In order to successfully help young people prepare for employment, education providers and employers must open up the lines of communication and become more engaged in each other’s worlds.  In the most innovative and effective school-to-work systems around the globe, it is common for employers to help design post-secondary training curricula or to offer their employees as faculty to training programs.  At the same time, education providers should actively encourage students to spend half their time on a job site and help them secure interview opportunities.

These findings from a McKinsey & Company report published in December are not all that surprising.  In fact, many of the education systems scoring at the top of the international league tables have already reached these conclusions and implemented similar strategies.  After returning from Singapore last year, Marc Tucker recapped what he had observed, writing, “In Singapore, young people not headed to University go either into the upper secondary vocational education system or into one of the polytechnics.  In the upper secondary vocational system, there is no sandwich program alternating time in the workplace with time in school.  [Their experience] is all in school, but the Singaporeans have persuaded the companies to give them the state-of-the-art machines they need in the classrooms (working engines for current model cars, for example, with cutaway engines for the auto mechanics program) and have also persuaded the firms that it is in their interest to regularly cycle the school instructors through their firms to keep their skills up to date.”  This city-state also boasts one of the lowest rates of youth unemployment in the industrialized world.

According to McKinsey, the second common success factor occurs when employers and education providers work with their students early and intensely so the education-to-employment journey is treated as one continuum in which employers commit to hire young people before they are even enrolled in a program and are invested in building their skills.  What the report, Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works, brings to the table is powerful examples of where this is working around the world.  One model of a cohesive school-to-work continuum can be found in China’s Vocational Training Holdings (CVTH), the largest training institute for China’s automotive industry.  This vocational education program establishes and maintains relationships with about 1,800 employers, which provide internship opportunities and “promises to hire”.  The CVTH provides their students with access to a large database that houses information on each of the employers such as company size, how many workers they need, and the type of worker required.  Prior to graduation from CVTH, students take a survey on their ideal job placement situation and are matched to an employer based on their preferences.  The Institute then provides post-graduation support to students for a year if they are not happy with their initial placement.  Within three months of graduation, 80 percent of CVTH graduates are employed and of the students that are not, many of them have exited the job market to pursue higher education degrees.

The report authors surveyed young people, education providers and employers in nine countries including Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and the United States.  They found that the road from postsecondary education to employment looks vastly different from one perspective to the next.  While 72 percent of education providers in the survey believe new graduates are ready to take on entry-level positions, fewer than half of young people and employers agreed.  The United States demonstrated one of the widest opinion gaps on this issue with 87 percent of education providers stating that graduates and new hires are adequately prepared for entry-level work and only 49 percent of employers thinking this is the case.

This disconnect is partly explained by the lack of communication between employers, educators and youth.  A third of employers in the surveyed countries said they never communicate with education providers and of those that do, fewer than half say it has proven effective.  Meanwhile, more than a third of educators report that they are unable to estimate the job-placement rates of their graduates.  When surveyed, educators were asked to identify their priorities.  Helping students find jobs after graduation fell to the middle of the list for both private and public education providers.

Young people are also failing to connect the dots with less than half considering the job openings and wage levels of the professions most commonly associated with their selected major.  And while nearly 60 percent of youth view on-the-job training and hands-on learning as the most effective instructional technique, only 24 percent of academic-program graduates and 37 percent of vocational graduates said that they were enrolled in programs that regularly provided these types of experiences.

Another interesting finding is the general low perception of vocational schools.  While the majority of young people believe vocational training is more helpful than an academic track in finding a job, less than half of those surveyed actually enrolled in these types of programs.  Of the nine countries studied, Germany is the only place where students think academic schools and vocational schools are held in equal esteem. Germany and a number of other Northern European and Asian countries, provide young people with high quality post-secondary education and training experiences linked closely to labor market needs.  This experience provides young people with a route to good jobs so it is not surprising that perceptions about vocation training differ when quality systems are in place, students are participating in them, and they are functioning well.

Education to Employment suggests that stakeholders implement three interventions to improve the school-to-work transition.  The first intervention is to collect and disseminate more data to students and parents on career options and training pathways.  Education institutions should offer more information about their job placement rates and their graduates’ career trajectories.  In Singapore, the Ministry of Education requires education providers to take an annual survey of their graduates about six months after graduation to collect data on employment status and salary.

Secondly, the report calls for multiple providers and employers to work together within a particular industry.  As an example, the report references Apprenticeship 2000, an industry-led coalition founded in Charlotte, North Carolina by two German companies, Blum (a hardware fabricator) and Daetwyler (a printing equipment manufacturer).  Blum and Daetwyler wanted to establish a strong pipeline of employees that would have the guaranteed specialized skills they needed.  So using the German apprenticeship model, they worked with a local community college to set-up the program and made it available to qualified high school students and experienced workers.  The employer coalition has grown to include eight members that commit to covering the cost of training and wages of its apprenticeships over a 3.5-year period.  Students who complete the program earn an associates degree in manufacturing technology, bring in $9 an hour while studying and are guaranteed employment upon successful completion of the program.  Member companies agree to a common curriculum, recruit as a group and are forbidden from poaching employees.

The last recommendation is to create “system integrators”, an individual or a group responsible for the high-level view of the fragmented education-to-employment system.  These “system integrators” would be charged with working with education providers and employers to develop skill solutions, gather data and identify and share positive examples.  In Australia, the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency (formerly known as Skills Australia) serves as the “system integrator” and is responsible for driving greater collaboration between industry providers and the government on workforce development issues.  The agency is responsible for critical functions such as administering the new National Workforce Development Fund to deliver training for high-priority industries and occupations and to conduct skills and workforce research on the quality of jobs and future working life in Australia.

