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By Marie-Helene Doumet Senior Analyst, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons School autonomy can mean different things to different people. Policy makers see it as a way to make schools more responsive to local needs and specific contexts. For school heads and teachers, it can mean gaining greater control over the management of the school and its pedagogical direction. Parents, meanwhile, may interpret it as a way to engage more directly in a school’s  decision-making processes. The truth is that school autonomy is all of these things, which makes it difficult to define. And although greater autonomy would seem like a benefit to parents, teachers and school leaders, it also raises important questions. What role should central authorities play in a newly decentralised system? To whom should schools be held accountable? And how can we ensure that the decisions made by school management align with national strategies? Because while greater autonomy ...

By Tarek Mostafa Analyst, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills Photo credit: Ousa Chea/ Unsplash Education experts have spent the last 50 years debating over a seemingly simple question: what’s the best way to teach science? On one side of the divide are those who support self-guided, enquiry-based approaches, under which students direct their own learning. On the other are proponents of teacher-directed instruction, who say this approach makes it easier for teachers to manage classrooms and cover a wider range of content. Complicating the debate even further is the increasing diversity of student populations, which has raised demands for science curricula to adapt to student needs through adaptive teaching approaches.   We take a closer look at each of these strategies in the latest issue of PISA in Focus . Using new evidence from PISA 2015, we found that each approach has advantages and drawbacks for learning – and that identifying the most effective strategy isn’t as clear...

By Marco Kools Analyst, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills Photo credit: Element5 Digital/Unsplash In 2011, Wales embarked on a large-scale reform to improve the quality and equity of its education system. Since then, the reform has increasingly focused on the implementation of a new, 21st-century school curriculum that calls for developing young people into “ambitious, capable and lifelong learners” who are “enterprising and creative, informed citizens, and healthy and confident individuals”. This vision also aligns with the framework being developed by our Education 2030 project. To support the successful implementation of this curriculum, Wales has set an objective to develop its schools into learning organisations . These schools have the capacity to change and adapt to new environments and circumstances as its members learn, collectively and individually, how to implement a shared vision. Schools in Wales have already made substantial progress toward this objective, as we ...

By   Gabriela Ramos,  OECD Chief of Staff and Sherpa Ludger Schuknecht,  OECD Deputy Secretary General Andreas Schleicher,  Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills and Stefano Scarpetta,  Director, OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Photo credit: Shutterstock On television, in newspapers and on social media, migrants are often described in blanket terms: they’re mostly unskilled, they have little chance of integrating in their host country, and they are a burden on the public purse because they rely on benefits more than they contribute to financing them. It’s a broad generalisation, and it often forms the basis of a polarised debate. But the data tell another, more differentiated story. As we lay out in a new report , migrants come to their host countries from a wide range of backgrounds and with a diverse set of skills. In OECD countries, about one in three foreign-born people have a university degree, and fewer than one in...

By Javier Suarez-Alvarez Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills Photo credit: SpaceX A mannequin dressed in a spacesuit is seated in the driver’s seat of an electric sports car. Within minutes, the car escapes Earth’s gravity, crosses the orbit of Mars, and becomes a satellite of the Sun. It may sound like a scene from a sci-fi movie, but this actually happened  earlier this year. And although it was little more than a publicity stunt, the event still underscores how fast our world is changing. The rapid pace at which technology is developing today offers both new opportunities for society to evolve, and new challenges to overcome. As the world becomes more globalised and complex, people are interacting more with different cultures, job mobility and uncertainty are on the rise, and information (or disinformation) is more widely accessible than ever before. As our world has changed, so too have the skills necessary to navigate it. Classical academic skills such as math, readi...

by Anthony Mann Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills Photo credit: Shutterstock The OECD estimates that over the next ten to twenty years, half of all jobs will either disappear or radically transform as machines continue to automate tasks that were once performed by humans.  Many other new jobs and tasks will be created. Such upheaval in the labour market creates a new challenge for education systems: what knowledge and skills do young people today need for an unpredictable future? One way to respond to this challenge is through work-based learning: a well-established means of combining classroom learning and skills development in the workplace. Over the last three years, our team at the OECD has worked with countries to closely examine work-based learning and identify the characteristics that make it most effective. In a series of working papers , the team has reported on how to incentivise employers to participate in work-based learning, how to best develop skil...

By Janet English Academic Coach, El Toro High School Photo courtesy of Janet English When people said Finnish teaching methods couldn’t work in American classes, I wanted to see if I could prove them wrong. So I moved to Finland on a Fulbright grant to learn how teachers there teach problem-solving skills. Then, I returned to the US to adapt these methods to my high school biology classes in southern California. The learning results were so positive and unexpected that I (literally) ran with the final exams to show the principal how well the students had succeeded! After three years of adapting and adjusting Finnish teaching methods, my students were scoring a 97% proficiency rate in content knowledge, and had improved their problem solving skills  –  even in large, diverse classes. So how did I adapt Finnish methods to an American classroom? I combined the Finnish pedagogical approach for optimizing learning with the American approach of increasing competition. The result: hi...