Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills
The faster globalisation and digitalisation are compressing time and space around us, the more people will need to find emotional stability and grounding. Perhaps this is one of the most undervalued missions of schools in the 21st century.
Most would associate PISA, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, with comparative data on academic success in school subjects such as mathematics or science, but PISA also provides the largest and most up-to-date database on social and emotional outcomes. In 2022, PISA asked large representative samples of students in 81 countries and economies how happy they were with their life. While one could think that, for 15-year-olds, school might be the last place they associate with their well-being, the data show that the two strongest predictors of student life satisfaction were their relationships with their parents as well as their life at school.
There are other ways in which PISA data can, at times, be at odds with our expectations. In Ukraine, a country under daily attack, with already hundreds of schools obliterated by Russia’s military aggression and much of school life taking place in shelters, students feel safer in their schools than on average across OECD countries and much more so than in countries like, say, the United Kingdom or the United States. They also reported a higher emotional sense of belonging and greater social connectedness in school than in the latter. But that’s a surprise just at first glance. Last week I visited School 25 in Vinnytsia, a public school in a less affluent area of the city, where students, teachers and parents worked since even before the war to make values, an Ukrainian identity and students’ sense of belonging the central mission of education.
That vision has transformed everything, from the quality of student-teacher relationships, through the pedagogies, the forms of parental engagement, up to the organisation of learning environments. The bomb shelter, that used to be a dark and grubby underground storage, has become a light and colourful space for learning and play (see video). School 25 is not alone, the New Ukraine School reform has brought many schools along this path of transformation. It becomes perhaps less surprising, then, that students in Ukraine also demonstrate a higher level of self-motivation to learn than students across the OECD area and, not least, that they experienced fewer academic losses than elsewhere despite a much greater level of disruption. In that sense, the country may provide powerful lessons for the world in these times of transformation.
But the story does not end there, PISA provides many pointers for how schools can help build the emotional resilience that will become so central in our times of accelerations. For a start, in all countries that participated in PISA, students who enjoy more support from their families reported a greater sense of belonging at school, greater life satisfaction, and more confidence in their capacity for self-directed learning (Table II.B1.3.75). More generally, students who were supported more at home also had more positive attitudes towards school and learning. For a long time, public policy often sought to build schools that try to compensate for a lack of parental engagement. Those efforts have borne few fruits, as large and often growing social disparities in learning outcomes reveal. The answer seems to be to make parents part of the solution, rather than seeing them as part of the problem, and many education systems in PISA show this is an attainable goal.
The pandemic has brought home that learning is not a transactional business but a social and relational experience, with the quality of student-teacher relationships at its heart. In many high-performing education systems, teachers are not just great instructors, but also great coaches, great mentors, great community builders, and creative designers of innovative learning environments. They work in this way because their education systems provide them with the space and support for that. This matters: In most education systems, students in PISA who reported more support from teachers and a better disciplinary climate scored higher and reported greater well-being (Tables II.B1.3.5, II.B1.3.7, II.B1.3.13, II.B1.3.15). The latter includes students’ sense of belonging at school, overall satisfaction with life, confidence in their capacity for self-directed learning and less mathematics anxiety.
What is worrying is that teacher support has tended to decline over the last years, according to the perception of students. PISA asked students how they were supported during the pandemic. On average across countries, half of students were offered live virtual classes, got material on a learning platform and assignments so many schools did a lot to support student learning. But just 3% said someone from school checked-in with how they were feeling and less than 20% that they received tips on how to study on their own. In some countries it was less than one in ten. After accounting for social background and mathematics performance, this kind of support was among the most strongly and positively related to students’ wellbeing, including students’ sense of belonging and life satisfaction.
Students themselves provide another important resource: The data also show that, across OECD countries, peer-to-peer tutoring links to an increase in students’ sense of belonging at school. In education systems where more students in 2022 than in 2018 attended schools that offer peer-to-peer tutoring, students’ sense of belonging at school strengthened during the period (Table II.B1.5.104). The results also show that in high-performing education systems, schools tend to provide a room where students can do their homework, and school staff provide help with students’ homework (Table II.B1.5.102). This relationship is observed even after accounting for national income, so these differences are not simply explained by the wealth of countries.
Quite worryingly, across the OECD area, disadvantaged students’ sense of belonging at school deteriorated between 2018 and 2022, while advantaged students’ sense of belonging remained stable. Disadvantaged students in 2022 were more likely than their advantaged peers to report feeling that they have fewer opportunities to form close bonds at and with school (Table II.B1.1.2).
Perhaps less surprisingly, students in systems that spared more students from longer closures scored higher in mathematics and reported a greater sense of belonging at school. Education systems in which students encountered fewer problems during remote learning also saw improvements in their students’ sense of belonging at school pre- to post-COVID (Table II.B1.2.46).
In sum, we need to advance from a world in which students are seen as consumers of prefabricated educational content, teachers as service providers and parents as clients towards a world in which education becomes a shared enterprise geared towards helping the next generation build a reliable compass and the tools to navigate with confidence through a rapidly changing world. This does not need to come at the expense of academic excellence. In fact, education systems as different as Japan, Korea, Lithuania or Switzerland show us that even during the pandemic it was possible to maintain and reconcile high standards of academic excellence and a strong sense of emotional resilience. In these times, nothing will be more important. People who don’t feel solid ground under their feet are likely the ones who later in their lives will build walls around them, however self-defeating that may be.
