Did you ever wonder what the impact of climate change will be on our educational institutions in the next decade? What does it mean for schools that our societies are becoming more individualistic and diverse?
Trends Shaping Education is a triennial report examining major economic, political, social and technological trends affecting education. While the trends are robust, the questions raised in this book are suggestive, and aim to inform strategic thinking and stimulate reflection on the challenges facing education.
This 2022 edition covers a rich array of topics related to economic growth, living and working, knowledge and power, identity and belonging and our physical world and human bodies and interactions. It includes a specific focus on the impact of COVID-19 on global trends, and new futures thinking sections inviting readers to reflect on how the future might differ from our current expectations.
This book is designed to give policy makers, researchers, educational leaders, administrators and teachers a robust, non-specialist source of international comparative trends shaping education, whether in schools, universities or in programmes for older adults. It will also be of interest to students and the wider public, including parents.

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For the first time, the OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 project conducted comprehensive curriculum analyses through the co-creation of new knowledge with a wide range of stakeholders including policy makers, academic experts, school leaders, teachers, NGOs, other social partners and, most importantly, students. This report is one of six presenting the first-ever comparative analyses on curriculum, summarising existing literature, listing challenges and strategies countries reported, and suggesting lessons learned from unintended consequences countries experienced with their curriculum reforms.
This report highlights how clearly articulated and experienced values and attitudes can support students’ positive lifelong learning outcomes and promote a more equitable and just society. Despite the variety of values espoused in national curricula, there is an emerging trend in prioritising values that enhance well-being and learning across different countries.

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In recent years, the Emirate of Dubai has been placing a stronger emphasis on people’s well-being with the aim of making Dubai “an inclusive and cohesive society (…) that is the preferred place to live, work and visit and a pivotal hub in the global economy”. Within the education sector, KHDA and private schools have introduced a number of initiatives to help raise awareness, measure and support students’ and staff’s well-being. Given the central role education and educators have in fostering and supporting empowered, healthy and happy communities, these interventions hold great potential.
This report analyses the well-being policies and practices that KHDA and schools have implemented in Dubai’s private school sector. In order to fulfil this objective, the OECD has taken a holistic picture view of well-being in education, which is discussed in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 looks at Dubai’s private schools as a whole, focusing on the school leadership and other key school staff. Chapter 4 focuses on teachers and their well-being, an issue that has been relatively overlooked until recently. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses student well-being and empowerment.

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The report on Resourcing Higher Education in the Flemish Community of Belgium is the first in a series of publications produced by the OECD's Resourcing Higher Education Project. This project aims to develop a shared knowledge base for OECD member and partner countries on effective policies for higher education resourcing through system-specific and comparative policy analysis. The review of resourcing in the Flemish Community of Belgium has a strong focus on the funding of operating costs, teaching and research in Flemish higher education institutions. It also analyses financial support for students, system-level frameworks governing human resources policy in higher education and key trends in higher education that will impact future higher education resourcing policy. Alongside analysis and comparison of Flemish resourcing policy approaches, it provides recommendations to support future refinement of policies.

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In supporting children’s development, countries invest in the future successes of economies and societies. Awareness of the critical role early childhood education and care (ECEC) plays in setting a strong foundation for children’s learning, development and well-being has grown among policy makers worldwide. The OECD Quality beyond Regulations policy review provides countries with an overview of the different dimensions of quality in ECEC. It also highlights policies that can enhance process quality in particular. From this review, emerged the present report, taking an in-depth look at Ireland's ECEC system. It outlines the sector’s main strengths and challenges, focusing on workforce development and quality assurance through monitoring and inspections. The report provides tailored policy recommendations to improve provision in line with national goals.

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Education systems operate in a world that is constantly evolving towards new equilibria, yet short-term crises may disrupt, accelerate or divert longer-term evolutions. This Framework for Responsiveness and Resilience in Education Policy aims to support policy makers to balance the urgent challenge of building eco-systems that adapt in the face of disruption and change (resilience), and the important challenge of navigating the ongoing evolution from industrial to post-industrial societies and economies (responsiveness). Building on international evidence and analysis from over 40 education, this framework endeavours to establish tangible, transferable and actionable definitions of resilience. These definitions, which are the goals of the framework (Why?), are underpinned by policy components of responsiveness (What?), which define priority areas for education policy makers. Policy pointers for resilience (How?) then illustrate how policy makers can apply these components in ways that promote resilience at the learner, broader learning environment and system levels of the policy ecosystem. Finally, a transversal component looks into the people and the processes undertaken in order to reach a given purpose (Who?). The report has been prepared with evidence from the Education Policy Outlook series – the OECD’s analytical observatory of education policy.

