Showing posts with label PIAAC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PIAAC. Show all posts

How can countries close the equity gap in education?

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Skills Beyond School Division,  Directorate for Education and Skills


Education plays a dual role when it comes to social inequality and social mobility. On the one hand, it is the main way for societies to foster equality of opportunity and support upward social mobility for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. On the other hand, the evidence is overwhelming that education often reproduces social divides in societies, through the impact that parents’ economic, social and cultural status has on children’s learning outcomes.

The social divide is already apparent very early in the life of a child, in the time their parents spend on parenting or in the number of words a toddler learns. It progresses through early childhood education and becomes most obvious in the variation in learning outcomes, based on social background, among 15-year-old students who participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). And when literacy and numeracy skills among adults are assessed, such as in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), we still see the impact of socio-economic status on skills development. A new report, Educational Opportunities for All, which contributes to the OECD Inclusive Growth initiative, charts the trajectory of educational inequality over a lifetime using OECD datasets on education and learning outcomes.

Children from disadvantaged families, measured by the proxy of parents’ educational attainment, have less chance than their peers from more advantaged backgrounds to benefit from early childhood education and excellent learning opportunities at school. The later stages in a person’s educational career often reinforce the accumulated disadvantage from previous stages.

The chart above shows,for the cohort born between 1985 and 1988, that the impact of social background continues to be strong between the age of 15, when students sit the PISA reading test, and the ages of 25-28, when PIAAC conducts a similar test in literacy. In most cases, the difference in the standardised scores between children with tertiary-educated parents and those without a tertiary-educated parent increases between the two measurements. This is probably because poor literacy proficiency at school translates into different trajectories into further education, into more difficult transitions between school and work, and into work environments that offer fewer opportunities to improve literacy skills either by using those skills or through training.

Is this then a completely pessimistic story? Should we forget about the potential of education to foster a more equal and inclusive society? Not at all! The report shows that children’s educational trajectory is not set in stone. Many children seem to be able to move beyond the destiny to which their background seems to condemn them. But there are large differences among countries in the extent to which these children succeed in school. The report includes a dashboard of 11 indicators of equity in education – a clear sign that policies and practices matter. The right policies and the right kind of incentives can make a huge difference in whether a country is able to provide educational opportunities for all.

Throughout its work on learning, education and skills, the OECD has identified policies that matter with regard to equity. Those identified in this new report are not surprising: invest in accessible, high-quality early childhood education; improve learning opportunities for children at risk and target resources to those schools that need them most; focus on employability skills for adults from disadvantaged backgrounds; and provide opportunities for second-chance and lifelong education.

There is no magic formula that will work for all countries. In some countries, a lack of quality early childhood education creates huge equity issues, while in others, secondary school is the stage at which equality of educational opportunity is jeopardised. In still other countries, it is the transition to work that is the most challenging for disadvantaged young people. As shown in the chart above, Sweden, New Zealand and Norway are relatively successful in guaranteeing equitable learning outcomes in secondary school. But in contrast to the two Nordic countries, New Zealand doesn’t seem able to extend its equitable approach into skills development among young adults, probably because of segregating mechanisms in work allocation and adult learning programmes.

The Flemish Community of Belgium provides a contrasting picture: the secondary school system there shows large disparities in learning outcomes between disadvantaged and advantaged children, but the inequitable outcomes are, to some extent, compensated in early adulthood by more inclusive labour-market and social-protection systems. Countries thus need to search for the specific mix of policies that will work for them.

More equitable and inclusive education and skills policies are not only beneficial for individual people; they can have a huge impact on society. Such policies can guarantee that the routes to upward social mobility remain open to talented people, regardless of their social background. Countries will benefit socially and economically when they stop wasting the talents of those who are penalised simply because of where they came from. At a time when skills are the ticket to brighter futures, developing everyone’s skills is the best strategy towards economic prosperity and social cohesion.

