On average across OECD countries, students’ belief that they can solve mathematics problems (mathematics self-efficacy) is associated with a difference of 49 score points in mathematics – the equivalent of one year of school.

Education has become increasingly important worldwide, including politically. Probably the key driver for this is economic – the fundamental role of knowledge and skills in underpinning and maintaining prosperity.

The Korean economy has seen significant growth in the past decades. However, much of the economic growth has been supported by intensive labour resource utilisation. Korean workers work the second longest hours among OECD countries. This is not sustainable in the long-term because Korea’s working age population is projected to decline from 2017 onwards.

This document reveals some of the difficulties immigrant students encounter – and some of the contributions they offer – while settling into their new communities and new schools. It also presents some of the policies governments can implement to help immigrant students integrate into their host societies.

Since 2000, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been measuring the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in over 70 countries.

Who wants to be a teacher? As this month’s PISA in Focus shows, in many countries the teaching profession is having a hard time making itself an attractive career choice – particularly among boys and among the highest-performing students.

How school systems respond to immigration has an enormous impact on the economic and social well-being of all members of the communities they serve, whether they have an immigrant background or not.

Archived webinar December 17 2015 - Immigrant Students at School: Easing the Journey towards Integration presented by Presented by Andreas Schleicher, Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills, OECD

One of the most remarkable consequences of the expansion of education in OECD countries over the past decades is the reversal of the gender gap in education. From outright exclusion and discrimination in educational institutions less than a century ago, girls and young women have conquered schools and colleges.

In 2012, 15-year-old students spent over two hours on line each day, on average across OECD countries. The most common online activities among 15-year-olds were browsing the Internet for fun and participating in social networks, with over 70% of students doing one of these every day or almost every day.

Most 15-year-olds in OECD countries spend at least some time each day wandering through cyberspace as part of their media diet.

Archived webinar - Low-performing Students: Why they Fall Behind and How to Help them Succeed (February 10, 2016) with Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills, OECD, and Daniel Salinas, Analyst, OECD.

Most countries have made little progress helping their weakest students improve their performance in reading, mathematics and science over the past decade. This means too many young people are still leaving school without the basic skills needed in today’s society and workplace, hurting their futures and long-term economic growth, according to a new OECD report.

A new PISA report, Low-Performing Students: Why They Fall Behind and How to Help Them Succeed, offers an in-depth analysis of low performance at school and recommends ways to tackle the problem.

No country or economy participating in PISA 2012 can claim that all of its 15-year-old students have achieved basic proficiency skills in mathematics, reading and science. Some 28% of students score below the baseline level of proficiency in at least one of those subjects, on average across OECD countries

The Slovak Republic has undertaken a series of reforms to improve its education system, and the country now needs to use resources more efficiently and improve equity and inclusion in schools, according to a new OECD report.

Today, around 5 million students study and do research in a country other than their own, attracted by the quality of overseas universities and willing to complement their education portfolio with international experience.

OECD countries differ significantly in the way spending on tertiary education is shared between public and private sources of funding, and in the financial support they provide to students.

There are few issues in education that raise as much political and ideological controversy as tuition fees for higher education.

Whoever has a hammer sees every problem as a nail. Those in the security business tend to see the answer to radicalism and terrorism in military might, and those in the financial business in cutting flows of money.

In the 2012 PISA test, urban students in Latvia outperformed rural students by the equivalent of more than a year of schooling – half a year more than the average performance difference between these two groups of students across OECD countries.

Sound public policies grounded in evidence – and implemented effectively – will be crucial for the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This document outlines four broad areas for future action for the OECD, highlighting what it could do more of – or do differently – to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. C/MIN(2016)6.

Austria has taken important steps to improve its school system, but needs to reform its complex school governance to further improve quality and equity, according to a new OECD report.

Many students who participated in PISA 2012 reported that they have hardly been exposed to fundamental concepts in mathematics, like arithmetic means or linear equations, which form the basis of the numeracy skills that they will need to thrive as adults.

