A recent review of the United States concluded that in the decade to 2018, nearly one third of job vacancies will require a post-secondary qualification of some sort, but less than a four year degree.

Countries where 15-year-old students perform at high standards internationally tend to be the same countries where these young adults tend to perform well at the age of 26 to 28.

More than 40 years ago, the former French Prime Minister Edgar Faure and his team published one of the most influential educational works of the 20th century: “Learning to Be”, better known as the “Rapport Faure”, in which he mainstreamed the idea of lifelong learning.

In Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, participation rates in adult education and learning are over 60%, but they are one-third – or below – in Italy, the Russian Federation and the Slovak Republic.

Reducing income inequality would boost economic growth, according to new OECD analysis. This work finds that countries with lower income inequality grow faster than those with higher inequality.

Latin America’s GDP growth rate has slowed down in 2014, dropping below 1.5%. This is the first time in a decade that the region grows less than the OECD average, according to the OECD Development Centre, the Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean and the development bank for Latin America. Given the projections in the past weeks, any recovery in 2015 is likely to be challenging.

This report offers a broader view of teachers and school principals across all levels of compulsory education, and all the similarities and differences in the issues they are facing.

The report New insights from TALIS 2013: Teaching and Learning in Primary and Upper Secondary Education presents an overview of teachers and teaching in primary and upper secondary education for a sample of countries that participated in the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) in 2013.

Looking at teachers at all levels of education, we learn that the majority of teachers are women. In all countries, the percentage of male teachers is particularly low in primary schools where teaching is still seen as a women’s job. As a result young children are missing out on role models of both sexes.

While most 15-year-old students spend part of their after-school time doing homework, the amount of time they spend on it shrank between 2003 and 2012. Socio-economically advantaged students and students who attend socio-economically advantaged schools tend to spend more time doing homework.

Professor John Hattie is held in high esteem as an education researcher and was called “possibly the world’s most influential education academic” by the Times Educational Supplement in 2012.

The quality of an education system today shapes the economic and social prosperity of the country tomorrow. Chile has embarked on wide-ranging reform to improve the quality and equity of its education system on several fronts, including early childhood education and care (ECEC), school funding, student selection, school governance, teacher career pathways, vocational education and training (VET) and tertiary education.

Skills have become the currency of 21st century economies

Teachers can certainly face challenges in the classroom. In TALIS participating countries and economies, almost one in three teachers report having more than 10% of students with behavioural problems in their classes.

Almost one in three teachers across countries participating in the 2013 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) reports having more than 10% of potentially disruptive students with behaviour problems in their classes. Teachers with more than one in ten students with behaviour problems spend almost twice as much time keeping order in the classroom than their peers with less than 10% of such students in their class.

The conference will be interactive and results-oriented. The format will be designed to foster opportunities for meaningful discussion and dialogue among participants, national representatives, international organisation representatives and experts. We will ask most participants to take an active role in the conference

Between 2000 and 2012, the proportion of young adults (25-34 year-olds) with a tertiary qualification has grown by more than 3% per year on average in OECD countries. On average across 24 national and sub-national entities participating in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, 39% of adults have achieved a higher level of education than their parents.

Greater anxiety towards mathematics is associated with lower scores in mathematics, both between and within countries. The better a student’s schoolmates perform in mathematics, the greater the student’s anxiety towards mathematics.

by J. Alan McIsaac (Vice-Chair, Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), Minister, Education and Early Childhood Development, Prince Edward Island)

Teachers report participating in more non-school than school embedded professional development (i.e. professional development that is grounded in teachers daily professional practices). Participation in non-school and school embedded professional development varies greatly between countries.

Gender differences still exist in certain fields, with more men studying science, computing and engineering, and with women dominating education and health and welfare.

Last Saturday, 14 April, Equal Pay Day reminded the world again of the large gap between men’s and women’s wages. Eradicating unjustifiable gender inequalities in earnings seems to be very hard to accomplish.

La calidad del sistema educacional de hoy es la base para la prosperidad económica y social del país de mañana.

The Indonesian economy has enjoyed strong and stable growth over the past decade and a half, leading to impressive reductions in poverty and major improvements in living standards. But challenges remain to continue to converge towards higher-income countries, according to the latest OECD Economic Survey of Indonesia.

