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The Polish government, acknowledging the importance of its human capital to Poland's transition to a market economy and accession to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), requested an OECD review of its education sector. The review, undertaken in 1995, covered all areas of the Polish system of education and training, including the quality and effectiveness of education, the teaching profession and teacher education, higher education and the financing of education. The report consists of two parts: a summary of the background report prepared by the Polish authorities and educational researchers from the Ministry of National Education and the examiner's report compiled by education experts from outside Poland. A number of recommendations are made in relation to curriculum development, evaluation of the performance of the system, the professional status of teachers, and the reorganisation of higher education. The report concludes with proposals for the development of a human resource development policy in Poland. Show less

This working paper aims to give an overview of the national policies that exist in the field of [information and communication technology] ICT and initial teacher education. Information on this topic was initially gathered via a survey, in the form of a country questionnaire, which was conducted as part of the analytical strand of the OECD study entitled ‘ICT and initial teacher education’. In addition, desk research was conducted for 31 OECD countries. All of this work has been carried out under the auspices of the New Millennium Learners project. Responses to the survey were received from the following countries: Austria, Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Chile, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and the United Kingdom. On the basis of these documents, three categories are proposed for understanding the extent to which countries have addressed the issue of ICT and initial teacher education: Category 1: Lack of relevant information concerning ICT and initial teacher education; Category 2: Developing awareness of the stakes of ICT and initial teacher education; Category 3: Inclusion of ICT in initial teacher education at several levels. The first part of this report presents a comparison of national policies by classifying each of them in one of these three categories. The second part of this report proposes a complementary analysis of these results by first discussing some limits to the initial broad classification of countries in these categories and then presenting key elements of comparison in order to estimate the level of coherence of these policies.

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The 2020 [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted schooling around the world and highlighted how critical it is for teachers to quickly learn, improve and adapt their practice to changing conditions. Continuing professional learning is vital to support teachers in refreshing, developing and broadening their knowledge and to help them keep up with changing research, practices and student needs throughout their careers. However, there is growing concern in many countries that traditional forms of professional development in the form of one-off courses or seminars have failed to live up to that promise. Reorienting professional development towards the most effective forms of continuing learning and fostering teachers' collaboration in schools are critical to support high-quality teaching. This Policy Brief draws on evidence from the OECD's School Resources Review and beyond to explore the following questions: How to improve teachers' access to professional learning opportunities? How to make professional development systems more effective? How to foster professional collaboration and learning in schools? How to sustain professional growth in remote and hybrid learning contexts?

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Defining and Scoping Human Resource Development (HRD) in the Victorian TAFE System was one of a set of four projects supported by the Office of Employment, Training and Tertiary Education (ETTE) and designed to inform and promote human resource development (HRD) in TAFE Victoria. For the purposes of this project, human resource development is taken to mean those TAFE management arrangements, such as policies, practices, processes, programs and values, that develop individuals, teams and organisations to meet the TAFE organisation's strategies, goals and outcomes. The key aims of this project were to provide an overview of best practice in Australian HRD that is relevant to staff training and workforce development in TAFE, and to report on current HRD practices and trends in TAFE in Victoria. The project gathered data on the HRD infrastructure, policies and practices of a sample of Victorian Technical and Further Education (TAFE) providers (a number of TAFE Institutes and university TAFE Divisions), a selection of the larger Adult and Community Education (ACE) organisations and a sample of commercial TAFE providers. Thirteen TAFE provider case studies were also conducted to provide an accessible and user-friendly representation of current good practice in HRD in a range of Victorian TAFE organisations. From these case studies, five programs were selected to be developed into models that were intended to provide a highly accessible single representation of each program. Other project outcomes include a literature review, a web-based bibliography of relevant HRD literature and a set of recommendations advising the Office of Employment, Training and Tertiary Education on the promotion of HRD practices. The project also trialled innovative approaches to data collection and review by employing web-based survey technologies which enabled the project methodology to be iterative. For example, the models of HRD practice and summary survey results were placed on a website where they were accessed by respondents who emailed feedback. This method proved successful in eliciting detailed responses and allowed for freer exchange between researchers and survey respondents as the project progressed. Show less

Across TALIS 2013 countries and economies, new teachers with a maximum of three years' work experience comprise, on average, 10 per cent of the total teacher population.

New teachers are more likely to feel prepared in the content of their subject field(s), rather than the pedagogy or classroom practice of their subject field(s). However, the levels of their perceived preparedness were lower than experienced teachers in all three domains. In nearly two-thirds of TALIS 2013 countries and economies, the largest difference in reported preparedness between new and experienced teachers was in classroom practice of the subject field(s) they teach, followed by the pedagogy of the subject field(s) they teach.

