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Urban studies

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education
To many people, the phrase “inner-city schools” is synonymous with crumbling buildings, frustrated teachers, disengaged students, truancy and violence. In some urban areas, though, city schools and the students who attend them flourish. In fact, three of the top five performers in reading in the PISA 2009 survey—Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore—are large cities. So are big cities a boon or a bane for education?

The latest edition of PISA in Focus presents new analyses suggesting that, in some countries, students in large cities—defined as those with over one million inhabitants—score on a par with their top-performing peers in PISA. For instance, students in urban areas in countries like Portugal and Israel, countries that tend to perform around the OECD average in PISA, compare favourably with students in Singapore; and the performance of students in Poland’s urban areas compares easily with that of students in Hong Kong.

But in Belgium, the United Kingdom and the United States, the performance of students in large urban areas drags down overall country scores in PISA. This might be because, in these countries, not all students can enjoy the advantages—including a rich cultural environment, more school choice and good job prospects after leaving school—that large urban centres offer. Some of these students may come from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, speak a different language at home than the one spoken at school, or have only one parent to turn to for support and assistance.

However, these new analyses of PISA data also show that an urban environment’s impact on learning is not just related to socio-economic advantage or disadvantage. Even when comparing students of similar backgrounds in OECD countries, those attending schools in urban areas in Chile, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Turkey scored more than 45 points higher—the equivalent of more than one year of formal schooling—than their peers in rural schools. In Hungary, the performance gap between the two groups of students was more than 70 score points wide.

What these analyses tell us is that in order to join the ranks of PISA best-performers, countries may have to provide targeted support to isolated rural communities to ensure that students attending schools in these areas reach their full potential, while those countries whose city-based students underperform will have to figure out how to both embrace a heterogeneous student population and enable these students to tap into the cultural and social advantages that large urban areas offer.

Links:
For more information:
on PISA: www.pisa.oecd.org
PISA in Focus: Are large cities educational assets or liabilities?
Photo credit: City student / Shutterstock




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A Curriculum for the Next Billion

by Charles Leadbeater
Author of Learning from the Extremes and Innovation in Education: Lessons from Pioneers Around the World, published by Bloomsbury with the support of the The Qatar Foundation’s WISE initiative.
Today, global companies are fascinated by the prospect of what the World Economic Forum calls ‘the next billion’ – the future consumers of the developing world whose income is rising from around $2 a day to between $5 and $7 a day. Most of these people are recently arrived in rapidly expanding cities, often living in the poorest areas: every month about 5 million people in the developing world move to cities.

If we were to look at these families as parents and learners, what kind of education will they be looking for? Or to put it another way, if we were to design a curriculum with ‘the next billion’ what would they want?

Having spent much of the last three years visiting a wide variety of education projects in cities across the developing world, it strikes me that the first thing that people want is facility with a global language, usually English, but also in some places Spanish and, in others, Mandarin. They want a language that will give them access to people and jobs linked to global networks and trade – a business hotel, a job in retail, manning a phone in a call centre – rather than confining them to ply their trade in purely local markets.

Next they want a mastery of basic mathematics, the ability to understand numbers and do fairly basic sums, like working out discounts or more complex applications like planning a production schedule. Maths is foundational to much else that people need, and want. to learn.

The third ingredient is digital literacy. People need to be able to work competently and capably with computers, and not just the basics of the Microsoft world of Word and Excel, but increasingly the world of the web and social media, apps and programming. They need to be comfortable with having to learn, and learn again, as technology changes.

None of that, however, is worth very much unless they are skilled at working together with other people. So the fourth thing their education needs to give them is a well-grounded experience in social skills so they know how to respond to customers and work well with their colleagues, to find collaborative solutions to problems. Some of those skills are social and relational, based on empathy and sympathy. But others are more about collaborative self-government, which is why it is so important that education provides children with ample, structured, challenging opportunities to work together, in groups, on projects which they can make their own. As social media spreads so it will open up ever more opportunities for people to find one another and come together to achieve common goals. Citizens will need to learn how to make the most of these technologies, for better government, richer culture and more successful businesses.

All of this needs to be married to entrepreneurial and creative capacity, by which I mean the ability to spot an opportunity, mobilise support to take it, learn how to take risks and recover from setbacks. Most of the ‘next billion’ will find themselves working in small entrepreneurial companies. Studies of the urban poor show that many have to hold down two or three jobs to survive. Their education needs to help them become micro-entrepreneurs, adaptive and resilient, fleet of foot. Learning to juggle work if, not balls, is a key skill.