The Indonesian education system is immense and diverse. It reflects aspects of its past, with a diverse ethnic and religious heritage, and a struggle for national identity.

ISTP 2015 will be held in Banff, Alberta, on March 29–30, 2015, and will bring together education ministers and leaders of teachers’ unions and associations from a number of high-performing and rapidly improving education systems.

This report was prepared by the Educational Policy Institute, Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic, as an input to the OECD Review of Policies to Improve the Effectiveness of Resource Use in Schools (School Resources Review).

To mark International Women’s Day the OECD released an impressive new analysis on gender and education.

Structural reforms and income distribution

This month, PISA in Focus examines the impact of good teacher-student relations on both students’ well-being and performance. It’s not surprising that when students feel that their teachers are interested in them and support them they feel happier at school and often do better in school.

Children spend about a third of their waking hours in school during most weeks in the year. Thus, schools have a significant impact on children’s quality of life – including their relationships with peers and adults, and their dispositions towards learning and life more generally.

The OECD PISA surveys of educational competence among 15-year-olds have taught policymakers many lessons since the programme was launched in 2000. They have revealed several myths as well.

The global talent pool has grown over the past decade and is expected to continue growing through to 2030. The number of young people aged 25-34 with a tertiary qualification increased by nearly 45% between 2005 and 2013 in OECD and G20 countries and is expected to keep increasing in the coming decade.

When choosing a school for their child, parents in all participating countries value academic achievement highly; but they are often even more concerned about the safety and environment of the school and the school’s reputation.

For those parents who have the opportunity to do so, choosing a school for their child is one of the most important decisions they will make as parents – a decision that could have a lasting impact on their child’s life.

Analysing the efficiency of education systems and organisations is at the forefront of today’s policy and academic debate.

TALIS 2013 finds that in many countries, new teachers (with less than five years’ teaching experience) are more likely to work in challenging schools than more experienced teachers.

In many countries, less experienced teachers (those with less than five years’ teaching experience) are more likely to work in challenging schools and less likely to report confidence in their teaching abilities than more experienced teachers.

It’s a well-trodden path to observe that the school systems of today are not preparing children for the jobs of today, let alone tomorrow. But what changes to our school systems are necessary to address this challenge?

More than 35 million 16-29 year-olds across OECD countries are neither employed nor in education or training (NEET) – and around half of all NEETs are out of school and not looking for work. These young people are likely to have dropped off the radar of their country’s education, social and labour market systems.

When it comes to technology, education seems stuck in the age of chalkboards. But at an international conference on technology in education, held in Qingdao, China, last week, I got the feeling that educators and education ministers might finally be ready to join the technological revolution.

At the OECD, we tend to look at French education through the lens of statistics. These show one of the largest gaps between the learning outcomes of children from poor and wealthy families. And the opportunity gap keeps widening.

The OECD’s Annual Meeting at Ministerial Level reinforced member governments’ support across a broad range of key OECD work.

When societies move forward, not everyone benefits in the same way or to the same extent. Some social groups change faster than others, while other groups risk falling behind. Change in education is no exception. In understanding social change it is critically important not only to look at the average change, but also to look at how change affects the entire population.

Educational opportunities have a very important impact on a person’s life. Employment, earnings, well-being, health and trust are all strongly related to education and skills. A lack of high-quality educational opportunities is the most important way in which poverty, social inequality and exclusion are transmitted from one generation to another.

The quantity and quality of resources available to schools improved significantly between 2003 and 2012, on average across OECD countries.

Countries and economies participating in PISA have invested substantial resources and used a wide variety of strategies during the past ten years to improve the quality of their schools. Have these efforts paid off?

One of the most dramatic consequences of the economic crisis has been the soaring levels of youth unemployment in several OECD countries; and the hesitant recovery of the past years was insufficient to improve the job prospects of young people.

In 2012, in more than one-third of OECD countries, over half of all upper secondary students participated in pre-vocational or vocational programmes but less than 30% of those students were exposed to work-based learning. Countries with well-established and high-quality vocational and apprenticeship programmes have improved youth employment opportunities.

Between 2003 and 2012, the percentage of students who were raised in immigrant families grew by around 3 percentage points across OECD countries. At the same time, as this month’s PISA in Focus notes, migration policies in some countries became increasingly selective while education outcomes in many countries of origin improved considerably.