Tag Archives: OECD

OECD’s review of education: 2024

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OECD’s latest Education Indicators at a Glance 2024 has recently been published Education at a Glance 2024 | OECD Within the publication is an interesting section of teachers and teacher shortages.

Compared with most countries where data are analysed in the study, the United Kingdom has a better-balanced age profile for its teaching force.  With primary teachers under 30 at 20% of the workforce, compared with the OECD average of 12%, the UK doesn’t quite top the list. Luxembourg has 27% of primary teachers below the age of 30. But the UK is in the top 5% of countries.

As a result of the high percentage of younger teachers in the United Kingdom there is a relatively smaller proportions of teachers under the age of 50. In the primary sector it is 16%, compared with 34% across the OECD. For the lower secondary sector, the UK percentage is 19% compared with 36% for the OECD average. As a result, the United Kingdom faces less of an issue with regard to teacher retirements over the next decade than in many other countries. However, there is a need to ensure that younger teachers do not leave the profession as that would nullify the gain on lower retirement numbers.

Teachers in the United Kingdon have some of the worst pupil teacher ratios in the OECD, and certainly in Western Europe, within the school sector. The data in the OECD book supports my blog posts at various times in recent years, such as: Worst Secondary PTRs for a decade | John Howson and by my longitudinal study of changes in PTRs over the past 50 years available through Oxford Teacher Services

Another interesting feature of the OECD tables about teachers and teaching is the gap between classroom teachers’ pay and that of school leaders. This seems larger in the United Kingdom than in many other OECD countries – perhaps that’s why there are still so many older teachers in service if they are being well paid compared with younger classroom teachers.

Although this blog has concentrated on some of the OECD’s data about teachers, the key sections of Education Indicators at a Glance this year are around equity and the levels of education studies by different groups within societies across the OECD landscape.

One of the key messages from the book’s editorial is that

‘High quality education systems, with fair access for children from all social and economic backgrounds, can be a means to lift people out of poverty and empower students to reach their full potential.

There has been good progress in educational attainment and outcomes, for example, with a significant drop in the share of 25–34 year-olds without an upper secondary qualification, which has decreased from 17% in 2016 to 14% in 2023, in many countries.

However, challenges remain in achieving equality of opportunity. The 2024 edition of Education at a Glance, with a spotlight on equity in education, finds that family background, for example, remains a strong influence on education outcomes.

Fewer than 1 in 5 adults, whose parents did not complete upper secondary education, have university degrees or another form of tertiary qualification. And children from low-income families are, on average in countries with available data1, 18 percentage points less likely to be enrolled in early childhood education and care before the age of 3.’ Page 8

This is an important set of messages in the week of the Labour party Conference.

Poverty is not destiny – OECD PISA Report

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OECD published the latest of its PISA studies today. This is a long and complex report and I am grateful to those that have already pointed the way to some of the key points. Generally, the data is for the United Kingdom and not just England.

As in previous studies, the urban regions of China entered plus some other Asian economies provide outstanding outcomes among fifteen years olds taking the survey tests, especially in maths and reading. The report can be found at: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2018-results.htm

What follows are some of the comments that caught my eye at a first glance. The most significant challenge, especially in the light of the Prime Minister’s comments on parity of esteem is whether selective secondary education is good for the economy? Such schools are certainly good for those that attend them. But, for the nation as a whole?

The OECD believes that “it remains necessary for many countries to promote equity with much greater urgency.” While students from well-off families will often find a path to success in life, those from disadvantaged families have generally only one single chance in life, and that is “a great teacher and a good school. If they miss that boat, subsequent education opportunities will tend to reinforce, rather than mitigate, initial differences in learning outcomes.

One in ten disadvantaged students was able to score in the top quarter of reading performance in their country/economy, indicating that poverty is not destiny. The data also show that the world is no longer divided between rich and well educated nations and poor and badly educated ones. The level of economic development explains just 28% of the variation in learning outcomes across countries if a linear relationship is assumed between the two.

