Four Education Trends that Countries Everywhere Should Know About

Recently, we reached out to education experts around the world to hear what they considered the most pressing issues facing our sector today. Surprisingly, they all said that little has changed in terms of our most common challenges. What was changing, they agreed, were the innovative ways that the global community has begun tackling them…

1. Neuroscience
2. MOOCs
3. Blockchain
4. Consequences of negative population growth

How Europe can upgrade its ‘convergence machine’ for greater equality   The European Union has had an image problem of late, as political forces from left and right, and north and south, like to portray it as a source of new and old economic and social problems. Yet the critics of Europe often seem to forget that the EU has been a stunning success in delivering peace and prosperity for the countries of Europe since its foundation a little over 60 years ago. Globally, Europe stands out as the region with the fastest convergence of living standards over the last four decades, as the EU accelerated the development of poorer countries through its enlargement, the single market, and structural and investment funds. Moreover, Europe’s “convergence machine” has been resilient to the recent economic crisis and recession, most spectacularly for its newest members: Romania’s GDP per capita increased from 35 percent of the EU average in 2005 to 58 percent in 2016, while Poland became a high-income country faster than any country in the world except South Korea….

Education in the EU: Diverging Learning Opportunities?  This report examines one of the most influential forces in any society, one that can contribute both to bridging differences or to deepening divides among people: skills. The skills that people have when they enter the workforce and that they can build on later in their work life determine to a large extent their ability to thrive, to raise families, and to feel vested in their country’s economic and political future. Skills gaps and their formation, mirror and exacerbate social divides as well. In the European Union (EU), this issue has new urgency: changes in the labor market have made human capital an increasingly important divider between those how thrive on the labor market and those who not. Importantly, education systems in the EU are not becoming more successful in ensuring that all students acquire the skills needed. This report takes an in-depth look at socioeconomic disparities in educational opportunity and achievement, to aid policymakers in identifying where and how changes can be made to bring more educational equity, ultimately, into the future employment and well-being of Europe’s more vulnerable populations.

Skills and Europe’s Labor Market  This report examines recent trends and underlying causes in labor market outcomes, to assess how the importance of skills for productive employment has evolved. It particularly reviews labor market outcomes and the demand and supply side factors that determine labor outcomes, with an emphasis on the extent to which technological change drives labor outcomes via its impact on the task content of jobs.

Work-Based Learning: Getting Out of School and into the Workplace  The potential for work-based learning to improve the quality and relevance of vocational education and training is widely recognized. Work-based learning allows students to develop skills and gain experience through practical, real-life experiences in the workplace, complementing what is being learned in the classroom. However, many vocational education and training systems worldwide are still largely school-based and do not incorporate much work-based learning. There are many studies of mature training systems that are already largely employer-driven and firm-based, but less is known about how school-based vocational education and training systems can best transition to including stronger elements of work-based learning. This report takes a region of Poland as a case study…

Thailand threatens to quit Pisa test  Thailand may boycott the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) this August if the test organiser refuses to allow the Education Ministry to proof-read the translated examination papers…

Estonia Ministry working on plan to make kindergarten mandatory  Minister of Education and Research Mailis Reps (Centre) has a plan in the works to make kindergarten mandatory, with all children not attending to officially be considered homeschooled. Former Education Minister Jürgen Ligi (Reform) supports her plan, but the Estonian Parents’ Union believes that expectations for preschool education should be considered first. Currently, 94% of children between the ages of 3-7 attend kindergarten. Reps told ERR that in a typical year, up to ten percent of children are left out of preschool education, and this is a problem…

Temperature and Human Capital in the Short- and Long-Run  We provide the first estimates of the potential impact of climate change on human capital, focusing on the impacts from both short-run weather and long-run climate. Exploiting the longitudinal structure of the NLSY79 and random fluctuations in weather across interviews, we identify the effect of temperature in models with child-specific fixed effects. We find that short-run changes in temperature lead to statistically significant decreases in cognitive performance on math (but not reading) beyond 26C (78.8F). In contrast, our long-run analysis, which relies upon long-difference and rich cross-sectional models, reveals no statistically significant relationship between climate and human capital. This finding is consistent with the notion that adaptation, particularly compensatory behavior, plays a significant role in limiting the long run impacts from short run weather shocks…

Many Dutch High Schools Experimenting with Alternative Timetables  Dutch high schools are increasingly getting rid of traditional timetables and experimenting with new ones. Currently at least a fifth of secondary schools in the Netherlands have said goodbye to traditional 50 minutes-long lessons, according to a survey by Leerling 2020, a project of sector organization VO-Raad, AD reports…

UNESCO webinar on Lessons for Education Development from East Asia: Growing Smarter  Lessons for Education Development from East Asia: Growing Smarter is a special seminar focusing on World Bank’s new flagship “Growing Smarter: Learning and Equitable Development in East Asia and Pacific” hosted by the NEQMAP Secretariat at UNESCO Bangkok on 25 May 2018. Watch the recorded webinar here.

e-Magazine on IFC Cape Town education conference, April 10-11: Learning for the Jobs of Tomorrow  The magazine provides a comprehensive roundup of the many rich conversations and discussions at Cape Town, including: Keynote on “The Exponential Future of Work” by Gary Bolles, Chair of the Future of Work at Singularity University; The panel session on “The Emerging Talent Marketplaces;” The session on the” The Growth of Alternative Credentials and Implications for Education Institutions;” Plenary session on the Learning Crisis and WDR18 (Liz Ninan).  During the 2-day event, IFC launched its newly designed Employability Tool.

Bridge Academies battles its enemies  It is cheap and popular with parents, but unions are trying to shut it down… “BRIDGE is unauthorised and illegal,” says Wilson Sossion, the secretary-general of the Kenya National Union of Teachers. “The curriculum they teach and the medium they use are not approved. The teachers are untrained and unqualified. They should be closed down.” Bridge International Academies is the world’s most controversial low-cost for-profit chain of schools. It has raised about $140m in investment from the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-investment arm of the World Bank. Some 120,000 children are enrolled in its schools in Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria and India. It gets results: in Kenya, its biggest market, costs per pupil are $190 a year (parents pay an average of $84 a year), compared with $313 in government schools, and 86% of children score well enough to pass into secondary school, compared with a national average of 76%. Since half the primary-school pupils in the developing world cannot read or write a sentence, such schools are doing a crucial job…