Links
Educational Opportunities for All, Overcoming Inequality throughout the Life Course
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

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How much will the literacy level of working-age people change from now to 2022?

by François Keslair
Statistician, Directorate for Education and Skills 



Taken as a whole, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) present a mixed picture for Korea and Singapore. As their economies have grown, these two countries’ education systems have seen fast and impressive improvements; both now rank among PISA’s top performers. However, neither Korea nor Singapore do so well in PIAAC. PIAAC measures the skills of adults aged between 16 and 65, i.e. a large majority of the population, not just the 15-year-olds pupils measured by PISA. And while the skills of younger Koreans and Singaporeans are just as impressive in PIAAC as in PISA, the same cannot be said of their elders, who did not enjoy the advantages of their current successful education systems. The skills of the older population covered by PIAAC simply cannot keep pace with such change.

But why exactly can we draw this conclusion? In other words, why do the drivers of change in the skills of the population examined by PIAAC necessarily work so slowly? And since we are looking into it, why not take the opportunity to try our hand at predicting the future of adult skills, taking literacy as an example? We are all familiar with the strong link between skills and productivity, so predicting the skills of the working-age population could help to identify, for example, trends in some economic fundamentals. This exercise – prospective and necessarily provisional – is covered in the latest issue of Adult Skills in Focus (ASIF), “How might literacy evolve among working-age adults by 2022?”

The first driver of change is population renewal. Without wanting to state the obvious, people aged between 16 and 65 in 2012 will be aged between 26 and 75 in 2022 (unless, unfortunately, they have died). So the population of 16-65 year-olds in 2012 and 2022 will largely overlap, except that 2022’s 16-24 year-olds, who were previously too young, will have joined the population, while 2012’s 56-65 year-olds, now too old (as well as any 16-65 year-olds who passed away between 2012 and 2022) will have left it. This means that only about one-fifth of the 16-65 age group is renewed every ten years.

During that ten-year gap, the remaining population, i.e. four-fifths of 2012’s 16-65 year-olds, will get that much older. People’s skills vary over time. Skills can naturally be learned, but they can also be lost, most often because they are not practised. The second driver of change, then, is the impact of ageing on skills. This subject was covered in another issue of ASIF, “What does age have to do with skills proficiency?”, which identified two trends: first, a marked improvement in the skills of 16-35 year-olds, corresponding to the age of higher education, followed by a slow decline; and second, a distinct improvement for a minority of the population and a small deterioration for the majority, the combined effect of which will not be particularly significant.

In ten years, neither population renewal nor the impact of ageing on skills will be able to significantly affect the skills of all those aged between 16 and 65. But the projections we can make by modelling both drivers reveal a not-insignificant increase, as demonstrated in the graph above.

The improvement in literacy skills ought to be generally observable across all nations surveyed. Some countries may stagnate, such as England and Northern Ireland (UK), and Italy; but the good news is that none should see a decline. On the contrary, some countries should see a considerable improvement. And those countries which are expected to see the greatest progress include – surprise! – Singapore and Korea, although both of them will nevertheless continue to lag behind their neighbour Japan; but in Japan’s case, modernisation had already begun in the Meiji era at the end of the 19th century, which included the modernisation of the education system. The fruits of the efforts invested in education are harvested little by little, over a period of many years, meaning that the future beyond 2022 may well see yet more improvement. But we have to lay the foundations now.

Links
Adult Skills in Focus No. 7: How much will the literacy level of the working-age population change from now to 2022?

Closing Italy’s skills gap is everyone’s business

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills


Italy is the birthplace of Leonardo, Galileo and Armani. For centuries, skilled Italians have been recognised for their contributions to the world’s art, science, and culture. A relatively small country, with scarce natural resources, Italy today is among the world’s leading industrialised economies and is home to millions of firms, including many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), who play a prominent role in many key global value chains. So the skills of Italy’s population matter. Not only for their own country, but also for their contribution to the future prosperity and well-being of the global community. 

