Browse by: "2022"

Social and emotional learning (SEL) strengthens students’ abilities to regulate their emotions, thoughts, and behaviours and to interact successfully with others. There are an array of important social and emotional skills (SES): goal-setting, working to one’s potential, resilience, creativity, perseverance, problem solving, and caring about the welfare of others, among them. All students need SEL, but newcomer and refugee students may have particular challenges requiring SES. The beginning of this paper examines the current situation of refugee and newcomer students in OECD countries, SEL, its frameworks and skills and how they apply to newcomer and refugee students. The paper concludes with an examination of SEL policies and practices for newcomer and refugee students in OECD countries.

Ample research has shown the importance of collaboration between practitioners, researchers, and policy makers to ensure holistic, inclusive, and effective policy making, particularly in the field of refugee education. Many countries, however, still face challenges in engaging with stakeholders during all the stages of the practice – research – policy transfer in the context of refugee education in a meaningful and effective way. The unique and distinct needs of refugee students in education systems require extensive collaboration among schools, service providers, and (refugee) communities to collect evidence whether and how refugee students’ needs are met. Hence, a multi-stakeholder approach or “whole-of-a-society” approach is one of the prerequisites for designing inclusive refugee education policies. This paper highlights the importance of stakeholder engagement at all stages of the practice – research – policy transfer, and maps key stakeholders in refugee education in Europe.

This paper operationalises the OECD Guidelines for Measuring the Quality of the Working Environment (OECD, 2017) to describe job characteristics among European countries, the United States and Korea in 2010 and 2015. The analysis extends the range of aspects of quality of the working environment beyond those featuring in the Job Strain index presented by (Cazes, 2015), which is used to monitor implementation of the OECD Job Strategy, but at the cost of a more limited country coverage. While the two indices of job strain are largely consistent both across countries and over time, all of the job characteristics included in the “extended” index turns out to matter for workers’ well-being. The framework uses the job demands-resources model ( (Demerouti, 2001) that stresses the importance of balancing the demands of the job and the resources that are available to workers to meet those demands. Workers are classified as (heavily) strained when the number of job demands they face (largely) exceeds the number of job resources they benefit from, and conversely, they are classified as (very) well-resourced when their job resources (largely) exceed their job demands.

On average among 28 OECD countries, about one third of employees are (moderately or heavily) strained at work, while one half are well-resourced. The share of employees that are heavily strained is close to 10%. Job strain is relatively more frequent among employees with low education and low occupational skills, and it is relatively less frequent in the service sector and in the public sector. Due to composition effects, women hold on average slightly less strained jobs than men. The share of strained workers has slightly declined on average over the 2010-2015 period, falling in a majority of countries. The improvement in working conditions is related to better prospects of career advancement, higher take-up of training, stronger social support and organisational participation at work, higher flexibility of working time, as well as lower exposure to physical risk factors, hard physical demands and unsocial work schedule. On the other hand, perceptions of job insecurity, intimidation and discrimination, as well as work intensity have been on the rise. Finally, quality of the working environment is strongly associated with workers’ well-being as measured by mental and physical health, days of sickness, job satisfaction as well as job motivation, and the associated effects are potentially large. For most outcomes, perceived intimidation and discrimination at work is one of the most powerful predictor of workers’ well-being.

Education is one of the most important fields to promote the integration of refugee and newcomer children and youths in host countries. However, holistic education for refugee and newcomers has so far not been established into mainstream education systems in European countries. Projects and pilot programmes have developed across Europe to test holistic approaches. Some of them have started very recently as a response to the arrival of high numbers of refugees and newcomers, while others have been established for a longer period and have started to expand. This paper first provides an overview of key research gaps in refugee education. It then provides a mapping of promising holistic education practices in Europe, with a focus on Germany, Greece and the Netherlands. Based on this, the paper explores key conditions to upscale and institutionalise promising practices of holistic refugee and newcomer education.

Since UNESCO’s Salamanca Declaration in 1994, inclusive education has progressively attracted attention in international debates around education policy. While some evidence exists on the positive impact that inclusive education reforms can have on the academic and personal outcomes of diverse students – and in particular of students with special education needs – limited information is available on the economic sustainability of such reforms. Starting from the literature on the correlations between education and individuals’ life outcomes, this paper reviews the existing evidence on the potential benefits and costs of inclusive education reforms. Specifically, the paper discusses the evidence on the shortcomings of current education settings for diverse groups of students – with specific sections on students with special education needs; immigrant and refugee students; ethnic groups, national minorities and Indigenous peoples; gifted students; female and male students; and LGBTQI+ (which stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex’) students. It highlights the individual and societal costs deriving from the low academic, social and emotional outcomes of these students and the socio-economic costs these yield for societies. Where possible, the paper also presents evidence on the effects of inclusive education reforms on diverse student groups.

