Creativity has fascinated scholars for generations, and its identification as one of the key 'twenty-first century skills' necessary for economic growth has led to renewed interest. This creates two challenges for the OECD: its flagship Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) does not directly measure creativity. Secondly, the…

In the context of rising fundamentalism, urgent threats to the environment, and the persistence of poverty and deep inequities in the world, 193 nations have pledged to work towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) crafted by UNESCO in 2015. Education is seen as key to attaining all the other SDGs. Within the 'education goal' (Goal #4),…

The case study from Brunei described in this report provides a practical example of how learning outcomes in this area can be improved through the power of teacher coaching. This report explores how the Literacy and Numeracy Coaching Programme (LNCP) -- developed by Brunei's Ministry of Education with technical assistance from the Education…

This paper addresses emerging modes of educational governance constituted through new online platforms for teacher professional development. Specifically, I focus here on the OECD's "PISA4U" ('PISA for you'), an online professional learning platform comprising structured assignment modules and peer-to-peer collaborative activities based…

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has unveiled plans to move into the field of early childhood education through the introduction of the International Early Learning Study (IELS), a new comparative test of five-year olds that is being piloted in three nations. This article explores the dynamics of this new project…

In this chapter, the authors analyse and discuss conceptual and methodological issues related to international benchmarking and its effect on educational policy and practice in selected European countries. Benchmarking is viewed as a process of comparing educational outcomes in schooling systems, identifying strengths and weaknesses and serving as…

Much ink has been spilled debating the merits of different science-teaching practices. Proponents of enquiry-based science teaching argue that this approach exposes students to the procedures used by professional scientists, while the proponents of traditional practices emphasise the role of teachers in transmitting knowledge about science and in…

Employing Connelly and Xu's (this issue) conceptualisation of reciprocal learning, the article explores the potential for reciprocal learning about pedagogy provided by a body of PISA-inspired literature on high-performing education systems. I argue that the opportunities for reciprocal learning provided by that body of literature is rather…

Every teacher's classroom practice is embedded in a system of overlapping contexts that interact with their day-to-day decisions. In this paper, I focus on sociocultural context and how it interacts with teachers' subjective responses to accountability instruments. Drawing on interviews with secondary school teachers in Finland and Singapore --…

Within OECD countries, Sweden has historically welcomed large numbers of migrants, in particular migrants seeking humanitarian protection. Since 2015, this large influx of new arrivals with multiple disadvantages has put a well-developed integration system under great pressure and highlighted a number of challenges for education policy given…

This paper examines the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) "PISA for Schools," a new variant of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that compares school-level performance on reading, math and science with international schooling systems (e.g., Shanghai-China, Finland). Specifically, I…

This paper explores Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools, a local variant of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD's) influential PISA that not only assesses an individual school's performance in reading, mathematics and science against international schooling systems, but also promotes 17…

As educators know well, there are many barriers to learning that originate outside of school, such as those that arise from socio-economic disadvantage. In many education systems, the concentration of disadvantaged students in certain schools poses an additional challenge. Yet it is also true that schools with effective learning environments and…

The article examines two key concepts in research on policy borrowing and lending that are often used to explain why and how educational reforms travel across national boundaries: reception and translation. The studies on reception analyse the political, economic, and cultural reasons that account for the attractiveness of a reform from elsewhere.…

Since the mid-1980s, a number of East Asian societies have consistently performed well in international tests, and their education systems have emerged as models of "best practice", including Hong Kong, which has been extensively referenced by politicians and their advisers in England. In parallel, local dissatisfaction with the…