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This book sets out a potential response to two major challenges facing OECD countries: the "youth problem", or the need to ensure that young people can play a full role in society, and the need to foster entrepreneurship for job creation, innovation and economic adaptability. The "new economy" will be built on a culture of entrepreneurship and this must include youth as well as adults. In publishing this book, the OECD therefore wishes to stimulate policy debate on the factors that encourage youth entrepreneurship, the obstacles that stand in its way and the policy measures that can support it.
A picture is painted of youth entrepreneurship programmes operating at national, regional and local levels across the OECD in a wide variety of settings and with various different approaches and delivery mechanisms. The result is the first international review of "best practices" in this new and emerging area. Examples are given of programmes for education and training, help with capital, ideas and operational matters, counselling and mentoring, networking and intergenerational transfers of businesses. The range of players and activities involved are set out and suggestions are made for where gaps might be filled. The main message is that young people can indeed found new businesses and succeed, but new policies will be needed if they are to be fully encouraged.
In most PISA-participating countries and economies, the average socio-economic background of students who attend privately managed schools is more advantaged than that of those who attend public schools. Yet in some countries, there is little difference in the socio-economic profiles between public and private schools. Why? An analysis of PISA results finds that while the prevalence of privately managed schools in a country is not related to socio-economic stratification within a school system, the level of public funding to privately managed schools is: the higher the proportion of public funding allocated to privately managed schools, the smaller the socio-economic divide between publicly and privately managed schools. This report also shows that those countries with narrow socio-economic stratification in their education systems not only maximise equity and social cohesion, but also perform well in the PISA survey.
For most children, early childhood education and care (ECEC) provides the first experience of life in a group away from their families. This experience plays a crucial role in children’s learning, development and well-being. The benefits of high-quality ECEC are not restricted to children’s first years of life. However, little is known about this first experience. What do children learn and do in ECEC settings? With which staff do children interact at their centres? Do all children face the same opportunities to enrol in high-quality settings? What are the main spending priorities to raise the quality of ECEC? These are key questions for parents, staff and policy makers.
The OECD Starting Strong Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS Starting Strong) is the first international survey that focuses on the ECEC workforce. It offers an opportunity to learn about the characteristics of the workforce, the practices they use with children, their beliefs about children’s development and their views on the profession and on the sector. This first volume of findings, Providing Quality Early Childhood Education and Care, examines multiple factors that can affect the quality of ECEC and thereby can influence children’s learning, development and well-being.
The introduction of standardised tests in Flemish schools aims to generate regular, reliable data for educators and policy makers. At an early stage of development, this report uses a research-based framework to engage stakeholders in thinking about the opportunities standardised tests could bring for their work. It builds on feedback from key stakeholders regarding their perceptions, hopes and concerns about the introduction of standardised tests. Feedback was gathered during a series of structured discussions and a stakeholder reflection seminar. The report identifies ways to strengthen the opportunity, capability and motivation of decision makers at all levels of the education system to use evidence effectively for their respective practice – including teaching and quality assurance. The report identifies lessons learnt to support the further development of standardised tests.
The publication is part of OECD work on strategic education governance, which supports countries in identifying the best ways to achieve national objectives in a context of multi‑level governance structures and complex environments. The work identifies and promotes effective governance processes in the domains of accountability, capacity, knowledge governance, stakeholder involvement, strategic thinking and adopting a whole‑of‑system perspective. This publication will be of interest to policy makers, education leaders, the education research community and all those interested in education governance.
This report takes stock of processes that promote the systematic use of evidence in decision making in Austria’s education system. It builds on an online survey among over 6500 decision makers, drawing on responses from executives in the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research; regional education directorates; school supervision and school leaders. The report identifies what it takes to strengthen the opportunity, capability and motivation of decision makers at all levels of the education system to use evidence effectively for their respective practice – including teaching and quality assurance. It assesses respective strengths and weaknesses in current processes and in opportunities available to decision makers. The report develops possible next steps to inform further discussions.
The publication is part of OECD work on strategic education governance, which supports countries in identifying the best ways to achieve national objectives in a context of multi-level governance structures and complex environments. The work identifies and promotes effective governance processes in the domains of accountability, capacity, knowledge governance, stakeholder involvement, strategic thinking and adopting a whole-of-system perspective. This publication will be of interest to policy makers, education leaders, the education research community and all those interested in education governance.
Consumers today are challenged by growing amounts of information and wider choices of products, requiring them to develop skills and knowledge for making good choices in complex markets. This publication examines the approaches that governments use to promote consumer education in OECD and some non-OECD countries, highlighting the policies and measures that have been particularly effective. It also analyses recent trends, the role of stakeholders, steps being taken to evaluate the effectiveness of current programmes and the principal challenges.