This Policy Insights presents a conceptual framework for understanding the non-financial performance of firms through the lens of the OECD Well-being Framework. Building on existing approaches for measuring non-financial performance, it proposes a measurement framework and indicator set for what may be referred to as “Scope 1” Social performance. This refers to the well-being of stakeholders that operate within the operational boundaries of the firm, namely employees, and the capital resources that a firm contributes to and depletes that are directly relevant to society as a whole. Measuring the non-financial performance of firms in the social area is relevant both to provide insight into a company's impact on society, as well as to inform enterprise value creation.

This paper analyses the impact of the COVID-19 crisis across socio-economic groups in Switzerland and the role played by its short-time work scheme during the first year of the crisis until the end of 2020. To this end, it compares changes in hours worked for different socio-groups in Switzerland and other OECD countries, and then documents differences across groups in the use of short time work and in the risk of job loss. Finally, the paper investigates differences between groups of short-time work participants in terms of the reduction in working time, job search behavior and the risk of subsequent job loss. The evidence so far suggests that the Swiss short time work scheme as it operated during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis was fit for purpose.

Improving patient safety culture (PSC) is a significant priority for OECD countries as they work to improve healthcare quality and safety—a goal that has increased in importance as countries have faced new safety concerns connected to the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings from benchmarking work in PSC show that there is significant room for improvement. Across included survey findings from OECD countries, less than half (46% ) of surveyed health workers believe that important patient care information is transferred across hospital units and during shift changes. Just two-in-five surveyed health workers in OECD countries believe the staffing levels at their workplace are appropriate for ensuring patient safety (40%) or that mistakes and event reports would not held against them (41%). International benchmarking is a feasible and useful addition to exiting measurement initiatives on safety culture and may help accelerate necessary improvements in patient safety outcomes.

OECD countries deliver publicly-funded employment services through different institutional arrangements. While in most OECD countries the majority of such services are delivered by public employment services, in two in five OECD and EU countries (or regions) they are partly or fully contracted out to external providers, including for-profit and not-for-profit entities. Contracting out employment services to outside providers offers many potential benefits: an increased flexibility to scale capacity in line with changes in unemployment, the possibility of offering services more cost-effectively, the option to better tailor services through the use of specialised service providers and the possibility to offer jobseekers choice of providers. However, achieving these benefits will depend on the actual design and monitoring of the contracting arrangements that are put in place. Focusing on the job brokerage, counselling and case-management employment services typically provided by public agencies, this paper reviews the experiences of OECD countries that have contracted out employment services through outcome-based payment schemes. It highlights the need to carefully consider questions related to the design and implementation of this form of contracting: fostering competition amongst potential providers, setting appropriate minimum service requirements and prices for different client groups, and ensuring the accountability of providers through monitoring and evaluations. These issues are discussed based on country examples, which are also detailed in factsheets contained in the online annex of the paper.

This policy brief is the second in a series of thematic policy briefs in the OECD's Resourcing Higher Education Project. This project provides a shared knowledge base for OECD member and partner countries on effective policies for higher education resourcing through system-specific and comparative policy analysis. To meet the skill needs of the Finnish economy, its government has set policy targets with respect to educational attainment and globally mobile learners, and backed those targets with additional resources to aid higher education institutions in accomplishing them. At the same time, Finnish policymakers are engaged in an assessment of their higher education landscape, examining whether the distribution of responsibilities among its higher education institutions is effectively coordinated and adapted to national innovation needs. This policy brief assesses the progress of initiatives to expand the capacity of the higher education system and increase its attractiveness to globally mobile learners, and takes stock of Finland’s institutional landscape in light of international experience.

This policy brief on the social economy and its contribution to the circular economy was produced by the OECD and the European Commission. The brief defines concepts of both the circular and social economy and describes the potential of the social economy to support circular activities and related business models and to reinforce uptake of circularity in our economies and societies. It finally identifies policy orientations that build on the complementarity of the social and circular economies, and help the social economy support circularity and drive a green and inclusive transition.