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This report from the OECD has been prepared to support the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession held in New York in March 2012 and hosted by the US Department of Education, the OECD and Education International. The summit was designed to review how to best improve the quality of teaching, teachers and school leaders. The report presents available research about what can make educational reforms effective, and highlights examples of reforms that have produced specific results, show promise or illustrate imaginative ways of implementing change. The report acknowledges that the kind of teaching needed today requires teachers to be high-level knowledge workers who constantly advance their own professional knowledge as well as that of their profession. However, to attract and develop knowledge workers, education systems need to transform the leadership and work organisation of their schools to an environment in which professional norms of management complement bureaucratic and administrative forms of control, with the status, pay, professional autonomy, and the high quality education that go with professional work, and with effective systems of teacher evaluation, with differentiated career paths and career diversity for teachers. The summit is organised around three interconnected themes and the report addresses each of these. Chapter one, 'Developing effective school leaders' [drafted by Beatriz Pont in collaboration with Pauline Musset, Andreas Schleicher, Diana Toledo Figueroa and Juliana Zapata], contains the following sections: a changing profile of school leadership; supporting, evaluating and developing teacher quality; goal-setting, assessment and accountability; strategic resource management; leadership beyond school walls; distributing leadership; developing leadership for tomorrow's education systems; appraisal of school leaders; conclusions; Chapter two, 'Teacher development, support, employment conditions and careers' [drafted by David Istance and Stephan Vincent-Lancrin in collaboration with Dirk Van Damme, Andreas Schleicher and Kristen Weatherby], contains: changes in the demand for student skills; a demanding agenda for teachers; understanding learning to improve teaching practices; designing ecosystems for a 21st-century teaching profession; conclusions; Chapter three, 'Preparing teachers: matching demand and supply' [drafted by Andreas Schleicher in collaboration with Dirk van Damme and Pauline Musset], contains: a challenge of teacher shortages; making teaching an attractive career choice; compensation schemes to match teacher supply and demand; establishing effective employment conditions; ensuring high-quality initial teacher education; providing for attractive careers; meeting the need for ongoing professional development to address issues of teacher supply; conclusions. The appendix contains selected comparative data from OECD sources.

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Novice teachers bring new energy and ideas to schools and classrooms that could improve the learning environment of students, if harnessed correctly. At the same time, novice teachers are, by definition, inexperienced in some aspects concerning classroom practices and schoolwork. As is the case for any other profession, novice teachers need time, support and guidance to improve their skills and adapt to the tasks they are confronted with on a regular basis. Thus, providing novice teachers with adequate support in their initial years is a key challenge of developing teaching as a profession. This Teaching in Focus brief will explore the motivations, working conditions, confidence levels and support structure of novice teachers. For the purposes of this brief, novice teachers are defined as lower secondary teachers with up to five years of teaching experience, while experienced teachers are defined as lower secondary teachers with more than five years of teaching experience.

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As education systems move to a 'new normal' where traditional face-to-face teaching will be complemented by some form of distance learning, teachers may require training to prepare them to use innovative teaching practices. Although TALIS data were collected before the [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 crisis, they remain relevant regarding the take up of training in the use of ICT in teaching. The analyses presented in this briefing suggest that including ICT for teaching in teachers' initial formal training could be an instrument to encourage them to continue to develop their ability to use new technology in teaching. Teachers whose pre-service education included the use of ICT in teaching are not only more likely use it in the classroom, but also to take advantage of professional development that includes ICT skills for teaching. However, whether and how teachers integrate ICT into their classroom practice is influenced by a wide array of organisational and system-level conditions, in addition to their pre-service education and in-service training. The few months of the pandemic have taught us that work organisation, collaboration among colleagues and with stakeholders, as well as the presence of an environment where entrepreneurship and progress are recognised and promoted, are necessary conditions for the adoption of innovative teaching practices.

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The [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 crisis has resulted in a significant increase in online learning by adults. Much of the training that had started as face-to-face in classroom environments has been pursued online. Furthermore, individuals are being encouraged to use the time freed up by short-time work schemes to take up new training. As such, the crisis provides a powerful test of the potential of learning online. It also highlights its key limitations, including the prerequisite of adequate digital skills, computer equipment and internet access to undertake training online, the difficulty of delivering traditional work-based learning online, and the struggle of teachers used to classroom instruction. This brief discusses the potential of online learning to increase adult learning opportunities and identifies some key issues that the crisis has highlighted. Addressing these issues could contribute to expanding online learning provision in the post-crisis period and to making it more inclusive.

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Kazakhstan has made tremendous progress in ensuring universal access to primary and lower-secondary education. Nevertheless, results of international surveys reveal that almost two-thirds of students from Kazakhstan complete schooling without mastering the basic skills needed to be successful, and that student achievement is increasingly inequitable. This policy perspective provides Kazakhstan with recommendations about how to strengthen its initial teacher education and support for early career teachers in order to improve the learning outcomes of all students.

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