In over half of the PISA participating countries and economies, principals of disadvantaged schools were significantly more likely than those of advantaged schools to report that their school’s capacity to provide instruction is hindered by either a lack of or inadequacy of educational material; and in 31 countries and economies, principals of disadvantaged schools were more likely than those of advantaged ones to report that a lack of teaching staff hinders instruction. In these systems, students face a double disadvantage: one that comes from their home background and another that is created by the school system. The report concludes: “There can be numerous reasons why some students perform better than others, but those performance differences should never be related to the social background of students and schools.”

Many students, especially disadvantaged students, hold lower ambitions than would be expected given their academic achievement. In the United Kingdom, about one in three high-achieving disadvantaged students – but fewer than one in ten high-achieving advantaged students – do not expect to complete tertiary education.

Some 81% of students in the United Kingdom (OECD average: 74%) agreed or strongly agreed that their teacher shows enjoyment in teaching. In most countries and economies, including in the United Kingdom, students scored higher in reading when they perceived their teacher as more enthusiastic, especially when students said their teachers are interested in the subject.

The OECD findings also reveal how the foundations for education success are laid early. Students who had attended pre-primary education for longer scored better in PISA than students who had not attended pre-primary education. Between 2015 and 2018, the share of 15-year-old students who had attended pre-primary school for three years increased in 28 countries. Despite this advantage, in 68 out of 78 education systems with comparable data, students who had not attended pre-primary education were much more likely to be socio-economically disadvantaged and enrolled in more disadvantaged schools at the age of 15. This highlights how access to pre-primary education often reinforces educational disparities

OECD Education Indicators at a Glance: 2020 Edition

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Each year the OECD brings together the most recent data about education systems. Originally it was just data from the OECD countries, but now the scope has widened to include some other countries. This allows for both a EU23 country average and in some cases a G20 average number to be calculated in many of the tables.

In this blog post, I look at three sets of data; age of teachers in primary and lower secondary sectors; the percentage of female teachers in these sectors and some data about class sizes.

The data for the home nations is aggregated into a United Kingdom statistics. This is despite, as pointed out in a previous post, education is a devolved activity and each constituent part of the United Kingdom takes its own decisions on education policy. However, they are not separate countries, and are viewed no differently than either German Land or French Departments by the OECD.

On the ratio of students to teaching staff in 2018, the United Kingdom still has one of the largest ratios in the table for the primary sector, at 20 pupils per teacher. Only The Russian Federation, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, of the nations included in the table, have larger class sizes. By comparison, the OECD average is 15 pupils per teacher, and the EU23 average is even smaller at just 13 pupils per teacher.  The United Kingdom figure comes after including the smaller class sizes often found in swathes of rural Scotland and Wales.

In the lower secondary table, the United Kingdom performs better. The average falls to 16 pupils per teacher, compared with an OECD average of 13 and the EU23 average of 11 pupils per teacher. Although the imbalance between staffing is of long-standing, it is smaller than a generation ago. It is to be hoped that as policymakers fully understand the importance of early education the gap will continue to close between the staffing ratios funded for younger and older pupils.

On the age distribution of teachers, the United Kingdom had the system with the highest percentage of teachers below the age of 30 working in the primary sector at 29% of the teaching force, and one of the lowest percentage of teachers older than 50 in the sector.  Young teachers are more recently prepared for the classroom, but less likely to remain there than older teachers.

The large percentage may partly be down to the rise in the birth rate that required more teachers to be hired as the increased number of pupils reached school age. By contrast, many western European countries, including Finland, had less than ten per cent of their primary teaching force in the under-30 age bracket in 2018.

The position is similar in the lower secondary workforce, with the United Kingdom again leading the way at 22%, with the second highest percentage of teachers in the youngest age grouping: only Turkey had a higher percentage. Indeed, the EU23 average was only nine per cent of lower secondary teachers under the age of thirty in 2018.

