By Dirk Van Damme, Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress division, Directorate for Education and Skills. The world is living through one of its most extraordinary revolutions, with game-changing implications, many of them still unknown. The growth rate of adults with tertiary education qualifications, and the knowledge and skills associated with them, has never been higher. In 2013, on average across OECD countries, 25% of 55-64 year-olds had a tertiary qualification, but 40% of 25-34 year-olds had – an increase of 15 percentage points over 30 years. But among OECD countries, differences are huge. Some countries had expanded their education systems a century ago, while others started to offer opportunities for tertiary education only recently. Read more...
Nellip: Network of European Language Label Initiatives and Projects
NELLIP 
has been funded by the European Commission in the framework of the Lifelong Learning Programme – Key Activity 2 Languages, for a three years period, to promote quality in language learning through the application of the quality criteria used to award the European Language Label (ELL). More...
30,000 Erasmus+ participants learning languages with Online Linguistic Support
Erasmus+ Online Linguistic Support (OLS) 
is the new online tool for learning languages on-the-go.
Sign up to Online Linguistic Support today
The 35,000th, 40,000th and 45,000th participants will also receive Erasmus+ goody bags filled with Erasmus+ gear and gadgets.
A very special surprise awaits the 50,000th participant of OLS language courses, so sign up to OLS and start learning a language today!
Winners will be contacted directly by the Erasmus+ team. More...
The global talent pool has taken on a dramatically different look
Literacy for life
By Andreas Schleicher, Director, Directorate for Education and Skills. As jobs increasingly involve analysing and communicating information, individuals with poor literacy skills are more likely to find themselves at risk. Poor proficiency in these skills limits adults’ access to many basic services, to better-paying and more-rewarding jobs, and to the possibility of participating in further education and training, which is crucial for developing and maintaining skills over the working life and beyond.
On this Leaders for Literacy Day, I want to share some findings from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills. The survey finds, for example, that the median hourly wage of workers scoring at the highest levels in literacy (Level 4 or 5 in the survey) – those who can make complex inferences and evaluate subtle truth claims or arguments in written texts – is more than 60% higher than for workers scoring at Level 1 or below – those who can, at best, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information that is identical to the information given in the question or directive or to understand basic vocabulary. In addition, people with poor literacy skills are more than twice as likely to be unemployed. Read more...
A mini-milestone for PISA in Focus
By Marilyn Achiron, Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills. It seems like only yesterday…but it was, in fact, 50 months ago that we started our PISA in Focus series. Over these past four years we’ve mined PISA 2009 and PISA 2012 results to highlight some of the most important findings and stories from the triennial international survey of 15-year-old students – from the importance of early childhood education to the effect of family background on students’ education to whether or not doing homework is really beneficial. Read more...
Balancing youth with social and emotional skills
By Donato Speroni. Social and emotional skills play an essential role during all stages of life. Along with cognitive and learning abilities, it is equally important that our youth develop social and emotional skills in order to balance and ground their personalities and strengthen their characters. This blog post on a new OECD publication, "Skills for Social Progress", was written by Lynda Hawe of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, as part of our focus on youth well-being during the Wikiprogress online consultation on Youth Well-being.As we know from personal experiences, when we feel a deep sense of well-being we are far better able to absorb new information, take risks and be more responsible for our lives. Now don’t we want that for all youth? But growing-up can often be quite a challenging period. Ensuring that youth have a wide variety of skills to help them cope with some of life’s challenges may not always occur naturally. Sometimes they will need help in building social and emotional skills - which are the kind of skills involved in achieving goals, working with others and managing emotions.
Using big data in the fight against dementia
By Elettra Ronchi. There’s a quiet revolution afoot: health data are increasingly collected, stored and used in digital form. Doctors, nurses, researchers, and patients are all producing on a daily basis huge amounts of data, from an array of sources such as electronic health records, genomic sequencing, high-resolution medical imaging, ubiquitous sensing devices, and smart phone applications that monitor patient health. In fact the OECD predicts more medical information and health and wellness data will be generated in the next few years than ever before. More...
Health systems are still not prepared for an ageing population
By Francesca Colombo. That population is ageing across the world is well known. As fertility rates drop and life expectancy improves, a bigger share of the population is greying. At least one in four people will be aged over 65 by 2050 in about two-thirds of OECD countries. The share of those aged over 80 years will more than double, from 4% in 2010 to 10% in 2050. In Japan, Spain and Germany, this trend will be even more pronounced, with the proportion of the over-80s expected to triple, rising from 5% to 15% in Spain and Germany, and from 6% to 16% in Japan. The speed of ageing will be even more dramatic in some emerging economies. China, for example has taken only 40 years to increase life expectancy from 40 to 70 years, something that took Germany 80 years. More...
The future of development is ageing
By Ken Bluestone. Two themes that resonate strongly across the OECD are the need to achieve sustainable development and the growing significance of population ageing. It is rare, however, that these two agendas are brought together to consider the importance of ageing for developing countries. More...
Time is of the essence: can Indonesia phase out energy subsidies without hurting the poor?
By Maroussia Klep. Indonesia enacted a major reform recently. On 1 January, President Joko Widodo followed through with his electoral promise to cut decades-long subsidies for energy products. Many leaders had tried before him, but retreated in the face of fierce resistance from the people. Thanks in part to low oil prices, the newly-elected President got the reform through without much trouble. The true challenge will be how to support poor households when prices start rising again. More...