Italy’s future prosperity depends upon the skills of its people

Today, Italy is facing a skills gap. OECD Surveys measuring the skills of 15 year-olds (PISA) and adults between the ages of 16 and 64 years old (Survey of Adult Skills, PIAAC) have detected a significant shortfall in skills  compared with other countries. Despite progress achieved over the past decade, young Italians’ PISA scores in literacy and science are still relatively low compared with the OECD average. Adults display an even larger skills gap compared to their peers in other OECD countries. In 2012, some 13 million adults between 25-64 scored at the bottom of the PIAAC ranking,  while in some southern regions 2 out of 3 adults were found to be functionally illiterate. Poor skills are paralleled by stagnant productivity growth, which indicates that Italy may be trapped in a low-skilled equilibrium in which both the supply of, and the demand for, skills are weak.

Implementing recent reforms requires concerted efforts  

Italy has recently embarked on a major reform effort aimed at boosting the development, activation and use of people’s skills. For example, the 2014 Jobs Act introduced a major overhaul of labour market settings to favour open-ended contracts (over fixed-term ones) and strengthen active labour market policies. The following year, the Good School Act made work-based learning compulsory for all high schools, in order to provide students with real life experiences and a much broader range of learning opportunities. But Italy did not stop there, and in 2015 put in place Industry 4.0, a 3-year programme that provides firms with targeted support to help them transition to digital technologies and boost their demand for skilled workers. 
Implementation of these reforms has met with many challenges. They can only be addressed by generating synergies among different skills policies, engaging more with key stakeholders and improving the multilevel governance of the national skills system. 

Italy faces 10 skills challenges

Today, the OECD Secretary General is in Rome to launch the OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report for Italy, together with a high-level panel of Ministers and undersecretaries. The report applies the framework of the OECD Skills Strategy to identify 10 skills challenges for Italy as it seeks to maximise its future skills potential. It includes a rich set of comparative data and evidence and offers concrete examples of how other countries are tackling similar skills challenges. 

With regards to developing relevant skills, the report focuses on:  

1. Equipping young people across the country with skills for further education and life; 
2. Increasing access to tertiary education while improving quality and relevance of skills;
3. Boosting the skills of low skilled adults.

When activating people’s skills, Italy will need to tackle the challenges of:  

4. Removing supply- and demand-side barriers to the activation of skills in the labour market;
5. Encouraging greater participation of women and youth in the labour market.

Italy also needs to make better use of the skills it has by: 

6. Making better use of skills in the workplace;
7. Leveraging skills to promote innovation.

Finally, Italy urgently needs to improve its overall skills system by: 

8. Strengthening multilevel governance and partnerships to improve skills outcomes;
9. Promoting skills assessment and anticipation to reduce skills mismatches;
10. Investing to improve skills outcomes.

Each of these 10 skills challenges are well known in Italy. By adopting a systemic approach to their analysis, this report underscores the need for renewed efforts to adopt a whole-of-government skills strategy that cuts across ministerial silos and gives an active role to key stakeholders, including civil society.  To close its skills gap, Italy needs to mobilise everyone’s energies to ensure that skills policies are implemented effectively and help deliver inclusive growth. 

Taking action today

The diagnostic phase of the OECD National Skills Strategy project in Italy has brought together many different ministries and a large number of stakeholders to gather insights and start generating a common narrative about the skills challenges facing Italy today. Developing concrete plans for action will mean building on the many reforms already underway and the continued engagement of all stakeholders.

The OECD stands ready to support Italy as it builds the skills that will empower its people to generate a new wave of well-being, prosperity and innovation that will benefit everyone, everywhere.

Links

For more on skills and skills policies around the world, visit: http://www.oecd.org/skills/

Follow the conversation on twitter: #OECDSkills

Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo
Photo credit: @Shutterstock


Why it matters if you can't read this

by Tanja Bastianic
Statistician, Directorate for Education and Skills 



Adults who lack basic skills – literacy and numeracy – are penalised both in professional and private life. They are more likely to be unemployed or in precarious jobs, earn lower wages, have more health issues, trust others less, and engage less often in community life and democratic processes.

Basic skills are not complicated. What we measure in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the ability to process the information needed to perform everyday tasks – to read the instructions on a bottle of aspirin or to know how many litres of petrol are needed to fill the tank.