On gender, although we tend to think of teaching these days as a profession where women vastly outnumber men, and that is true, the data revealed that in 2018 the United Kingdom was close to the OECD average of 83% female teachers among teachers under thirty in the primary sector. The EU23 average for this group was 85% ,with a UK figure of 84%.  By contrast, in Austria and Italy more than 90% of their teacher under the age of 30 were female. In Denmark, the percentage was only 58%.

In the lower secondary sector, the international averages were a 68% of teachers under thirty being female. The United Kingdom were again similar to the averages with a figure of 66% for female teachers as a proportion of teachers under the age of thirty. Denmark again had one of the lowest percentages, but Italy had a much higher percentage of male teacher in the lower secondary sector.

There is more to be said about the difference in survival rates in teaching for men and women, and the relative lack of women in leadership positions, even after several decades of equal opportunities legislation.

Data on teachers’ ethnic backgrounds would also be useful, not least to know where and how well it is collected across the OECD countries.

The data was collected in a period of calm before the pandemic storm hit the world. What these numbers will look like in a decade if employment opportunities change is in the realm of speculation. Might the patterns be very different or might the journey to equal opportunities really be more firmly embedded in the labour market than ever before?

OECD’s Bill of health on teachers

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Today the OECD publishes their latest TALIS report. (Teaching and Learning International Study) This report is about teachers and school leaders as lifelong learners. In addition to the full report, there are digests of the evidence from particular countries produced as separate country reports. It is important to note that the country report is headed England (UK). I assume that it is just schools in England included. This is important since education is a devolved activity.

When reading the report it is also of importance to start from the end and to note that the response rate from teachers and school leaders in England was generally only regarded as ‘fair’. Indeed, in some aspects the response wasn’t very far above the level regarded as too low to use in the survey. The other caveat, as far as I am concerned, is around the term ‘lower secondary’. This is not a discrete phase in England except in Central Bedfordshire, Northumberland and a few other towns around the country where 9-13 middle schools still exist, and, of course, in the independent sector where many ‘prep’ schools can be regarded as partly covering the lower secondary age range.  This may especially affect views on the nature of principals as, presumably most replying from the state sector in England were head teachers of secondary schools.

Almost all secondary teachers are trained through the post-degree professional training route, whether that training is in universities, SCITTs or schools. That is not the model throughout much of the OECD, where teacher preparation often still occurs alongside the acquisition of subject knowledge.

What is interesting is the relatively small degree of change recorded on a number of the items between the 2013 and 2018 TALIS studies, at least as far as England is concerned.

As the retirement boom of the first decade of this century fades into history, it is clear that the teaching force in England is generally younger than in many OECD countries. There is a slightly higher proportion of men in the workforce than across the OECD at 36% compared to 34% as the OECD average, but fewer women are principals – 41% against the OECD average of 47%. As a result of the age profile, the average length of service of a teacher in England is 13 years, compared to the OECD average of 17 years and more than 20 years in the small Baltic States.

Length of service is important in how it can affect attitudes to professional development. Older more experienced teachers may take a different attitude to professional development than that of teachers in the first few years of their careers; I dislike the TALIS term of ‘novice teacher’.

The BBC have chosen to highlight the issue of cyber-bullying and the fact that head teachers in England are more likely to face problems with pupils bullying online and misusing social media than in any other developed country. However, there seems to have been little change in classroom behaviour faced by teachers in England between the 2013 and 2018 studies.

Finally, although teachers saw the need for more funding and resources, the response of teachers to increasing their salaries was below the OECD average. This is despite teachers in England not being as well paid as those in many other OECD countries.

More or less: which way for the future?

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The BBC has recently run an interesting piece about the relationship between class sizes and teachers’ salaries, based upon some OECD data. The article headed ‘when class sizes fall so does teachers’ pay’ is an interesting thesis. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47281532 However, how does it relate to the first law of economics that when there is a shortage of supply, and demand remains consistent, either the price will rise or substitution will take place?

