England has a 'pre-qualification' system of higher education admissions, where applications and offers are made to young people before exam results are received. While in most cases offers are conditional on achieving a grade target in A Level exams, recent years have seen an exponential growth in 'unconditional offers', where the offer of a place…

Increasing the supply of qualified teachers is a priority in many nations as a prerequisite to accomplishing UNESCO's Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all" by the year 2030. Questions remain however concerning definitions and…

In recent years, play-based learning (PBL) has attracted attention, debate and controversy across different national contexts. There is no definitional consensus which may have undesirable consequences for enacting its potential in professional practice. The aim of our study was to synthesize international research on ECE practitioners' views on…

A national qualifications framework (NQF) is an instrument used to classify a country's qualifications at different levels. Each level is defined by a set of learning outcomes expected at that level. NQFs can be useful tools in education and training reforms and are vital reference points for lifelong learning and comparing qualifications across…

While policy debate is often focused on the whole teaching profession, primary and secondary teachers differ in more ways than one. While all countries require teachers to have at least a bachelor degree to enter the profession in primary or lower secondary education, the structure and content of the programmes vary and are less geared towards…

Teachers are the most important school resource. In every country, teachers' salaries and training represent the greatest share of expenditure on education; and this investment in teachers can have significant returns. Research shows that being taught by the best teachers can make a real difference in the learning and life outcomes of otherwise…

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an intergovernmental economic organisation with 35 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. The Organisation for works with countries to develop skills strategies tailored to specific needs and contexts. The Organisation prepared a global…

The first years of life lay the foundations for a child's future development and learning. Many countries have increased their financial support for provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC) over the past years. More recently, the focus of debate has been shifting from expanding access to affordable ECEC to enhancing its quality. A…

Teachers in academia are usually not required to have teacher training but must often be evaluated by their students who expect them to have much better teaching qualifications than their high school teachers. However, teachers in elementary and high schools are required to go through several years of teacher training, resulting in a teaching…

The digital revolution and automation are accelerating changes in the labour market and in workplace skills, changes that are further affected by fluctuations in international and regional economic cycles and employment opportunity. These factors pose a universal policy challenge for all advanced economies and governments. In the workplace, people…

Which non-American education systems best prepare young people for fulfilling jobs and successful adult lives? And what can the United States--where far too many young people currently enter adulthood without adequate preparation for the twenty-first-century job market--learn, adopt, and adapt from these other systems? In "Schooling in the…

The IEA Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) is the first large-scale international study of the preparation of primary and lower-secondary teachers. The study investigated the pedagogical and subject-specific knowledge that future primary and lower secondary school teachers acquire during their mathematics teacher…

The Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) will establish technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the survey design and implementation processes of PIAAC yield high-quality and internationally comparable data. This document provides a revised version of the technical standards and guidelines originally…

This paper offers an overview and analysis of the status of teaching as an occupation and of teacher development in the United States. An opening section describes the development of the industrial-based education model that has been in place for this century and the reform movements that have started in the past two decades. A section on the…

The literature on business involvement in education in Canada, the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, the United Kingdom, and other European countries was reviewed. Special attention was paid to the following topics: workplace trends/changes; skill requirements/deficits; youth employment/unemployment; integration versus…