In Australia, around three million working-age adults – one in five – currently have low basic skills and are living with the consequences. And if Australia doesn’t tackle this problem, it risks being left behind by countries investing more successfully in the skills of their people, especially in a world where work is undergoing a rapid technology-driven change and people have to adapt to new circumstances (See figure).

Many Australians with low levels of education have low skills – this comes as no surprise, as they often quit education at an early stage. Perhaps more surprising is that a higher level qualification doesn’t guarantee advanced basic skills. The OECD study published today, Building Skills for All in Australia: Policy Insights from the Survey of Adult Skills shows that 17% of Australians with a vocational Certificate IV, Advanced Diploma or Associate Degree still have low levels of basic skills. 

Australia’s post-secondary VET (Vocational Education and Training) system is inclusive and caters to adults with different needs, including those with poor basic skills.  This is a real asset to the Australian education sector. But the OECD argues that providers of post-secondary VET could do more to help those students with poor basic skills.

The study also highlights specific weaknesses in the numeric skills of young women in Australia, indicating that far greater attention should be devoted to ensuring that young women participate fully within Australia’s wider efforts to strengthen mathematics within secondary education. Opportunity exists, moreover, to better support young people who are Not in Education, Employment or Training (the NEETs) to reengage in learning whether through the development of pre-apprenticeship provision or access to better childcare for young mothers.

The OECD Australia review follows a number of similar studies on low basic skills conducted in the United States, England, and Finland. The OECD’s work on adult learning and skills is designed to help countries identify where skills-related challenges arise among adults, and then offer them an opportunity to redirect their skills policies and investments. The review of Australia is part of this work.  

Helping adults to improve their basic skills remains a challenge nearly everywhere and there are no easy answers. But the alternative – of doing nothing – is even worse. So each of these studies help us all understand the challenges better and offer a menu of interventions to help countries tackle the issue. 

Links

To read a literature review about the problem of low basic skills, visit Adults with Low Literacy and Numeracy Skills: A Literature Review on Policy Intervention


Photo credit: @Shutterstock 

How inequalities in acquiring skills evolve

by Francesca Borgonovi
Senior Analyst, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills



Since 2000, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been a key source of information on how well societies and education systems have equipped 15-year-old students with the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in modern societies. However important this information is, most 15-year-old students can expect to stay in education or training for at least another three to four years after they are eligible to sit the PISA test; those who go on to complete higher degrees are looking at around another ten years of study. The tendency to devote more and more years to the development of skills through formal schooling, further education and training implies that the effectiveness of education and training systems should not be judged solely on how well 15-year-old students have mastered certain skills.

PISA data reveal large disparities in achievement not only across countries, but also within countries across different subgroups of students. In particular, compared to other students, students from socio-economically disadvantaged households score lower in the three core subjects considered in PISA: reading, mathematics and science. However, PISA by itself cannot identify how disparities in achievement evolve between the teenage years and young adulthood.

A new OECD working paper released today combines data from PISA and the Survey of Adult Skills to identify how socio-economic disparities in achievement evolve as students make the transition from compulsory schooling into further education, training or the labour market. In most countries, the socio-economic disparities in literacy and numeracy observed among 15-year-old students not only persist in young adulthood, but tend to widen.

Further education and participation in the labour market are crucial for acquiring skills after compulsory schooling. But socio-economically disadvantaged young people are considerably less likely than their more advantaged peers to attend post-secondary education and training, and are more likely to drop out of education without a secondary level qualification. They are also more likely to be unemployed or out of the labour force and to work in jobs that require little advanced, on-the-job training or practice of higher-order thinking skills.

Although it is not possible to establish causality, the data suggest that, once compulsory schooling is over, the opportunities available to young people to develop their skills diverge – in ways that are largely related to socio-economic status.