The nightmare scenario for government is that facing the secondary sector in England at present. Pupil numbers are on a rising curve, at least until the middle of the next decade. This means more funding will be required, even if the unit of funding per pupil falls in real terms. At the same time, there is a labour shortage that is growing worse in some parts of the curriculum.

Hence, demand for more cash for schooling since, as the BBC pointed out, it is a fact of school life that staffing costs, and especially the cost of teachers, consumes the largest part of any school budget. However, schools are competing with other government services for cash and it seems likely that in England, however hard the teacher associations press their case, the cash needed for the extra pupils will come before any significant uplift in funding per pupil.

So, to that extent, larger classes is one way to fund better pay for teachers. However, most schools, and especially secondary schools, are constrained about how far class sizes can be increased, due to the physical nature of their buildings and the dependence on a classroom based building model.

In England, there may be the space to increase pupil-teacher ratios, perhaps back to where they were around the turn of the century, but that is likely to come from altering contact ratios – the amount of time teachers spend in the classroom – as much as from increasing class sizes. The trade-off of worsening contact ratios will almost certainly be a rethink about workload, since making the job of a teacher look even harder won’t help recruitment into the profession.

There is one helpful point for the government in England, but probably not for parents, and that is the fact that in England children have no right to be taught by anyone with knowledge and training in the subject they are teaching. Indeed, in extremis – nowhere defined except in very vague terms – children can be ‘taught’ by those with no background knowledge or training in what they are asked to teach. So long as there are enough people willing to be teachers, then pay can be kept under control. And, as everyone knows, there are plenty of arts and social science graduates for whom a teaching salary can still look attractive.

Today The Pearson Group published its annual results. Might their experience point to another way forward? The substitution of capital – in the form of IT and AI – for labour? So long as the learner is engaged, as there are in higher education, this may well be part of the way forward. But, for those that see schooling as a struggle between the generations, rather than the development of future wealth and happiness, the physical presence of a teacher overseeing learning has much to recommend it.

Who that teacher might be, and how well they will be paid, will, I am sure, still feature large in the future debates about the economic of education.

 

OECD’s view of UK teachers

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The OECD has today published the latest in its Education Indicators at a Glance series this is a weighty document that takes a while to download even on reasonably fast computers. Still, I is worth the efforts. http://webexchanges.oecdcode.org/F0w3Shjh/EAG2018_final_embargo.pdf

Two of the interesting comments about the United Kingdom are that:

The teaching workforce in the United Kingdom is one of the youngest among all OECD countries, and starting salaries from pre-primary to upper secondary education are below the OECD average.

Lower secondary school heads play an active role in decision making and leadership in the United Kingdom. In England, they earn more than twice the salary of tertiary-educated workers, the highest premium for school heads across OECD countries.

It is interesting to read the OECD comment specifically about headteachers in England as the majority of their observations are a combination of the four ‘home nations’ data into a United Kingdom analysis.

The OECD has some interesting observations about the teaching force in the United Kingdom:

As in most OECD countries, the majority of teaching staff in the United Kingdom are women, with the share of women decreasing as the level of education increases. At lower secondary level, there is more gender balance in the United Kingdom than in many other countries. In 2016, 36% of lower secondary teachers in the United Kingdom were men, almost 5 percentage points higher than the average across OECD countries (31%).

Despite our concerns about attracting men into teaching, the United Kingdom seems to be doing better than many other OECD countries in attracting and keeping men in secondary school teaching, but we cannot afford to be complacent about the future in terms of attracting anyone into teaching.

The good news is that the United Kingdom has a relatively young teaching force. This should be helpful in ensuring a stream of future leaders for the schools unless wastage removes the brightest and best into other jobs, an issue not discussed by the OECD.

The teaching workforce in the United Kingdom has become younger since 2005 and is now the youngest among all OECD countries in primary education and the second youngest after Turkey in lower secondary education. In primary schools, 31% of teachers are aged 30 or younger, compared to the OECD average of 12%.  