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Austria is in the process of developing and implementing a comprehensive education monitoring system that is in line with the goals of the 2017 Education Reform Act. This Policy Perspective presents the final output of this two-year collaboration between the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, the European Commission and the OECD. The overall goal of this project is to support the Austrian Government in the design and implementation of a new education monitoring system that balances traditional top-down implementation processes with more bottom-up approaches that leave room for co-construction and local adaptation. This report issues a set of recommendations for the monitoring system to provide data to support quality assurance, school self-evaluation, effective governance, evidence-based policy making, and allocation and use of resources. This report can be of help for any country looking to support policy development and improvement in the education system through data-informed decision-making.

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The introduction of standardised tests in Flemish schools aims to generate regular, reliable data for educators and policy makers. At an early stage of development, this report uses a research-based framework to engage stakeholders in thinking about the opportunities standardised tests could bring for their work. It builds on feedback from key stakeholders regarding their perceptions, hopes and concerns about the introduction of standardised tests. Feedback was gathered during a series of structured discussions and a stakeholder reflection seminar. The report identifies ways to strengthen the opportunity, capability and motivation of decision makers at all levels of the education system to use evidence effectively for their respective practice – including teaching and quality assurance. The report identifies lessons learnt to support the further development of standardised tests.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are major breakthrough technologies that are transforming the economy and society. The OECD’s Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Skills (AIFS) project is developing a programme to assess the capabilities of AI and robotics, and their impact on education and work. This volume reports on the first step of the project: identifying which capabilities to assess and which tests to use in the assessment. It builds on an online expert workshop that explored this question from the perspectives of both psychology and computer science. The volume consists of expert contributions that review skills taxonomies and tests in different domains of psychology, and efforts in computer science to assess AI and robotics. It provides extensive discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, and outlines directions for the project. The report can therefore be a resource for the research community of multiple fields and policy makers who wish to obtain deeper insight into the complexity of machine capabilities.

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Estonia is currently finalising its new Education Strategy 2035, a horizon that goes beyond strict education performance and encompasses the knowledge, skills and attitudes for people to thrive in the 21st century. To achieve the ambitious goals set in the strategy, Estonia requested support from the European Commission, under the Structural Reform Support Programme, in the area of education monitoring and data-informed decision making.
This Policy Perspective presents the final output of this two-year collaboration between the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, the European Commission, and the OECD. The overall goal of this project is to support the Estonian Government in strengthening data-informed decision making in education through improvements to its education monitoring system. After reviewing comprehensively the existing data and monitoring processes in Estonia, the OECD has prepared guidelines for education monitoring and a coherent set of indicators to support the achievement of the goals set in the Estonian Education Strategy 2035.

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Digital technologies have transformed the way people interact, work and learn. The emergency transition to online teaching and learning necessitated by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has posed a serious challenge to instructional routines of higher education systems across OECD countries. The pandemic has demonstrated the ability of higher education institutions to ensure continuity in teaching and learning, but it has also revealed that much work remains to be done to ensure digital technologies are effectively used to promote quality, efficiency and equity in higher education. This report, which focuses on the digital transformation of higher education in Hungary, is a collaboration between the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support (DG REFORM), the Hungarian Ministry for Innovation and Technology and the OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills. Building on stakeholder engagement and comparative analysis, the report offers an assessment of the current state of digitalisation in higher education in Hungary, identifies policy recommendations to strengthen the current policy framework supporting digitalisation, and provides suggestions to help Hungarian authorities and stakeholders develop a monitoring framework and indicators to measure the digitalisation of the higher education system.

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Higher education helps learners acquire the knowledge and skills they need to lead productive working lives, and it sparks the innovation that fosters economic growth and social progress. However, creating higher education systems that operate at a high level of research and teaching quality, with responsiveness to social and labour market demands, requires effective public policies and institutional practices. This report, which focuses on funding and governance reforms to improve higher education in the Slovak Republic, is a collaboration between the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support (DG REFORM), the Institute for Strategies and Analysis in the Office of the Government of the Slovak Republic and the OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills. Building on stakeholder engagement and comparative analysis, the report offers an international perspective on the performance of the Slovak higher education system and provides an action plan focused on governance and funding reforms, placing special emphasis on implementation planning to support reform success.