Links
Adult Skills in Focus No. 5: Do socio-economic disparities in skills grow between the teenage years and young adulthood?
OECD Working Paper No. 155: Youth in Transition: How does the Cohort Participating in PISA Fare in PIAAC
PISA 2015 Results
Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)


Chart Source: OECD Survey of Adult Skills (2012, 2015), www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/publicdataandanalysis ; OECD PISA (2000, 2003), www.oecd.org/pisa/data/database-pisa2000.htm ; www.oecd.org/pisa/data/database-pisa2003.htm

Building strong partnerships to tackle Mexico’s skills challenges

by Gabriela Ramos
Chief of Staff, OECD


Skills are central to the future prosperity and well-being of Mexico’s people 

Skills are the foundation upon which Mexico must build future growth and prosperity. Mexico, being one of the youngest populations among OECD countries, has a strong demographic advantage and thus a unique window of opportunity. But it also faces common challenges to bring the skills of its population up to the requirements of the global digital economy.

The time to act is now. Mexico needs to boost the development, activation and use of skills to drive further innovation and inclusive growth while dealing more effectively with longstanding, but increasingly urgent issues, such as improving equity and reducing informality. To this end, the aim of current educational reform in Mexico is a must to provide quality education to all the individuals.

However, challenges remain. According to the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data many youth in Mexico are not developing high levels of skills with a very high share of students performing poorly in mathematics (56.6%), in reading (41.7%) and in science (47.8%). In addition, due to high drop-out rates only 56% of 15-19 year-olds complete upper secondary education, far below the OECD average of 84%. Similarly, on tertiary level only 16% of the population aged 25 to 64 years old in 2015 had attained tertiary education, which is significantly below the OECD average of 36%. To these outcomes, we should add the fact that young people connect with informal labour market, reinforcing the precariousness of their job opportunities. Therefore, despite recent progress, Mexico still remains in a low-skill equilibrium.

Indeed, Mexico tends to specialise in low value-added activities linked to informal employment arrangements, which are estimated to account for 52.5% of all employment. Workers in the informal economy are, on average, less likely to: receive training, participate in high performance workplace practices that make more effective use of their skills, and find themselves employed in precarious and low quality jobs. Therefore, demand-side barriers which discourage employers from hiring formally should continue to be addressed, as well as the high cost to firms for hiring low income workers, a complex tax system, and heavy labour market regulations. Targeted support will be also needed if young people and women are to enter and remain engaged in the labour market. Over one in five young people are currently neither in employment, education, or training (NEETs), risking becoming permanently marginalised - from the labour market, from education, and from society. Given the differences between boys and girls not in employment or in schools, special emphasis should be placed on women’s conditions, and to sustain their involvement with high quality jobs. Mexico cannot be losing the talent of half of its population.

More needs to be done to improve the use of skills in the workplace. There are significant skills mismatches with a quarter of workers (26%) over-educated and just under a third (31%) under-educated for their current job. Companies and educational institutions need to co-operate to reduce these mismatches at source, while firm-sponsored training could help the low-skilled. At the same time boosting innovation and research are critical if Mexican firms are to continue improving productivity, move up the global value chain, and increase the demand for higher skills. But in 2013, Mexican businesses invested the equivalent of just 0.2% of GDP in R&D. That’s not just well short of the OECD average but well below Korea’s 3.3% of its GDP investment in R&D during the same time period.

Making this all happen in practice requires concerted government action. Mexico has undertaken a number of reforms aiming to enhance the quality of teaching, raise productivity, stimulate innovation and improve integration into global value chains. Actually, one of the positive pieces of news is that productivity has increased recently as a result of recent reforms, particularly in the telecommunications market.

It is necessary to improve effectiveness of government institutions, and formal collaboration arrangements across ministries. The National Productivity Committee is good news in this sense – but much remains to be done. Yet governments cannot achieve better skills outcomes alone. Success will depend on the commitment and actions of a broad range of stakeholders. The help of employers, trade unions, students and trainers is needed. These are the people who, each and every day, invest in skills, set skills in motion and put them to work.

