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by Andreas Schleicher Director, Directorate for Education and Skills Anyone flying into Abu Dhabi or Dubai is amazed how the United Arab Emirates has been able to transform its oil and gas into shiny buildings and a bustling economy. But more recently, the country is discovering that far greater wealth than all the oil and gas together lies hidden among its people. If the country would live up to its ambition to be among the world’s 20 leading school systems, as measured by PISA, that would add over USD 5 600 billion to the economy over the lifetime of today’s primary school students, or the equivalent of 9 times the size of the UAE’s economy. That is because people with a solid foundation of knowledge, with creative, problem-solving and collaborative skills, and with character qualities such as mindfulness, curiosity, courage and resilience, make a so much greater contribution to economic and social progress. The trouble is that the UAE has been slow to invest in the people who can di...

by Tracey Burns Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills Feeling out of place. Too big, too short, too wise, too ignorant – these are all situations Gulliver experiences in Jonathan Swift’s classic of English literature. Gulliver’s Travels give us an idea of how important our environment is when it comes to defining ourselves. It also gives us a 19th century look into the very modern concept of diversity. Diversity in the classroom includes differences in the way students' brains learn, or neurodiversity. Diagnoses of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) have risen dramatically in the last two decades. This is not an issue that is isolated to a few countries: ADHD diagnoses have increased dramatically in Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Similar patterns are seen in the prevalence of ASD, which occu...

by Hélène Guillou Consultant, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills It’s 3pm in Finland. A bell rings, marking the end of classes in a middle school and time for students to go home. In a different part of the world, at the exact same time, other students are also just finishing  up classes. Except for these students, it’s not the middle of the afternoon, but night time, and they have just spent several hours studying in a “cram-school”, after a normal school day. Even if Finnish students study for a couple of hours after school, they will still have spent significantly less time cracking the books than some of their East Asian counterparts. Yet, when it comes to performance, Finland ranks among the top-performing countries in science. As this month’s PISA in Focus reveals, students spend considerably more time learning in some countries than in others, but this does not necessarily translate into better learning outcomes. Across OECD countries and economies, students rep...