The slim core skills set out above might provide the starting point for thinking about the kinds of skills all young people might need in the years ahead, in the developed and the developing world.

Yet that is only at best half the story. Setting out what people should learn is just the starting point. How they learn is almost as important. Effective learning needs to be a structured, well-designed, highly engaging activity which challenges and stretches young people as well as supporting them and building their confidence. It needs to pull people to it, by the laws of attraction. Too much of the time at school it is the other way around: people are pushed into learning they do not really understand and cannot make meaningful.

To be motivating learning needs to be intrinsically satisfying and to offer at least the distant prospect of a pay-off: a better job; a practical skill; a useful way of thinking.

Achieving that will mean that learning will have to become more connected to, if not located in, the real world of work and production. The most impressive and attractive places to learn in future, in the developed and developing world, will give young people ample opportunities to design and make, produce and sell things, with their hands and their heads. They should go to school to learn by working and having fun. They should study by making and building rather than sitting and listening.

Too often education is seen as a pristine preparation for a later career. Work is held at bay for as long as possible. I doubt we can afford that distinction in the future in which education increasingly seems to be losing touch with the real world that young people live in – and the real world seems increasingly unwilling to give them the jobs they crave. We need learning to give young people a real sense of what creative, satisfying, productive work can be, so they can take those standards and expectations into their later working life.

All innovators succeed by challenging ingrained conventional wisdom. Breaking down the barriers between work and learning will be one of the chief opportunities for educational innovators in the decades to come, especially if they want to meet the needs of the next billion parents and children entering formal education.


Links:
Innovation in Education: Lessons from Pioneers around the World
See also: OECD Skills Strategy
Photo credit: Population of our World in Colour / Shutterstock


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Erasing the “bright red dividing line” between education and work

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education
Central to the OECD Skills Strategy, which was released last week, is the idea that developing people’s skills and ensuring that those skills are used effectively on the job is everybody’s business—governments, employers, employees, trade unions and students. So who better to discuss the business of skills development than a business leader? Phil O’Reilly, Chief Executive of Business NZ, New Zealand’s largest business advocacy group, was in Paris this week to attend the OECD Forum. Calling the Strategy “an immaculate document” that “points out the complexity of what we’re dealing with”, O’Reilly makes a strong case for the importance of developing “soft” skills in today’s global labour market. “We all obsess about mathematics and science skills,” he says, “but cultural skills do matter.”

What do today’s employers look for in prospective employees? According to O’Reilly, businesses want good citizens working for them. “People who can read and add and think critically—and who can also act accordingly, like by voting; or getting up to give a seat to an older woman: that shows courtesy and the ability to think of others. Even showing up at a demonstration: that shows passion.”

These “soft” skills, defined as emotional intelligence, the ability to work in a team, and to communicate effectively, are largely taught by parents and by communities. While O’Reilly calls “hard” skills—literacy, numeracy, skills in using information and communication technologies, and what are called STEM skills (those in science, technology, engineering and mathematics)—the “ticket to ride” for today’s employees, “those skills will only be considered as good as the ability of someone to use them effectively in a particular place at a particular time,” he says. “Employees with both hard and soft skills are highly valued.”

For many people right now—young people just starting out in the labour market, or older workers who, for one reason or another, have not participated in the workforce for a while—just getting that first—or new—job is a struggle. O’Reilly suggests that these transitions can be eased dramatically if employers, governments and education systems work together to “break down the bright red dividing line between compulsory education and work.“ That can be accomplished, he says, by creating “pathways” between the two worlds, in the form of internships and apprenticeships. “We need to get students and employers to rub up against each other intellectually,” he says. “We need to narrow the gap between the end of compulsory education and the next experience”, whether that is work or continuing education or training, “because skills will deteriorate if we don’t.”

Information is crucial. The idea is not to tell students what to do, but to “give them and their parents information about what they need to do to get to where they want to be,” whether that is becoming an architect or a plumber. “We need to make sure students have enough information so that they can make an informed choice.”

In short, he says, “policy makers and businesses need to be talking about skills needs so that employers and workers are at the centre of the system, rather than being victims of the system.”


Links: 
Photo credit: Office corridor /Shutterstock

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