The report highlights strategies from other countries that could serve as a model for England as it develops its early childhood education and care programme.

The OECD has launched its Skills Strategy to help governments build economic resilience, boost employment and reinforce social cohesion. Despite the pressure on public finances, spending on education and skills is an investment for the future and must be a priority.

By Charles Fadel - Founder & chairman, Center for Curriculum Redesign It has become clear that teaching skills requires answering “What should students learn in the 21st century?” on a deep and broad basis. Teachers need to have the time and flexibility to develop knowledge, skills, and character, while also considering the meta-layer/fourth dimension that includes learning how to learn, interdisciplinarity, and personalisation.

More and more countries are having discussions about how to evaluate the quality of their teaching workforce and, subsequently, how to reward teachers for their work. The OECD’s newest series of briefs, Teaching in Focus, launches this month with a discussion of the appraisal and feedback teachers receive and the impact of both on their teaching.

Korea should reform its vocational education and training programmes to ensure that students leave college with the skills and expertise that companies need in today’s rapidly changing labour market, according to a new OECD report.

Denmark should build on the strengths of its vocational and educational training programme to ensure that young people enter the labour market with the skills companies need and to meet the national goal of having 60% of young people enter higher education by 2020, according to a new OECD report.

The relative earnings premium for those with a tertiary education increased in most EU21 countries over the past ten years, indicating that the demand for more educated individuals still exceeds supply.

L’école maternelle est ouverte au plus grand nombre en France malgré un investissement par élève moindre par rapport à la moyenne des pays de l’OCDE, ce qui se traduit par un taux d’encadrement (enseignants et auxiliaires d’éducation confondus) plus élevé en France que dans la plupart des pays de l’OCDE.

Germany’s early childhood education system is fairly well-developed: 96% of four-year-olds are enrolled in early childhood education programmes, and 89% of three-year-olds are. These levels are well above the respective OECD averages of 79% and 66%.

Although the salaries of experienced teachers in Japan are high relative to other OECD countries, their starting salaries are lower and working hours are longer. Moreover, different from the trend across OECD countries, teachers’ salaries have been declining since 2000 in real terms.

Virtually all three-year-olds in Spain are enrolled in school, most of them in public institutions. Spain’s expenditure on pre-primary education (for public institutions) amounts to 0.9% of GDP, compared to the OECD average of 0.5% of the combined GDP.

Education at a Glance 2012: Country Notes - United Kingdom

Education at a Glance 2012: Country Notes - United States

Education at a Glance 2012 - Country Note for Germany (german)

Australia’s education system achieves good outcomes overall - attainment of upper secondary education by adults aged 25 to 34 was 85% in 2010, above the OECD average of 82%

Canada ranks first among OECD countries in the proportion of adults with a college (tertiary-type 5B) education (24%) and ranks 8th in the proportion of adults with a university (tertiary-type 5A) education (26%).

Entry rates for higher education increased after Italy introduced a new degree structure in the early 2000s. While university-level attainment still remains below the OECD average, the gap for younger generations of Italians is expected to narrow over the next decade.

Since making pre-primary education compulsory in 2009, Mexico has achieved one of the highest enrolment rates of four-year-old children among OECD countries, but high student-teacher ratios pose significant challenges for early childhood education and care.

Education at a Glance 2012: Country Notes - Portugal

The high educational attainment level of the Russian population continues to increase. 88% of the adult population have attained at least upper secondary education and 54% have a tertiary qualification.

Education at a Glance 2012: Country Notes - Spain (Spanish)

Sweden enjoys an 81.5% employment rate for all levels of education – the second highest rate of all OECD countries after Iceland (Table A7.1b).

Education at a Glance 2012: Country Notes - Japan (Japanese)

Brazil boasts one of the largest increases in expenditure on education between 2000 and 2009 among the countries for which data was available.

Education at a Glance 2012 - Country Note - Canada (French)

Korea has reduced the share of individuals without upper secondary education while the proportion of tertiary-educated individuals increased rapidly over the past 14 years.

Governments should increase investment in early childhood programmes and maintain reasonable costs for higher education in order to reduce inequality, boost social mobility and improve people’s employment prospects, according to a new OECD report.

Whereas expenditure on education and expenditure per student increased significantly between 2000 and 2009, Estonia has seen the largest drop in education funding since the global recession, compared to other OECD countries.

I was in London last week to give a talk on “how to transform 10,000 classrooms” at the annual Teach First/Teach for All conference in London. Some 3,000 teachers and social entrepreneurs from around the world gathered there to discuss ways to re-invent and strengthen the teaching profession.

