This Education Indicators in Focus No. 15 sets out the changing needs of a more diverse generation of university students.

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.

The informal meeting of OECD Education Ministers will be held in Istanbul, Turkey on 2-3 October 2013. The theme of the meeting is “Fostering Skills and Employability through Education”.

OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría today welcomed Brazil’s further engagement with the Organisation’s world-leading global education assessment programme (PISA) during a signing ceremony in Brasilia with Brazil’s Minister for Education Aloízio Mercadante.

Brazil’s strong economic growth has helped cut the youth unemployment rate over the past decade to levels below those of most OECD countries. Increased investment in education and vocational training is also helping young people get a foot in the jobs market, according to a new OECD report.

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 story of Korean education over the past 50 years is one of remarkable growth and achievement. Korea is one of the top performing countries in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey and among those with the highest proportion of young people who have completed upper secondary and tertiary education.

Jobs, wealth and individual well-being depend on what people can do with what they know. There is no shortcut to equipping people with the right skills and to providing them with opportunities to use their skills effectively. If there’s one lesson the global economy has taught us, it is that governments cannot simply spend their way out of a crisis.

This book addresses the challenges linked to the introduction of financial education in schools and and provides practical guidance and case studies to assist policy makers.

Education has one of the highest shares of innovative jobs for tertiary graduates of all sectors of the economy in Europe, and a higher proportion than in other public sector areas such as health and public administration.

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 and China have announced that they will expand their cooperation in PISA, following the successful implementation of PISA 2009 and 2012 in Shanghai.

Access to education continues to expand worldwide but the socio-economic divisions between tertiary-educated adults and the rest of society are growing. Governments must do more to ensure that everyone has the same opportunity to a good education early in life, according to a new OECD report.

Public investment in education has sharply increased since 2000 and is now one of the highest among OECD and partner countries. In 2011, the Brazilian government spent 19% of its total expenditure on education, which is well above the OECD average of 13%, and is the fourth highest among all OECD and partner countries with available data.

October 5 marks the 20th anniversary of UNESCO’s World Teachers' Day, a day devoted to “appreciating, assessing and improving educators of the world”. This gives us a great opportunity to reflect again on how schools can celebrate and develop great teaching. One way to do that is through critical exchanges – building constructive feedback systems within the schools.

ICT has influenced almost all aspects of our lives and has changed the way we communicate, work and socialize. Education plays a key role in ensuring that everyone can reap the benefits of our technology-rich world, as well as help mitigate some of the risks.

Quick: Who has more up-to-date textbooks: students in wealthier schools or students in poorer schools? Actually, it depends where you live. As this month’s PISA in Focus explains, not only are some countries better than others in allocating their educational resources more equitably across schools, but students in these countries generally perform better in mathematics.

Many countries have implemented reforms to develop and support doctoral studies and postdoctoral research, stressing the crucial role of doctorate students and degree holders in terms of economic growth, innovation and scientific research.

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

How big should schools be? Is bigger better? Or do all the best things come in small packages? For education systems, the question of how school size influences quality and efficiency has long been an important issue.

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.

Want to get involved in shaping the future of education? As the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) reach their 2015 deadline, several international groups, including the OECD, are formulating a new set of goals and targets for sustainable development… and we’d like to know what you think.

Can PISA results predict the quality of a country’s labour force one decade later? To find out, we compared some of the results from the PISA 2000 and PISA 2003 tests with results from the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC).

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.

David Puttnam had a storied 30-year career as an independent film producer (The Mission, The Killing Fields, Local Hero, Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, to cite just a few of his award-winning films) before he retired from film production to focus on public policy related to education, the environment, and the creative and communications industries.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Over the past decades, education systems have expanded enormously. They provide opportunities for many more students than before to access and succeed in secondary and tertiary education.

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.

Some 37% of students in the Netherlands reported that they often worry that mathematics classes will be difficult for them. In Argentina, 80% of students reported the same worry.

An analysis of PISA data reveals how student performance is affected by such “intangibles” as behaviour in and outside of school, and self-confidence, and how, in turn, students’ behaviour and confidence can be influenced by parents’ and teachers’ attitudes and expectations.

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

The new Teaching in Focus brief shows that professional development embedded in school life has more impact on teaching practice than non-school embedded professional development.

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.

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.

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