<ul> <li> 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. </li> <li> On average across 24 national and sub-national entities participating in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, 39% of adults have...</li></ul>

With all the economic turmoil of the past several years, have you ever wished you could buy an insurance policy to protect against the effects of a global recession? Well, such an insurance policy already exists – and it’s called higher education. During the first two years of the global...

This issue will show that strong performers do not invest scarce resources in smaller classes, but in higher teachers' salaries. They are neither the countries that spend the most on education, nor are they the wealthiest countries; rather they are the countries that are committed to providing...

Few would dispute that having a higher education is more important than ever to help people build positive economic futures and strengthen the knowledge economies of countries. Yet as the second issue of the OECD’s new brief series Education Indicators in Focus explains, OECD countries have...

When you think of someone who is an engineer, do you imagine a man or a woman wearing a hardhat? How about when you imagine a teacher standing in front of a class of schoolchildren? If you answer “a man” to the first question, and “a woman” to the second, there’s probably a reason. And...

Since the PISA 2000 and 2009 surveys both focused on reading, one can track in detail how student reading performance has changed over that period. Among the 26 OECD countries with comparable results in both assessments, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Korea, Poland, Portugal, and the partner...

In recent years, many schools have grown into more autonomous organisations and have become more accountable to students, parents and the public at large for their outcomes. PISA results suggest that, when autonomy and accountability are intelligently combined, they tend to be associated with...

Large cities are generally educational assets: in most countries, performance improves dramatically when only the scores of students in urban areas are considered, although this is not the case in some countries, such as Belgium, Slovenia, the United Kingdom and the United States. When comparing...

Most parents know, instinctively, that spending more time with their children and being actively involved in their education will give their children a good head-start in life. But as many parents have to juggle competing demands at work and at home, there never seems to be enough time. Often,...

With all the competition to get into the right universities to secure the best jobs, secondary school students are often encouraged to take after-school classes in subjects already taught in school to help them improve their performance – even if that means forsaking other fun and interesting...