Back – and looking ahead – to school

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

It’s that time of year; and as sure as there are new pencil cases on desks, pristine notebooks in backpacks and fresh textbooks with nary a wrinkle up their spines, there’s a new batch of OECD reports ready to inform and challenge your thinking about education.

We’re particularly excited about a new PISA report, Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection, scheduled to be published on 15 September. If you thought all 15-year-olds knew everything there was to know about navigating their way around the web, or if you’re concerned that your child’s school is falling behind because it isn’t sufficiently “wired”, the findings of this report may surprise you.

The OECD’s Innovative Learning Environments project is poised to release a new book in October examining how some countries have moved from thinking about making their education systems more innovative to actually doing so – and changed some well-entrenched attitudes and approaches towards teaching and learning in the process.

Our annual compilation of education statistics, Education at a Glance, will be published a little later than usual this year – 24 November instead of right around now – to accommodate significant changes in how countries around the world classify and report on different levels of education. It will be worth the wait, though, as the new classifications allow us to gather even more detailed information about who participates in education, particularly in preschool and university-level education. This year, there will also be new data on the impact of skills on employment and earnings, on adults’ readiness to use information and communication technology for problem solving in their jobs, and on salaries for university-level faculty, to cite just a few of the topics covered in this authoritative mega-book.

In the middle of this flurry of publications, the OECD, together with the European Commission and the Government of Finland will hold a Global Education Industry Summit in Helsinki on 19 and 20 October. The aim of the meeting is to bring together ministers of education, innovators and leaders of private-sector industries to explore how innovation in teaching – involving both people and gadgets – can improve the quality and equity of school systems and help to equip students with the skills they need in 21st-century societies.

Watch this space for more details about these – and other – education-related reports and events.