Mini plenary: summary of OECD PISA research

  • Share
  • Print

14 June 2012, 3pm
By Ann Willacy

Andreas Schleicher, Deputy Director for Education and Special Advisor on education policy to OECD's Secretary-General.

Comparisons of the educational achievement of different nations provides us with some fascinating differences. Countries vary tremendously in their ability to provide both high quality education and high equity across the socio-economic scale.

However the highest performing nations have a lot in common. In particular, a strong focus on high quality leadership and the role of school leaders is more critical now than ever.

The Program for International Student Achievement (PISA) research tells us a lot about the characteristics of successful schools. They:

  • have the confidence to adapt the curriculum to local needs
  • support, evaluate and develop teacher quality through a culture of mutual challenge
  • have school leaders who have strategic management, including control over capital budgets
  • show leadership beyond school walls which enhances the learning of the education community and also the lead school

Transforming a national education system takes energy and commitment, and a willingness to create and promote new cultural values. The most recent data from PISA shows some dramatic gains from countries previously thought to have had cultural barriers to new ideas and transformational thinking such as Japan, as well as some of the high performing Scandinavian countries like Finland and Sweden.

Factors that influence a rise in standards are fairly uniform across countries and include:

  • professionalised recruitment to ensure the right leaders are selected
  • capacity building in leadership teams to plan for and feed succession planning
  • the need to define what good school leadership looks like
  • leadership induction to support new leaders and help them build support networks
  • in-service training
  • developing capacity in leadership very early in a teacher’s career
  • intelligent compensation
  • appraisal systems
  • system leadership

It is in system leadership where countries can gain the most by capitalising on the knowledge which is already in the system. In Shanghai, for example, within-school variability has been cut by half by pairing high- and low-performing schools, and by using retired school leaders to provide administrative and pedagogical advice.

Education leaders were urged to

  • be acutely sensitive to the differences in students
  • promote connections
  • be demanding of students without overloading
  • foster continual assessment with feedback
  • ensure learning is social and collaborative
  • make learning accessible, encourage engagement, and help students to understand themselves

The route to success lies in innovation and knowledge, inspired by practitioners, combined with high-quality research.