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.

How can we measure what makes a school system work? Andreas Schleicher walks us through the PISA test, a global measurement that ranks countries against one another -- then uses that same data to help schools improve. Watch to find out where your country stacks up, and learn the single factor that makes some systems outperform others.

The PISA-Based Test for Schools [In the United States, the assessment is known as the OECD Test for Schools (based on PISA)] is a student assessment tool geared for use by schools and networks of schools to support research, benchmarking and school improvement efforts.

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.

If there’s one lesson we’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that we cannot simply bail ourselves out of a crisis, we cannot solely stimulate ourselves out of a crisis and we cannot just print money our way out of a crisis. But we can become much better in equipping more people with better skills to collaborate, compete and connect in ways that drive our economies forward.

How are countries around the world helping youth stay in school, build skills and careers? What are they doing about youth unemployment? These case studies provide a starting point for those looking not only to learn about the problems facing youth today, but how to solve them.

How do you re-build an education system destroyed by a disaster? The OECD's Andreas Schleicher describes the efforts in Japan, two years after the nuclear accident in Fukushima.

There are few OECD countries where vocational education and training (VET) is held in such high regard or takes so many forms as in Austria. Some 60 percent of young Austrians aged between 25 and 34 have completed a VET course below tertiary level (vocational school or technical college).

David Hoey, Chief Executive Officer of WorldSkills International spoke to us of the international skills extravaganza (WorldSkills Leipzig 2013) going on now, between 2-7 July.

Big data is the foundation on which education can reinvent its business model and build the coalition of governments, businesses, and social entrepreneurs that can bring together the evidence, innovation and resources to make lifelong learning a reality for all.

Most students enjoy orderly classrooms for their language-of-instruction lessons. Socio-economically disadvantaged students are less likely to enjoy orderly classrooms than advantaged students. Orderly classrooms – regardless of the school’s overall socio-economic profile – are related to better performance.

In a global economy, the benchmark for educational success is no longer improvement by national standards alone, but the best performing school systems internationally.

Everywhere skills transform lives, generate prosperity and promote social inclusion. And if there’s one lesson the global economy has taught us over the last few years, it’s that we cannot simply bail ourselves out of a crisis — stimulus plans and printing money can never be a lasting solution to our economic problems.

This is the fourth episode of Global Education Leaders, an initiative launched by Turkish educators. The discussion revolved around global education issues and OECD's focus on skills.

This book provides, from an international perspective, an independent analysis of major issues facing teacher evaluation, current policy initiatives, and possible future approaches in Chile.

Asian countries outperform the rest of the world in the OECD’s latest PISA survey, which evaluates the knowledge and skills of the world’s 15-year-olds. PISA 2012 tested more than 510,000 students in 65 countries and economies on maths, reading and science. The main focus was on maths.

The OECD and the EC are inviting individual teachers and schools to submit case studies about their strategies, practices and achievements in promoting entrepreneurship in schools and VET. Participation in the Call requires a submission of an abstract of 1-2 pages by email to Joseph.Tixier@oecd.org indicating in the subject line "Entrepreneurship360- Call for case studies". Deadline for submission is 30 April 2014.

This review report for the Netherlands provides, from an international perspective, an independent analysis of major issues facing the Dutch evaluation and assessment framework in education, current policy initiatives and possible future approaches. This series forms part of the OECD Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes.

The results of the first international assessment of 15-year-old students’ financial literacy competencies were presented in Paris on 9 July 2014.

This report explores the association between school innovation and different measures related to educational objectives. This book is the beginning of a new journey: it calls for innovations in the field of measurement – and not just of education.

The OECD Directorate for Education has launched the Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship Programme. Mr. Alexander (1940 - 2012) was the Director for the OECD’s Education, Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Directorate from 1989-2000.

OECD Education Today - Addressing inequities in the Slovak Republic through evaluation and assessment

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.

If there’s one word that encapsulates the desires and aspirations of education stakeholders around the world, it is improvement.

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

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

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.

Research shows that programmes to improve adults’ basic skills need to use awareness-raising measures (like the adult education weeks promoted in Denmark and Finland) and national campaigns (as conducted in France and Luxembourg) to encourage interested, but reluctant adults to participate.

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.

Every September, classrooms in the Northern hemisphere reopen to students and teachers for a new school year.

Since the mid-1900s, the expansion of higher education systems has opened up opportunities for many students other than those from the elites. Higher education became the main route towards upward social mobility.

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

Graduation rates for bachelor’s and master’s degrees have dramatically increased over the past two decades, with 6 million bachelor’s degrees and 3 million master’s degrees awarded in OECD countries in 2013. Although women represent over half of the graduates at the bachelor’s and master’s level, they are still strikingly under-represented in the fields of sciences and engineering.

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.

One in ten students at the master’s or equivalent level is an international student in OECD countries, rising to one in four at the doctoral level.

Common sense and hard evidence point to the significant impact of socio-emotional skills such as perseverance and responsibility on children's lifetime success.

Webinar: Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, presents the findings of Equations and Inequalities - Making Mathematics Accessible to All

The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), was designed to provide insights into the availability of some of these key skills in society and how they are used at work and at home.

In 2015 the Lithuanian government launched an ambitious Social Model reform agenda aimed at balancing flexibility of the labour market and security provided through the system of social protection.

Archived webinar of September 15,2016 with Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills, OECD, presenting the findings of Education at a Glance 2016.

On 6 December, the latest results from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, better known as PISA, will be made public.

The most recent round of the assessment, PISA 2015, focused on 15-year-olds’ science literacy, defined as "the ability to engage with science-related issues, and with the ideas of science, as a reflective citizen".

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

More than half a million 15-year-olds took part in the OECD’s latest global education survey, known as PISA. The main focus was on science, an increasingly important part of our economic and social lives.

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

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines not just what students know in science, reading and mathematics, but what they can do with what they know. Results from PISA show educators and policy makers the quality and equity of learning outcomes achieved elsewhere, and allow them to learn from the policies and practices applied in other countries.

Modern education systems, which are open to the middle classes and the poor, not just the elites, were established during the first industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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 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. PISA shows that, rather than assuming that inequality of opportunity is set in stone, school systems can become more equitable over a relatively short time.

Despite increased funding and many reforms, most education systems are still seeking ways to better prepare their students for a world in which technological change and the digital revolution are changing the way we work, live and relate to one another.