Lessons to be learned from the world’s education leaders

Australia used to have one of the world’s leading school systems, but we are being left behind.

Australia used to have one of the world’s leading school systems, but in the past decade learning outcomes have dropped to levels closer to the average of school systems in the industrialised world.

The quarter of the most disadvantaged 15-year-olds in Singapore now show results similar to the average Australian student. Underperformance is not just visible among poor students in poor neighbourhoods but also among many students in many neighbourhoods in public and private schools. And the most significant drop in Australia’s scores in the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment occurred among its top performers.

That raises the question of what Australia might learn from the world’s educational leaders. Obviously, one can’t copy and paste school systems wholesale. But PISA has revealed a surprising number of features shared by the world’s best performing school systems. The first thing I learned is that leaders in high-performing school systems have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education more than other things. Chinese parents and grandparents will invest their time, energy and money into the education of their children, their future. In the Western world, we have started to borrow the money of our children to finance our consumption today.

But placing a high value on education is just part of the equation. Another part is the belief in the success of every child. And the fact students in most East Asian countries consistently believe that achievement is mainly a product of hard work, rather than inherited intelligence as many Australian students say, suggests that education and its social context can make a difference in instilling values that foster success in education.

Success is also about giving children a strong start, another area where Australia still has some way to catch up.

High-quality early childhood education and care can have a major impact on children’s cognitive abilities as well as on their socio-emotional development, and it can improve social mobility across generations. Unsurprisingly, the number of years spent in early childhood education and care is clearly visible in the performance outcomes in PISA at age 15.

And nowhere does the quality of a school system exceed the quality of its teachers. High-performing school systems all pay great attention to how they select and train their staff. And when deciding where to invest, they prioritise the quality of teachers over the size of classes.

They provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers. High-performing countries also have moved on from bureaucratic control and accountability to professional forms of work organisation. They encourage their teachers to make innovations in pedagogy, to improve their own performance and that of their colleagues, and to pursue professional development that leads to stronger education practice.

The challenge is not just to make teaching financially attractive — Australia does reasonably well on that — but to make teaching intellectually more attractive.

Perhaps the most impressive outcome of world-class school systems is that they deliver high quality across the entire school system so that every student benefits from excellent teaching. Achieving greater equity in education is not only a social justice imperative, it is also a way to use resources more effectively, and to increase the supply of skills that fuel economic growth and promote social cohesion.

Every three years PISA reminds us that this isn’t grey theory but that educational policy and practice can result in rapid improvement. And it is important to get this right. Without the right skills, people end up on the margins of society, technological progress doesn’t translate into economic growth, Australia will face an uphill struggle to remain ahead in this hyper-connected world and ultimately lose the social glue that holds together democratic societies.

I know that many will ask to what extent the observed results of the countries studied are artefacts of culture and context rather than the result of policy and practice. But we should ask ourselves more clearly to what extent culture is not just inherited from the past but also created by what we do.

The difference between education systems that are open to the world and ready to learn from other experiences, and those that feel threatened by being exposed or being left behind or to alternative ways of thinking and working is likely to be a key differentiator in the educational progress that we will see around the world.

The world is indifferent to tradition and past reputations, unforgiving of frailty and ignorant of custom or practice. Success will go to those individuals and nations that are swift to adapt, slow to complain and open to change. The task of governments is to help citizens rise to the challenges.

Andreas Schleicher is director-general of the OECD’s Directorate for Education.