East Africa. We need to contextualise each system of education. What type of education is required? What I was taught when I was going to school was education for a white-collar job: going to school, holding a briefcase, having a suit and tie. That’s what we were trying to instil in our own children, and that’s what [today’s youth] is thinking. What we need is a paradigm shift of mindset to get our kids to look at being self-employed, to start thinking outside of the box, to start learning to do, learning to be more innovative. But also to learn to find jobs that resonate with their interests.

I mentor a lot of youth in Africa, and one thing that comes up is not just the issue of hard skills for employment and employability, but soft, emotional life-skills, such as the ability to speak in public, to express themselves, to read and write basics… to be able to take risks and jump, to express themselves, to feel motivated and inspired. A+ students might not be able to prepare themselves for the world of work because they lack self-esteem, they do not have the confidence to be assertive, to ask questions.

MA: Is that something that can be taught in school?

OD-W: It should be; it has not been done. Our education systems are preparing our youth for examinations; they are not preparing them for work.

MA: As the head of a pan-African organisation, how do you hope to shape each individual country’s approach towards education?

OD-W: Our role is to engage more with policy makers. We do not implement activities, per se; we engage at a higher political level. We engage with the policy makers, ministers, heads of state, the permanent secretaries, administrators within the ministries of education. ADEA also provides capacity-building support to these ministries on best practices. So we say, for example, to a country like Angola: “Rwanda is doing something fantastic. You may want to go there and explore what they’re doing and see how you can adapt that to your context” because the environments are different; you cannot cut-and-paste. We also explore what is happening in other parts of the world. Finland has a very good education system. We engage with the minister in an African country and encourage the minister to go and do a study tour in Finland.

MA: Do you feel that African countries can learn lessons from countries in other parts of the world, and vice versa?

OD-W: They can and they could and they should. But what they shouldn’t be doing is transferring the same model from there and expecting it to work. We have a lot of donor agencies and partners who come in and say “We’re interested in supporting early childhood education; this is something we have done in South America and we want to do it in a particular country in Africa”. And we just take that model and do it because there is money attached to it. So what we have been doing in Africa is following the money, rather than using our own blueprint and saying, “You have this plan, but this is what we feel would be beneficial to us.”

We need to encourage our countries not to follow the money, but to have their own blueprint and then go out and invite [assistance from outside countries]. What we’re trying to think of now at ADEA is how to get countries to take responsibility for education as a global public good….ADEA is trying to engage with all stakeholders, both within the African continent and outside, to set up an African education fund [the African Development Bank is supporting a feasibility study for this fund]. There are so many funds out there that are being used for education in Africa and it’s just not working. So if we have an African education fund that is managed for Africans, by Africans, and [countries] take responsibility for this, then they can invite other stakeholders to contribute money so we can create an education system for Africans that resonates with the current state of the job market…If we continue to have funding coming from the outside, of course: he who pays the piper determines the tune. That’s what we are struggling with now.

Links

OECD Forum 2017

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

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Improving education outcomes for Indigenous students

by Andreas Schleicher 
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills 

Indigenous peoples are the first inhabitants of their lands, but are often poorly served by the education systems in their countries. Why? Is it necessary to wait until issues such as poverty or appropriate legal recognition for Indigenous peoples are resolved? Can education systems be expected to address Indigenous students’ needs relating to language, culture and identity? Can non-Indigenous teachers be effective teachers of Indigenous students? How can Indigenous parents have confidence that their children are safe at school and receiving a high-quality education?

Indigenous students do well in some schools more than in other schools and in some education systems more than in other education systems. Pockets of excellence and promising practices rarely translate across systems or across schools within a single education system. Thus, education systems and individual schools seldom learn from each other about what it takes to improve education for Indigenous students. Learning from examples of success can enable systems and schools to do better and accelerate improvements for Indigenous students.

An OECD report, Promising Practices in Supporting Success for Indigenous Students, released on International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (9 August 2017), highlights examples of success by Indigenous students and how these successes have been achieved. These examples can be used to help education systems improve education outcomes for Indigenous students and to quicken the pace of doing so.

OECD analysis of progress across six Canadian provinces and territories, New Zealand and Queensland, Australia shows that success for Indigenous students in education is becoming a priority. These jurisdictions have a clear will and commitment to improve, and have put in place many initiatives to address challenges and accelerate positive change. In some cases, the improvements are clearly evident; in others, the efforts are not yet at a scale to make a difference or have not been in place for a sufficient period to affect Indigenous students’ education. Achieving progress requires the deliberate decision to do so and then a concerted effort to do enough to improve each Indigenous student’s experience in education.

