Following the May 2008 earthquake in China, government officials visited the OECD, Italy and Turkey to draw lessons from international experience in seismic safety.

To get a picture of the impact of the current economic and financial crisis on educational building programmes so far, the OECD Centre for Effective Learning Environments (CELE) has been conducting a survey of member countries and regions. The survey focuses on three main issues: the impact of...

Thanks to financing from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) (2009-2013 Programme) and other Italian funding programmes, the Campania Region has begun a project to improve the quality of its school buildings, in partnership with the research centre CISEM of Milan.1 The Educational...

This working paper was prepared as part of the OECD thematic review Overcoming School Failure: Policies that Work, www.oecd.org/edu/equity. The project provides evidence on the policies that are effective to reduce school failure by improving low attainment and reducing dropout, and proactively...

The Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI) has recently initiated a pilot project to develop a new prototype school, involving users in the design phase. This is the first time in Korea that users have been consulted on issues relating to school design.

The world has been changing so fast that educational systems have not had time to keep pace. We therefore need to rethink, renew and modernise our schools, as well as develop a new educational experience for children. In order to do this, it is crucial that we devise a new approach to developing...

Kunskapsskolan is a chain of independent secondary schools which functions as a comprehensive platform for personalised education, known as the Kunskapsskolan programme (KED). What is special about this programme is that students set their own objectives, work independently and are assessed...

Good architecture responds to contemporary challenges, irrespective of fashionable trends, and is characterised by rigorous building processes. Office buildings, housing, stadiums and theatres offer outstanding examples of this principle. But do school buildings figure among them? Happily, in...

This paper provides an account of the main approaches, debates and evidence in the literature on the role of workforce skills in the innovation process in developed economies. It draws on multiple sources including the innovation studies discipline, neoclassical Human Capital theory,...

The second OECD educationtoday Crisis Survey was carried out in 2010. Twenty-five OECD member countries completed the questionnaire. The results of the survey relies largely on the informed opinion of education officials regarding various aspects of the impact of the economic recession and...