This publication provides policy guidance in an area that has been given little policy priority until recent years. It brings together key lessons from 17 OECD countries, providing evidence on the strategies in place to improve adults’ participation in learning. It addresses potential barriers to learning as well as the policies to remedy them. Among these are policies for increasing and promoting the benefits of adult learning to make them transparent and easily recognised. Other policy levers include economic incentives and co-financing mechanisms that can raise the efficiency of adult learning provision, while delivering quality learning that is adapted to adults’ needs. Finally, policy making can be improved via co-ordination and coherence in a field that is characterised by a wide variety of stakeholders, including ministries of education and ministries of labour.
Indigenous peoples are diverse, within and across nations. However, Indigenous peoples have experienced colonisation processes that have undermined Indigenous young people’s access to their identity, language and culture. At the same time, Indigenous children have not generally had access to the same quality of education that other children in their country have had access to. These two forces in combination have undermined the educational opportunities and outcomes of successive generations of Indigenous children and young people, at times with catastrophic effect.
The six Canadian provinces and territories that participated in this study, along with New Zealand and Queensland (Australia), are actively seeking to better meet the educational needs and aspirations of Indigenous students and their families.
The report seeks to identify promising strategies, policies, programmes and practices that support improved learning outcomes for Indigenous students and to build an empirical evidence base on Indigenous students in education. The study investigates four areas in Indigenous education: well-being, participation, engagement and achievement in education. These outcomes are inter-connected and mutually reinforcing, and each is essential for the success of every student.
The PISA 2000 Technical Report describes the complex methodology underlying PISA 2000, along with additional features related to the implementation of the project at a level of detail that allows researchers to understand and replicate its analyses. It presents information on the test and sample design, methodologies used to analyse the data, technical features of the project and quality control mechanisms.
This publication describes the OECD PISA 2000 international database. The PISA 2000 database comprises micro-level data on student performance for 32 countries collected in 2000 and processed during the second half of 2000 and 2001, together with students' responses to the questionnaires and the test questions. The first results were released in December 2001 and presented in the publication Knowledge and Skills for Life: First Results of PISA 2000 (OECD, 2001). The purpose of this publication is to provide all the information required to understand the PISA 2000 database and perform analyses in accordance with the complex methodologies used to collect and process the data. It does not provide detailed information regarding these methods but rather directs readers to the publications which cover these aspects. The PISA 2000 database can be downloaded from www.pisa.oecd.org
This book examines the results of the special portion of the 2003 PISA survey of student achievement that relates to problem-solving skills. Covering 40 countries, it provides, for the first time, a direct assessment of life competencies that apply across different areas of the school curriculum. The assessment looked at students' abilities to identify problems in various settings, to choose relevant information or constraints, to represent possible alternatives or solution paths, to develop solution strategies, to solve the problem, and to communicate the solution.
This report examines how countries can raise their performance in this competency area and what countries with lower performance levels can learn from those whose students do well. It also provides insights into some of the factors that are associated with the development of problem-solving skills and into how these factors interact and what the implications are for policy development. Finally, the report sheds light on countries that succeed in achieving high performance levels while at the same time providing an equitable distribution of learning opportunities.
This second edition of Private Philanthropy for Development aims to meet the growing demand for open, reliable and comparable data on philanthropic giving. Compared to the first edition, it collected more data from large foundations and other organisations based in developing countries to have a more comprehensive understanding of cross-border financing and domestic giving.
The report analyses philanthropic flows by geography, sector and thematic area, explores how these flows are implemented and compares their scope to official development assistance (ODA). It dives deeper into foundations’ strategies for mobilising additional resources through their assets and philanthropic capital; looks at their engagement in advocacy to amplify and sustain their impact; and studies their approaches to learning and knowledge production through monitoring and evaluation.
The report unpacks unprecedented data on philanthropy’s contribution to developing countries, which will be critical for development actors, including governments, ODA providers and foundations, to better co-ordinate their actions, exploit synergies and play to their best comparative advantage en route to a sustainable recovery.
This report examines how the two global mega-trends of population ageing and rising inequalities have been developing and interacting, both within and across generations. Taking a life-course perspective the report shows how inequalities in education, health, employment and earnings compound, resulting in large differences in lifetime earnings across different groups. It suggests a policy agenda to prevent, mitigate and cope with inequalities along the life course drawing on good practices in OECD countries and emerging economies.