Providing high-quality, early childhood education and care (ECEC) for Indigenous children sets them on an early pathway towards success. High-quality ECEC is culturally responsive to the needs of Indigenous children and their families. It encourages Indigenous children to be confident and curious, and builds social, emotional and early cognitive skills. It also means working in partnership with Indigenous parents to better meet their children’s needs. Such ECEC is best provided in Indigenous communities, where these children live, and should be both accessible to and affordable for their parents.

Another ingredient of success is establishing respectful and trusting relationships with Indigenous leaders and communities, both at the system governance level and at the individual school level. Schools that build genuine partnerships with Indigenous communities achieve much more for Indigenous students than schools that do not engage with these students’ communities and homes. The benefits of such partnerships are evident in student participation and attendance rates, and in indicators of student learning and achievement.

School principals can make all the difference – or not. In schools where Indigenous students are achieving well, there is generally a highly effective and committed school principal who has done “whatever it takes” to ensure Indigenous students attend school, are engaged in learning and are positive about their futures. These schools tend to use a “whole-of-child” approach that puts children’s overall well-being as the key priority. Effective principals also set high expectations for teachers and take responsibility for monitoring Indigenous students’ academic progress, to ensure targets are being met and that any needed interventions are put in place in a timely manner.

Teachers also need support, to build their capability and confidence in establishing relationships with and teaching students from communities with which they may not be familiar. With the right support, teachers can build both their cultural competence and effective teaching strategies, such as the use of the history and geography of the school community, so that they elicit the best out of all of their students. 

Links
Promising Practices in Supporting Success for Indigenous Students
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Photo credit: Christopher David Rothecker

How education can spur progress towards inclusive growth

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Costa Rica is recognised across Latin America as a leader in education. The country was among the first in the region to enrol all children in primary school and combat adult illiteracy. Today, one in two young adults has completed secondary education, up from one in three among their parents’ generation. But, the demands placed on the skills of people have evolved as well. The overall context has become more challenging too: Economic growth has slowed, inequality is rising and productivity is weak in a labour market that shows a growing divide between a well-paid, high-skilled sector and a precarious informal economy. The OECD report, Education in Costa Rica, looks at how education can help Costa Rica turn these negative trends around.

The first step is to build strong foundations. Pre-primary education has become nearly universal in most OECD countries; but in Costa Rica, only 63% of children benefit from two years of preschool, and very few children under three have access to any form of early care and education. Strong, sustained support to promising initiatives, such as the new policy framework for early childhood and the preschool curriculum, will ensure that more children start school with the socio-emotional and cognitive skills that they need to learn. More flexible community-based services can accelerate the expansion of early education into rural areas.

The quality of education can never exceed the quality of teachers. Costa Rica is working towards ensuring minimum standards in the teaching profession by requiring private universities to accredit initial teaching degrees. The challenge  now is to advance from recruiting those candidates with the greatest potential for effective teaching towards promoting continuous professional development through regular feedback and more opportunities for peer learning within and across schools.

If all students are to complete at least secondary school, then the content, structure and certification of learning at this level need to respond to an increasingly diverse student population. Nearly one in three 15-year-olds is not in school, and among those who are, another one in three lacks core competencies in science, reading and mathematics. The programme Yo me Apunto, which allocates more resources to disadvantaged schools to prevent students from dropping out, should be supported and combined with an expansion of vocational courses and alternative forms of certification to help more students make a smooth transition from school to employment.

Costa Rica’s tertiary sector also has an important role to play  in fostering inclusive growth. Just one in ten students from a disadvantaged background makes it to university, and only 12% of tertiary programmes have been accredited. It is time for Costa Rica to embrace comprehensive reform of the governance, funding and quality-assurance systems of both private and public universities to respond to changing social and economic needs. This, in turn, requires much better data on tertiary performance so that students can make informed choices about their future, and institutions can be held accountable for meeting their own and their country’s objectives.

Costa Rica is rightly admired for making education the cornerstone of its development. It invests 7.6% of its GDP in education – a larger share than that of any OECD country. But those resources need to be invested strategically. If it does so, Costa Rica will be able to spur more inclusive growth and build on its remarkable achievements in human development and well-being.

Links
Reviews of National Policies for Education: Education in Costa Rica
Brochure: Education in Costa Rica, Highlights 2017 (English) and (Spanish)
Press release: Costa Rica should ensure that all children have access to quality education (English) and (Spanish)
Slides: Avances y desafíos de la educación en Costa Rica: una perspectiva internacional (Spanish)

Photo credit: MEP (Ministerio de Educación Pública)