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.

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.

Skills have become the currency of 21st century economies

Do our education systems offer the necessary support for children growing up in modern families? To what extent should schools be responsible for what have traditionally been thought of as “family matters”?

The OECD Directorate for Education and Skills helps individuals and nations to identify and develop the knowledge and skills that drive better jobs and better lives, generate prosperity and promote social inclusion. We encourage countries to compare their experiences and learn from each other, and we accompany them in the difficult process of policy implementation.

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.

The United Arab Emirates is identified by PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) as one of the most rapidly improving education systems in the world. However its students still perform well below the levels expected in advanced economies.

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.

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).

Structural reforms and income distribution

As jobs increasingly involve analysing and communicating information, individuals with poor literacy skills are more likely to find themselves at risk.

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 world is living through one of its most extraordinary revolutions, with game-changing implications, many of them still unknown.

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.

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.

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.

Studies show that interpersonal trust is fundamental for promoting the resilience of our societies, but many individuals say that they have little trust in others.

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

Information and communication technologies (ICT) permeate every aspect of our lives, from how we work, to how we “talk” with friends, to how we participate in political processes. But what are the returns to “digital skills” – the capacity to use digital devices and applications to access and manage information and solve problems – on the labour market? Do they help land a job or earn higher wages?

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.

The share of students with an immigrant background increased between 2003 and 2012, both in traditional and new destination countries. The performance difference in mathematics between immigrant and non-immigrant students decreased, on average, between 2003 and 2012.

Information and communication technology (ICT) use has been identified as one of the more active teaching practices, which promote skills students need for success. And yet, less than 40% of teachers across Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) countries report using ICT as a regular part of their teaching practice.

Education occurs in many forms; it’s not the same as schooling.

In just a couple of decades, upper secondary schooling has been transformed from a vehicle towards upward social mobility into a minimum requirement for life in modern societies.

In most OECD countries, the large majority of adults had at least an upper secondary qualification in 2013, making the completion of upper secondary education the minimum threshold for successful labour market entry and continued employability or the pursuit of further education.

There is no real consensus on how much class time is enough when it comes to learning mathematics, science and reading. But educators and policy makers generally agree that while it’s important for students to spend considerable time in school lessons to acquire new skills, spending more hours and minutes in class is not enough to ensure that students succeed in school.