A modern day Bulgarian proverb says “What money can’t buy, a lot of money can”. Sadly, the truth of this popular wisdom holds well beyond the country it comes from. Sadly too, it seems to work well in schools and universities. Year by year Transparency International (TI), an international anti-corruption NGO, publishes data on the perceptions and experience of people from around the globe...

More people than even before now reach a level of educational attainment equivalent to upper secondary education. The available evidence is very conclusive: this level of education can be considered a minimum level to ensure a job and a living wage.

Indira Samarasekera, President of the University of Alberta in Canada, was one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) Conference, held at OECD headquarters in Paris this past September. Marilyn Achiron, Editor at the OECD’s Education Directorate, spoke with her about a variety of subjects

Did you know that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development helped to lay the groundwork for the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals? Even though Development is part of our name, there are many people who don’t realise just how much of our resources are devoted to developing economies and not only to the development of the OECD’s 34 member countries.

education quality, improving education

More students are looking beyond their borders to give their education a competitive edge. Despite shrinking support for scholarships and tightening travel budgets, 177 million students left their home countries in 2012 to pursue formal tertiary education, an increase of 77 million students since 2000.

The U.S. is now the only country in the industrialised world in which the generation entering the workforce does not have higher college attainment levels than the generation about to leave the workforce. While that is in part due to the traditionally high levels of college attainment in the U.S, an increasing number of countries have approached and surpassed U.S. graduation levels and others are bound to follow over the coming years.

When we think of innovation in education these days, we immediately think of technology: getting more computers into more classrooms, offering online courses to students in higher education. - See more at: http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.fr/2012/12/oecd-education-today-and-tomorrow.html#sthash.dv2MKgEf.dpuf

What does the OECD have to say about the state of education today? What are the main OECD messages on early childhood education, teacher policies and tertiary education? What about student performance, educational spending and equity in education? OECD work on these important education topics and others have been brought together in a single accessible source updating the first edition of Education Today which came out in March 2009.

This first volume of the report of the Feasibility Study of the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) focuses on the design and implementation of the Study and the lessons learnt through that process.

This study looks into the use of fixed term contracts and agency work in Russia during and shortly after the crisis 2009 10 with the help of an enterprise survey.

In Colombia, the beginning of a new century has brought with it a palpable feeling of optimism. Colombians and visitors sense that the country’s considerable potential can be realised, and education is rightly seen as crucial to this process. As opportunities expand, Colombians will need new and better skills to respond to new challenges and prospects.

The exceptional turnout at the 2013 OECD/Japan Seminar in Tokyo this week, where over 300 participants from over 20 countries discussed global strategies for higher education, shows that the seminar had exactly the right agenda at exactly the right time. I asked myself how many people would have turned up had this seminar been held five years ago; or whether five years ago, Japan would have ventured to take the lead on this theme.

Most of us think of education as the great leveller; but are our education systems really doing all they can to ensure that boys and girls from all backgrounds have an equal shot at a high-quality education? As this month’s PISA in Focus reports, some countries have been more successful than others in levelling the playing field for their students.

Education is one OECD department that has embraced the information revolution.

In many OECD countries, ECEC services have increased in response to a growing demand for better learning outcomes as well as growing female labour force participation. In recent years, however, the goals of ECEC policy have become more child-centred.

The Secretary-General, Mr. Angel Gurría, will visit The Netherlands on 13th and 14th of March 2013, to attend the 2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession. He will also go to The Hague and hold a bilateral meeting with Mr. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, Finance Minister.

Digital economies are powered by skills. People with the high-end skills needed to invent and apply new technologies are in high demand the world over. At the same time, the portfolio of basic skills needed to navigate technology-rich environments and function effectively in our connected societies has expanded. How severe is the shortage of ICT skills? And what needs to be done to fill the gaps?

Education systems around the world are increasingly measuring the performance of teachers and schools as part of their drive to help students do better and improve results. Rising demand for higher education standards and a trend towards greater school autonomy in some countries are among the factors behind this new focus according to the OECD

How can assessment and evaluation policies work together more effectively to improve student outcomes in primary and secondary schools? This report provides an international comparative analysis and policy advice to countries on how evaluation and assessment arrangements can be embedded within a consistent framework to improve the quality, equity and efficiency of school education.

Rather than prescribe actions, the OECD often prefers to show policy makers what everyone else is doing and how successful those initiatives have been. A new OECD series of individual Education Policy Outlook Country Profiles does just that: each profile describes how an individual country is responding to key challenges to improve the effectiveness of its education system.