However, there is a risk with so many young workers of a loss of a proportion of teachers to caring responsibilities.

OECD acknowledge the relatively poor starting pay for teachers – this was before the current 3.5% increase in England.

When bonuses and allowances are included, the average actual salaries of lower secondary teachers in England and Scotland are lower than the average earnings of tertiary-educated workers, as in most countries. However, this relative earnings gap is slightly higher than the OECD average.

However, the OECD notes that after 15 years experience (sic), teachers’ salaries have increased considerably, and exceed the OECD average across all levels of education except upper secondary education in both England and Scotland. However, salary progression slows down after 15 years of experience, resulting in top of scale salaries that lag behind those in other OECD countries. It is not clear whether this also applies to salaries of school leaders.

In terms of school autonomy, I find the following statement difficult to understand.

The United Kingdom is among the few countries where local authorities are the main initial source of funds as well as the main final purchasers of educational services. In the United Kingdom, local authorities generate and spend 55% of education funds in primary, secondary and post-secondary non-tertiary education.

Since local authorities don’t have a vote on Schools Forum and there is a move to a National Funding formula, this paragraph might need reconsidering in future versions of the publication.

Overall, OECD remain positive of the benefits of education to individuals and society as a whole.

 

 

International Study on school funding by OECD

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The DfE has a new benchmark by which to assess the National Funding Formula for Schools. The OECD has just published a thematic review of school funding ‘The Funding of School Education: Connecting Resources and Learning’. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264276147-en

This is an ambitious report into the issues relating to funding schools across just under 20 of the economies that make up the OECD block. In one sense the issues raised here aren’t new. Funding, and the relationship between funding and the aims of an education system, has always been a matter for debate. Indeed, ever since the governments first became involved in funding education, the key questions around how and to whom have never been far from the surface of political debate. At the most basic level, this is characterised by two of the issues discussed in the OECD report. How much funding is raised locally and where that isn’t sufficient how is it topped up, and secondly, how is the success of any funding model measured and what happens when schools fall short of successful outcomes? This includes the debate about what is meant by equality and equal opportunities. Providing every learner with the same opportunity is not the same as providing them with the same funding as something as simple as the payment of a London salary weighting in England clearly demonstrated well before the notion of Pupil and Service Children Premiums were ever considered. Finally, there is the issue of the governance, where those that raise the money often don’t actually spend it on education. This involves the quality and quantity of data necessary for this task to be effective without overwhelming the system.

The OECD Review notes that as school systems have become more complex and characterised by multi-level governance, a growing set of actors including different levels of the school administration, schools themselves and private providers are involved in school funding in many OECD countries.

The Review notes that :

‘While on average across OECD countries, central governments continue to provide the majority of financial resources for schools, the responsibility for spending these funds is shared among an increasingly wide range of actors. In many countries, the governance of school funding is characterised by increasing fiscal decentralisation, considerable responsibility of schools over budgetary matters and growing public funding of private school providers. These developments generate new opportunities and challenges for school funding policies and need to be accompanied by adequate institutional arrangements.’

The OCED authors consider that to ‘support effective school funding and avoid adverse effects on equity in changing governance contexts, funding reforms should seek to: ensure that roles and responsibilities in decentralised funding systems are well aligned; provide the necessary conditions for effective budget management at the school level; and develop adequate regulatory frameworks for the public funding of private providers.’

It is disappointing that the home nations don’t form part of the review group of nations, although reference to issues and the literature arising from the Uk are to be found throughout the document, if the reader knows where to look., including  Dolton and Marcenaro-Gutierrez 2011 article in the journal Economic Policy, “If you pay peanuts do you get monkeys?

While this Review will be a mine of information to scholars researching the issue of funding, always recognising that some decisions are context bound and that, for instance, more rural economies may have different priorities than more urban and mixed economies, where the needs of the two groups compete with each other.

It is to be hoped that work will be undertaken to consider the differing actions of the four home nations with respect to funding against the issues raised in this review: the outcomes might be very illuminating.