On average across OECD countries, the 20% of students who are most exposed to pure mathematics tasks (equations) score, on the PISA mathematics test, the equivalent of almost two school years ahead of the 20% of students who are least exposed.

Today’s schools must equip students with the knowledge and skills they’ll need to succeed in an uncertain, constantly changing tomorrow. But many schools look much the same today as they did a generation ago, and too many teachers are not developing the pedagogies and practices required to meet the diverse needs of 21st-century learners.

The digital divide has shifted.

Even when all students, including the most disadvantaged, have easy access to the Internet,a digital divide, based on socio-economic status, still persists in how students use technology.

At the turn of this century, two different models of higher education programmes prevailed in the world.

Exposure to complex mathematics concepts and tasks is related to higher performance in PISA among all students, including socio-economically disadvantaged students.

OECD countries must step up their efforts to improve the quality and equity of their education systems as part of their commitments to meet the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for education by 2030, according to a new OECD report.

Archived webinar - School Leadership for Learning: Insights from TALIS 2013 (September 20, 2016)

The role of the school leader is essential for pupil and staff success, and although good practice exists, there is still room for improvement.

Instructional leadership is the set of practices that principals use in relation to the improvement of teaching and learning. It is a strong predictor of how teachers collaborate and engage in a reflective dialogue about their practice.

Exposure to high quality teacher professional development varies greatly both between and within countries, which broadens the scope of work for policy makers.

More and more adults are earning a tertiary qualification, but not all tertiary degrees have the same value on the labour market. In general, postgraduate degrees such as master’s and doctoral degrees are associated with higher employment rates and earnings than bachelor’s degrees.

This paper delivers a broad assessment of income inequality in Denmark.

Widespread increases in inequality over the past three decades have raised the question of the distribution of the growth dividends.

High-performing education systems value teachers and invest a lot in them. And indeed, the human factor is crucial in creating effective and high-quality teaching and learning environments.

On December 6 2016 the Education Policy Institute will host the global launch of the 2015 results from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) - a test of reading literacy, mathematics, and science given every three years to fifteen-year-olds in more than seventy countries and economies worldwide. This year's results will focus on science.

Bringing you the highlights from the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

Register for a webinar "PISA 2015: Q&A Session Closing the Achievement Gap" with Andreas Schleicher (December 15th, 14h Paris time)

The education system of Puebla is undergoing a transformation. Ambitious national reforms have provided a new framework to improve teaching and evaluation practices, and ultimately raise student learning outcomes. At the same time, Puebla has also launched promising initiatives to improve the quality of education in the state.

As governments around the world seek to tackle stubbornly high levels of youth unemployment, new attention has been focused on the relationship between education and employment.

This paper provides a quantitative description of decoupling in OECD countries over the past two decades, with the results suggesting that it is explained by declines in both labour shares and the ratio of median to average wages (a partial measure of wage inequality).

The persistence of social inequities in education – the fact that children of wealthy and highly educated parents tend to do better in school than children from less privileged families – is often seen as a difficult-to-reverse feature of education systems.

The Portuguese economy is gradually recovering from a deep recession thanks to a broad structural reform agenda that has led to rising economic growth, falling unemployment and remarkable progress in export performance.

Historically across the OECD, the teaching profession has been largely dominated by women. The share of female teachers has been increasing over the past decade – reaching 68% in 2014 for all levels of education combined. The gender disparity decreases gradually with the level of education, from 97% of women in pre-primary education to 43% in tertiary education.

In 2015, PISA asked students about the occupation they expect to be working in when they are 30 years old. Students’ responses were later grouped into science-related and non-science-related careers – with the former including science and engineering professionals; health professionals; science technicians and associate professionals; and information and communication technology (ICT) professionals.

In countries that performed above the OECD average in science, at least 80% of the students are in schools that invite specialists to conduct teacher training or organise in-service workshops for teachers or where teachers cooperate with each other. This is higher, on average, than what is observed among other countries.