Best practices of other countries 

Countries that are most successful in mobilising the skills potential of their people share a number of features: they provide high-quality opportunities to learn throughout life, both in and outside school and the workplace; they develop education and training programmes that are relevant to students and the labour market; they create incentives for, and eliminate disincentives to, supplying skills in the labour market; they recognise and make maximal use of available skills in workplaces; they seek to anticipate future skills needs and they make learning and labour market information easy to find and use.

The OECD Skills Strategy provides countries with a framework for developing co-ordinated and coherent policies that support the development, activation, and effective use of skills. In Norway, our collaboration clearly demonstrated the value of a whole of government approach to tackle the country’s longstanding skills challenges. The diagnostic and action reports fed into policy measures to improve career guidance and outreach to low-skilled adults – and served as the foundations for the new National Skills Strategy to be launched this year. Portugal used our project to build broad stakeholder engagement in defining the key skills challenges facing the country as it emerged from the worst economic crisis of its history. This year we will be using our shared diagnosis to help design concrete actions to provide adult education and training across the country. Korea has built on the results of its diagnostic report and ongoing OECD support to engage actively with a wide range of stakeholders on critical issues such as youth employability and lifelong learning.

Mexico finds itself in a context with many other countries moving at a high speed. The digitalisation of the economy and the rapid pace of change require not only a good knowledge basis, but also lifelong learning and the flexibility to adapt skills to changing conditions and demands. The future of work and the capacity to anticipate the evolving needs of the markets, due to the rapid technological progress, is a common challenge that all countries are trying to address. Mexico has been participating in the OECD Skills Strategy project to work with us to advance the best practices of other countries that have been able to improve their outcomes in this field.

Mapping Mexico’s skills challenges together

Since March 2016, we have been working closely with Mexico in applying the OECD Skills Strategy framework as part of a collaborative project to build a more effective national skills strategy. The National Project Team established by the Mexican government to oversee this process is co-ordinated by the National Productivity Committee (NPC) and includes representatives from Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Labour, Ministry of Economic Affairs and the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT). The CNP has been critical in this process, as it embodies the spirit of partnership across government ministries and with key sectors of the economy and society as well as focuses on the nexus between productivity, inclusive growth and skills.
The results of this work are published in the OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Mexico that sets out 8 skills challenges for Mexico. These challenges were identified in the course of several rounds of discussions with the National Project Team, technical meetings with Mexico’s leading experts and input from over 100 stakeholders such as employers, trade unions, education providers and experts including from other International Organizations, gathered during two interactive workshops held in June 2016 and September 2016 in Mexico City.

Mexico’s 8 skills challenges

So what are the main skills challenges facing Mexico today?
With regard to developing relevant skills, the report concludes that Mexico should focus on:
Improving the foundation skills of students in compulsory education
Increasing access to tertiary education while improving the quality and relevance of the skills developed in tertiary education.

When it comes to activating its skills supply, Mexico will need to tackle the challenges of:
Removing supply and demand-side barriers to activating skills in (formal) employment.
Boosting the skills activation of vulnerable groups.

Mexico could make more effective use of the skills it already has by: 
Improving the use of skills at work.
Supporting the demand for higher skills to boost innovation

Finally, Mexico could strengthen the overall governance of the skills system by: 
Supporting collaboration across government and stakeholders to achieve better skills outcomes
Improving public and private skills funding.

Building a shared road-map for action

As the first OECD country from Latin America to embark upon a National Skills Strategy country project, Mexico has demonstrated its commitment to leveraging international comparative data and good practice to tackle its own skills challenges. Equally, this analysis of Mexico’s skills system will be of great interest to many other countries around the world.

Throughout this initial diagnostic phase, we have witnessed first-hand a strong commitment to improving Mexico’s skills outcomes across government, employers and trade unions, as well as education and training providers.

The true test lies ahead, in designing concrete actions to tackle the skills challenges facing Mexico. Government cannot achieve better skills outcomes alone, so moving from diagnosis to action will require a whole of government and a whole of society approach.

The OECD stands ready to contribute to Mexico’s ongoing efforts to achieve its ambitious goals in designing and implementing better skills policies for better jobs and better lives.

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