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This report offers an initial overview of the available information regarding the circumstances, nature and outcomes of the education of schoolchildren during the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns of March-April 2020. Its purpose is primarily descriptive: it presents information from high quality quantitative studies on the experience of learning during this period in order to ground the examination and discussion of these issues in empirical examples. Information is presented on three interrelated topics: the nature of the educational experience during the period of lockdowns and school closures; the home environment in which education took place for the vast majority of schoolchildren; the effects on the mental health and learning outcomes for children during this period. The data come primarily from 5 countries (France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States) with additional information on some aspects for 6 additional countries (Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Finland, Italy and the Netherlands).

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What knowledge do teachers need for 21st century teaching? Today, teachers have an important role in guiding and shaping students’ use of digital tools and optimising the educational benefits of their digital experiences. They are also agents of inclusive, equitable education and ambassadors of embracing diversity as an enriching element of our societies. To fulfil these roles teachers need to be experts of teaching and learning, and base their practice on a specialised and updated body of knowledge. However, there is a great need for a better understanding of the knowledge and skills that teaching in the 21st century requires. This is the ambition for the next cycle of the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) and its new Teacher Knowledge Survey (TKS) assessment module.

Studying teaching as a knowledge profession across education systems is as challenging as it is important. This publication aims to contribute to this challenging endeavour by summarising the state-of-art on teacher knowledge and its measurement across systems. It discusses cutting-edge methodologies and designs and outlines implications for research as well as policies and practices for strengthening knowledge-based and evidence-informed practices in schools.

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Digital technologies are increasingly present in young children’s lives. How can early education systems get the best out of digitalisation while minimising its risks? This is especially urgent as the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated our reliance on digital tools – tools that enabled young children to continue learning when early education centres and primary schools closed down. It is in this context that the OECD conducted a policy survey covering 34 countries and jurisdictions. It investigates how digital technologies were used to provide distance education for young children in 2020, which challenges arose and what policy changes are in the pipeline for early education.

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Developing, promoting and maintaining a good professional teaching workforce from primary to upper secondary education is a policy imperative for education systems around the world. The data drawn from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) can help policy makers and education practitioners design policies and practices that enhance teaching across education levels. This report presents TALIS 2018 findings for countries and economies that took part in the primary and upper secondary education survey. It focuses on the following research questions: What are the levels of teachers’ and school leaders’ professionalism in primary and upper secondary education? What are some of the educational challenges unique to each education level? What are the factors that could explain differences in the levels of professionalism across education levels? The findings offer a broader view of teachers and school principals across all levels of compulsory education and the similarities and differences in the issues they face. The report also offers policy reflections on these findings.

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Education at a Glance is the authoritative source for information on the state of education around the world. It provides data on the structure, finances and performance of education systems across OECD countries and a number of partner economies. More than 100 charts and tables in this publication – as well as links to much more available on the educational database – provide key information on the output of educational institutions; the impact of learning across countries; access, participation and progression in education; the financial resources invested in education; and teachers, the learning environment and the organisation of schools.
The 2021 edition includes a focus on equity, investigating how progress through education and the associated learning and labour market outcomes are impacted by dimensions such as gender, socio-economic status, country of birth and regional location. A specific chapter is dedicated to Target 4.5 of the Sustainable Development Goal 4 on equity in education, providing an assessment of where OECD and partner countries stand in providing equal access to quality education at all levels. Two new indicators on the mechanisms and formulas used to allocate public funding to schools and on teacher attrition rate complement this year's edition.

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Over the last few years, social and emotional skills have been rising on the education policy agenda and in the public debate. Policy makers and education practitioners are seeking ways to complement the focus on academic learning, with attention to social and emotional skill development. Social and emotional skills are a subset of an individual’s abilities, attributes and characteristics important for individual success and social functioning. Together, they encompass a comprehensive set of skills essential for students to be able to succeed at school, at work and fully participate in society as active citizens.
The OECD's Survey of Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) is one of the first international efforts to collect data from students, parents and teachers on the social and emotional skills of students at ages 10 and 15. This first report describes students' social and emotional skills and how they relate to individual, family, and school characteristics. It also examines broader policy and socio-economic contexts related to these skills, and sheds light on ways to help education leaders and policy makers monitor and foster students’ social and emotional skills.

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