The 2012 edition of Education at a Glance enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ educational performance.

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.

As the spectre of another economic downturn looms large in many countries and is already a reality in others, new data from the 2012 edition of Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators – released today – provides powerful insights into the link between education, economic progress and social mobility around the world.

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.

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.

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

This report provides the main findings and recommendations of a case study review of entrepreneurship education and business start-up support in Tunisian universities and universities of applied sciences as part of a series of reviews on Skills and Competences for Entrepreneurship carried out by the LEED Programme of the OECD.

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 interactive chart, designed by Krisztina Szucs and Mate Cziner from Hungary, condenses highly complex data on the costs and benefits of education around the world. It clearly highlights important facts showing students, parents and policy makers where the real costs and benefits lie for them in relation to education

The OECD today announced the winner of its first-ever global data visualisation challenge.

This seminar will provide an opportunity for participants to share experiences on issues such as the influence of accelerated commercialization of education and a knowledge-based society.

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.

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.

2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession

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.

The higher the level of education, the higher the salary cost of teachers per student. In Belgium (Flemish Community), France and Spain, the difference in the annual salary cost between the primary and upper secondary levels of education exceeds USD 1 800 in 2010.

Successful education systems guarantee that all students succeed at high levels. As this month’s PISA in Focus notes, some school systems not only do well on international assessments, like PISA, they also manage to minimise the difference between the best- and poorest-performing students.

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.

The Education policy Outlook is a new publication that uses existing knowledge to review education policies and reforms across OECD countries. It will build on substantial comparative and sectorial policy knowledge and on the experience of policy outlooks already developed across the OECD.

Nearly half the world’s population now lives in urban areas. What does that mean for education?

In most countries and economies, students who attend schools in urban areas tend to perform at higher levels than other students. Socio-economic status explains only part of the performance difference between students who attend urban schools and other students.

Young people from poorer families are badly underrepresented in higher education. That risks exposing them to a lifetime of reduced earnings and undermines the foundations of wider economic growth. What can be done? Economically disadvantaged students benefit from a mix of grants and loans in third-level education, but they also need better support from the earliest years of their school careers.

Flanders builds a "triangle of quality" based on extensive autonomy for schools, supported by pedagogical advisory services and monitored by government inspectors.

In a drive to raise the quality of classroom teaching and boost student performance, Dutch education authorities are encouraging teachers to learn from each other through a process of peer review.

How do apprenticeships and other forms of workplace learning help people to make a successful transition from school to work? Global economic competition requires a labour force with a range of mid-level trade, technical and professional skills alongside the high-level skills typically associated with university education.

In some countries, an increasing number of young people are neither in employment, nor in education or training (NEET). A high proportion of NEETs is an indicator of a difficult transition between school and work.

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.

NEETS - young people aged between 15 and 29 years old who are not in employment, education or training - are a potential problem both for society and for themselves. The proportion of young people neither working nor studying offers an insight into how well economies manage the transition between school and work – better than youth unemployment rates, which do not take into account the numbers in education.

Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators is the authoritative source for accurate and relevant information on the state of education around the world. It provides data on the structure, finances, and performance of education systems in more than 40 countries, including OECD members and G20 partners.

Education at a Glance 2013 - Country notes and key fact tables

The jobs gap between well-educated young people and those who left school early has continued to widen during the crisis. A good education is the best insurance against a lack of work experience, according to the latest edition of the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance.

The insight that education is valuable both to individuals and to countries is not new. Using continuously improving data and statistical tools, we have come to understand and appreciate the magnitude of education’s impact on employment, income, health and life opportunities in general.

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).

The transition from school to work in Germany is remarkably smooth. An excellent vocational education and training (VET) system ensures that young people are well-prepared when they enter the labour market and can find jobs that match their qualifications.

Between 2000 and 2011, the number of international students has more than doubled. Today, almost 4.5 million tertiary students are enrolled outside their country of citizenship.

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.

The United States should improve postsecondary career and technical training provisions to help students transition smoothly into education programs and the labor market, according to a new OECD report published today.

OECD countries must ensure mobile markets remain open and competitive in order to sustain innovation and meet rising demand for data services, according to a new OECD report.

09/07/2013 - The United States should improve postsecondary career and technical training provisions to help students transition smoothly into education programs and the labor market, according to a new OECD report published today.

Students who know how to summarise information tend to perform better in reading. If disadvantaged students used effective learning strategies to the same extent as students from more advantaged backgrounds do, the performance gap between the two groups would be almost 20% narrower.