19 June 2019

By John Jerrim

Today, new results have been released from the TALIS 2018 survey – a study of the teaching profession conducted within more than 40 countries across the world. Along with Sam Sims, I co-authored the national report for England.

The survey, conducted amongst a large, nationally representative sample of primary and lower-secondary teachers, included several questions about job satisfaction. As an international survey, we can therefore compare the job satisfaction of teachers in England to teachers in other countries. Also, as the second time TALIS has been conducted in England, we can also examine trends in teacher job satisfaction over time.

This blog will be short and not-so-sweet. The results (more…)

19 June 2019

By John Jerrim

In case you hadn’t noticed, there seems to be a fairly important leadership race taking place. This is, of course, being dominated by Brexit. But many of the candidates have also announced grand education spending plans.

Michael Gove has said he will spend an extra one billion pounds on schools. Sajid Javid has reportedly promised “billions more for education” if he becomes PM. While the front runner, Boris Johnson, has said his government will spend at least £5,000 on every secondary pupil.

Theresa May has even got in on the act, (more…)

15 April 2019

By Peter Moss

Leave policies for parents (maternity, paternity and parental leave) are high on today’s policy agenda, not only in higher income countries but around the world. A recent International Labour Organisation (ILO) survey found all bar two countries (Papua New Guinea and the USA) had some paid maternity leave, while 79 had paternity leave and 66 parental leave.

This month, the EU is expected to adopt a new Work-Life Balance Directive, which sets a number of new or higher standards for parental, paternity and carer’s leave, and the right to request flexible working arrangements – an initiative so far ignored by the British media.

Yet despite this attention, many issues remain about how best to make leave policies effective and inclusive in a fast-changing world and to ensure they support a more equal and sustainable relationship between care, employment and gender.

These are the subjects of a new book published on April 17 – Parental Leave and Beyond: new international developments, current issues and future directions. It’s the product of a (more…)

14 March 2019

By Rebecca O’Connell, Julia Brannen and Abigail Knight

If we had not included Portuguese young people in our cross national study of Families and Food in Hard Times*, the inadequacies in the free school meal system in England might not have not have been quite so obvious. But looking at the photo taken of a secondary school meal in Lisbon by one of our participants (Maria, age 12), the contrast with lunch in an inner London secondary school (photo taken by Jack**, age 12) is stark. This international school meals day we explore the two nations’ approaches to school food.

Lunch at the school canteen in Lisbon (left) and in London (right)

Irrespective of their ability to pay, the standardised menu for all children in Portugal includes a daily soup starter, meat and fish on alternate days, bread, and a piece of fruit or jelly for dessert. There is a three-tier system for paying for school meals (and (more…)

Tina Isaacs and Lena Gray. 
As we wind down from a relatively calm examination season – even with the introduction of new examinations this year – some of us continue to mull over the idea of ‘standards’ in examination systems.
What does the term ‘standards’ mean, anyway? It crops up everywhere in the world of assessment. In England, exam boards and Ofqual, which offer general qualifications like GCSEs and A levels, have to try to make sure that grades have the same meaning across subjects, in different years, and even between competing exam boards – a Sisyphean task that is fraught with technical challenges. This is an area in which assessment researchers like us can see our work having real impact, and there are plenty of exciting developments to shape new thinking. One of those developments is the publication on 10 September by the UCL IOE press of a new book called Exam standards: how measures and meanings differ around the world.
Standard setting in national exams is a topic of interest throughout the global assessment community, yet opportunities for information sharing are rare, given the politically sensitive (more…)

Sam Sims. 
The Programme for International Student Assessment is a well-known exercise in benchmarking pupil attainment in maths, science and reading across countries. PISA was first conducted in 2000 and five further rounds of results have since been published. Around 80 countries are taking part in 2018.
What is less well known is that PISA also collects information from school leaders about their teachers, such as the qualifications they have and the training they receive. The OECD, who manage PISA, also collect information on differences in national policy towards teachers, through parallel research programmes.
The OECD have now brought this information together to examine whether national differences in teacher policy can explain (more…)

Melanie Ehren. 
In November 2017, Ofsted’s chief, Amanda Spielman, talked about one of the biggest problems in current education systems: the culture of fear and game-playing around school inspections, where educators for a long time have been guided by external accountability standards and have lost a sense of professionalism. An entire industry has supported schools in getting Ofsted-ready and many teachers and heads would scrutinize any school improvement activity, peer review or school self-evaluation to see how it would help the school get a good Ofsted-grade.
The fear of being classified as a failing school, being named and shamed, losing one’s job or student intake (particularly from high socio-economic backgrounds) has taken away much of the agency from teachers and head teachers to shape their own professional practice. This trend that is sometimes reinforced when large Multi-Academy Trusts introduce strong internal quality control around Ofsted grades and standards (e.g. performance management or peer review).
Ofsted’s ‘myth busting’ campaign, where the agency actively tries to debunk existing (more…)

Philippa Cordingley and Toby Greany.

We need to talk about how teachers become expert – not just at teaching, but at teaching across different subjects.

All too often in education we get side-tracked by debates about issues such as high stakes accountability systems, assessment reforms, recruitment and retention, anxiety about the breadth of learning experiences and funding.  Even when we do remember that it is the quality of teaching that matters most, we tend to focus on the challenges, such as teacher recruitment shortages.  Yet, as Professor Dylan Wiliam has argued, the biggest priority should be to ‘love the teachers we have’ by investing in their professional development and learning. (more…)

John Jerrim. 
A version of this blogpost also appears on the Centre for Education Economics website.
The OECD’s PISA study compares the science, reading and mathematics skills of 15-year-olds across countries, with the results closely watched by journalists, public policymakers and the general public from across the world.
It’s conducted every three years, and particular attention is now being paid to how the PISA scores of each country are changing over time. For instance, are the academic skills of young people in some countries improving, while in others they are in relative decline?
Of course, to answer such questions robustly, fair and comparable measures (more…)

Christina Swensson. 
This is the fifth in a series of blogs that delve below the headline findings from the 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). This blog investigates the similarities between TIMSS and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), another large-scale study designed to assess pupil achievement across a number of countries. So how do the headline findings from the two studies compare?
PISA and TIMSS Cycles
TIMSS, administered by the IEA, has been carried out every four years since 1995, a total of six study cycles. The OECD started its own large-scale international survey in 2000 and has been running the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) every three years since then, also a total of six study cycles. The two studies do not normally coincide (more…)