This year’s update on Closing the Gap presents a picture similar to 2014 in education - there is much work still to be done to improve educational outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students…
In order to make young children “school ready”, the English government is now encouraging parents to place their children in school nurseries shortly after their second birthday. But there is evidence…
For most governments, it’s their platform of education reforms that is politically one of the hardest programmes to push through. Yet push it through they do, in what has become a constant effort by politicians…
Only a tenth of education reforms carried out around the world since 2008 have been analysed by governments for the impact they have on children’s education. A new report by the Organisation for Economic…
It is no secret that children of East Asian heritage excel at school. In England, for example, 78% of ethnic Chinese children obtain at least 5 A* to C GCSE grades, compared to a national average of just…
There has been much publicity in recent years about China and its teachers. After the most recent results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) were published in 2013, considerable…
There has been a recent explosion of interest in the effectiveness of education systems around the world, largely driven by international studies that compare the performance of large samples of students…
There are around 1.3 billion children enrolled in primary and secondary schools worldwide. Each year, governments spend trillions of dollars on their education systems with the objective of educating children…
It’s known as the PISA/TIMSS travelling caravan. Each time international tests results are released with league tables showing winners and losers a gaggle of researchers, academics and assorted fellow…
“PISA shock” is the term that has been coined for the sense of political crisis and knee-jerk policy reaction that typically occurs when a country drops in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and…
The recent open letter of concern penned by nearly 100 academics from around the world about the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s international education rankings is more than just…
With the creeping rise of exam results over the past few decades, many have questioned whether standards are really as high as they were in the past. More worrying still is whether pupils in the UK can…
With a heavy feeling of déjà vu, here we are again with another round of introspection on the OECD’s international Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings and the mediocre education…
It’s no longer enough for children just to be able to read, count or multiply. With computers now doing many mundane repetitive tasks for us, many jobs in today’s world require analytical skills and the…
Chinese students begin learning their maths facts at a very early age: maths textbooks begin with multiplication in the first semester of second grade, when children are seven years old. In order to understand…
How much can we really deduce about academies and free schools from the Organisation for Economic Development’s (OECD) international education rankings? When the OECD’s deputy director for education Andreas…
The Conversation is running a series, Class in Australia, to identify, illuminate and debate its many manifestations. Here, Stewart Riddle outlines the correlation between low socioeconomic backgrounds…
Chinese pupils are once again at the top of international education rankings. Recent further in-depth analysis of results from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, have…
The length of the school year and school days, as well as the timing of holidays, is always a controversial topic. While the debate rages in the UK about whether children should spend more time at school…