Young people's situation and future prospects are of vital concern to us all. Many of them face high unemployment or joblessness and serious difficulties in getting a firm foothold into the labour market. Many leave school without the requisite skills or competences needed in today’s economy and society. Many are also experiencing falling relative (and sometimes real) wages and considerable uncertainty as to whether or not they will be able to settle into good careers. But at the same time, our ageing societies need, more than ever before, to harness the potential of all of our young people. This publication points the way to future initiatives to improve youth labour market and educational outcomes as identified by policy-makers and experts of OECD countries brought together at the Washington Conference "Preparing Youth for the 21st Century: The Policy Lessons from the Past Two Decades", held on 23-24 February 1999. To give the most comprehensive picture to date, it first puts today's challenges into a historical perspective by taking stock of two decades of policies for youth employment. But more substantially, this book provides insight into experiences and policy issues in the United States, as well as in Europe and Japan, with a stress on the special needs of disadvantaged youth. All of us interested in making sure we give youth a good start in education and in establishing rewarding labour market careers will find this compendium a milestone in youth employment debate.
Teachers and in-company trainers are central to vocational education and training (VET), as they support the school-to-work transitions of learners from diverse backgrounds. VET teachers develop learners’ skills in school-based settings, while in-company trainers support learners during their time in work-based learning. Countries use different strategies to ensure an adequate supply of well-prepared VET teachers and trainers. This report focuses on two aspects: entry requirements for the VET teaching and training profession to ensure quality and consistency; and initial education and training for VET teachers and trainers to ensure that they are well-prepared when taking up their role. It draws lessons from policies and practices in Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway for developing a skilled teaching and training workforce through entry requirements and training, while maintaining sufficient flexibility.
This book uses PISA data to show that a substantial proportion of students in OECD countries now attend schools that have high degrees of autonomy in different areas of decision making. But effective school autonomy depends on effective leaders, including system leaders, principals, teacher leaders, senior teachers, and head teachers, as well as strong support systems. That, in turn, requires well-distributed leadership, new types of training and development for school leaders, and appropriate support and incentives.
Rapid growth of tertiary education is partly due to the expansion of post-secondary vocational education and training (PSV). A well developed post-secondary PSV system and links between universities and VET institutions improve skills and employment opportunities. What is post-secondary PSV and how does it relate to other components of the education system? How do the labour market and globalisation trends impact post-secondary PSV? How do OECD countries address the issues of transition, pathways and collaboration in tertiary education?
This report is part of the OECD work on Higher Education in Regional and City Development. In the course of the reviews of more than 30 cities and regions, this work identified VET-university linkages as one of the common issues that impact the engagement of tertiary education in socio-economic development across countries.
The work of teachers matters in many different ways. Not only do they provide students with the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in the labour market, but they also help develop the social-emotional skills that are vital for students’ personal development and for their active citizenship. But how do teachers best achieve this? By linking 2018 data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) with evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – known as the TALIS-PISA link – this report aims to identify the teacher and school factors that matter most for student achievement and social-emotional development. The report uses a data-driven approach – based on machine learning and standard regression analyses – to identify the dimensions that are most strongly linked with student outcomes, and then combines this with a careful review of theory and previous research to analyse and interpret the findings. These findings provide a rich illustration of the many ways in which teachers and school leaders might influence the success of their students, acting as a tool for educators to reflect upon their own practice. Finally, the report offers several directions for education policy.
Personalisation of education can mean many things and raises profound questions about the purposes of and possibilities for education. What are the policy challenges to be addressed in furthering personalisation? What do the learning sciences, including burgeoning research into brain functioning, have to contribute in pointing the way ahead? What are the constraints imposed by key stakeholders in education systems – including teachers, parents and employers, and how should these be met? Such questions are addressed in this new volume in the OECD's Schooling for Tomorrow series, with contributors from Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Governments are seeking to channel research funds into universities and other institutions in ways that support high-quality research in strategically important areas and bolster effective knowledge diffusion. These issues of steering and funding have even more relevance in light of the current financial crisis and economic downturn which have seen severe fiscal pressures fall on many countries.
This publication presents a collection of papers presented at an OECD workshop on performance-based funding of public research in tertiary education institutions. It takes stock of current thinking and practice around performance-based funding of public research in tertiary education institutions, as a tool to help governments meet their research goals. These funding models are essentially systems of ex-post evaluation of research outputs and outcomes from universities and other tertiary institutions, and are generally based on peer review, bibliometric or other quantitative indicators. Their results are used to inform government decisions about how much and which institutions to fund.