The full report and a number of additional case studies can be found here:
http://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/public_sector/mckinsey_center_for_government/education_to_employment

The European Commission looks across member countries education and training systems and sets new targets for 2020

In a recent publication from November 2012, the European Commission identified new strategic priorities in meeting the education and training goals that have been set for European Union member countries.  This is part of the broader, ongoing Europe 2020 initiative undertaken by the European Commission in which member countries have agreed on growth and improvement targets in the areas of employment, research and development, climate change and energy sustainability, education, and fighting poverty and social exclusion to achieve in the next decade.

The education and training goals provide a glimpse into the arenas that the EU will focus its funding and technical assistance support on in the coming decade.  These include:

• developing and strengthening quality vocational education and training systems that link to the workplace;
• improving the education and training outcomes of students in at-risk groups;
• improving the teaching and learning of 21st century skills;
• helping low-skilled adults acquire usable skills;
• increasing the use of technology in teaching and assessment; and
• improving the teaching profession.

The European Commission also identified priority roles for the EU to take to help their member countries meet these goals.  These include monitoring progress towards these goals in the member countries; creating an apprenticeship alliance across the EU; and creating a European Area for Skills and Qualifications.

Along with setting new goals for 2020, the European Commission also released a country-level analysis that provides a baseline of 27 member countries against the new 2020 goals.  The report also provides descriptions of major policy initiatives and reforms that they plan to implement as they work toward these goals.  You can learn more about the initiative here.

Mining is by far Australia’s biggest industry. But that does not mean that it is Australia’s biggest employer. I learned that once a mine is established, most of the mining is automated. The mining itself is almost completely automated. Automated, driverless trucks deliver the ore produced by the mine to automated trains that deliver it to automated machines that take it from the trains and dump it into largely automated ships which deliver it to Australia’s dominant customer, China.

It might take 3,000 people to build one of these mines and the associated infrastructure, but only 300 to actually operate it. So it makes no sense to build big new towns for the workers who build the mines, because they won’t be there long. So the mining companies fly them in at the beginning of the week and fly them home at the end of the week, maybe hundreds of miles in each direction, for as long as it takes to construct the new mine and related infrastructure, at enormous cost.

In Singapore, I ran into a senior official from Germany who happened to know a lot about vocational education and training in China and about how the Germans are doing business in China. I asked him how companies like Daimler, the makers of Mercedes Benz motorcars, were able to get Chinese workers who were as skilled as the famed German mechanics. Oh, he said, Daimler’s operations are now almost completely automated. The numbers of highly trained mechanics they need is now so small that they can bring in a small crew of trainers from Germany and train all the workers they need themselves.

Besides, he said, Daimler is not making cars in China for export, but only for the China market. The price of making such things in China has been steadily rising, relative to the price of making them in Europe, so it no longer makes sense for Daimler to make cars in China for export.

In 1990, my organization, the National Center on Education and the Economy, issued a report, the introduction to which pointed out that industrial workers in South Korea were working for one tenth of what similarly skilled American workers were making, and those in mainland China were making one one-hundredth of what American workers made. But that is not true anymore. The average wages of American autoworkers have been falling steadily since then and those of similarly skilled Chinese workers have been rising. Wage levels for industrial workers in Shanghai are now around one quarter of those in the United States. And wages are swiftly rising in the interior of China, too.

This is to be expected in a world in which workers on one side of the world are competing directly with workers on the other side of the world, as never before. In such global markets for labor, one can expect that the prices for labor will slowly come into equilibrium, with prices coming down in the high priced countries and rising in the low price countries, for similarly skilled labor. Eventually, one could expect that these prices would be about the same from one country to another for the same skills.

For China, that will mean that their decisive price advantage in world markets will wither and die. The Chinese know that, and know that, increasingly, their growth will have to be internal, the result of their own people getting richer and demanding more goods and services from their own suppliers.

As the difference between the “China price” and the prices charged by other countries for similar goods and services becomes smaller and smaller, the United States will find that it no longer has access to the kinds of very cheap goods that has made Walmart such a success in our country and around the world. So the prices of many things that Americans have now become accustomed to purchasing very cheaply will rise, in some cases steeply. That will mean that a dollar earned by low-skill, low-wage workers in the United States will buy even less than it does now. It is also the case that the return of manufacturing to our shores will continue to pick up, partly because the difference between the cost of their labor and the cost of our labor is narrowing, but also because it is better to have suppliers who are closer than farther away, it is easier to protect intellectual property rights, and, most especially, because labor costs make up less and less of the cost of the product to the customer, because of advancing automation. So the return of manufacturing will be a blessing, but a blessing for fewer and fewer workers.

As the most advanced global companies come out of the Great Recession, many of the jobs they shed will not come back. Many have used their massive cash supplies to purchase the very latest in automated equipment to become more efficient, to automate many jobs that people did before the Great Recession, jobs that will never return. More and more of advanced industrial economy will look like the Australian mining industry. The industries will be healthy, but will employ far fewer people than before. Productivity will be high, but employment will be low. The owners of many firms in those industries will prosper. But the citizens of the countries they conduct operations in will suffer. Income disparities will grow more quickly than at present and the middle of that income distribution will get narrower and narrower as these processes accelerate.

There will be employers in each of those countries who will tell government that the way to be competitive is to keep the price of labor low, to waive environmental regulations because regulations make their products uncompetitive, to cut back on health care and retirement benefits for the same reason. They will argue, in effect, that the only route to competitiveness for those countries is to pollute the environment, endanger public health and lower ordinary workers’ standard of living.

But there is another possibility. You can see it in Singapore. With a combination of determination, persistence and smart policy, the Singaporeans have been investing wisely in their future for half a century. When other countries in the East saw their future in offering cheap labor to global companies, Singapore was trying to figure out how to raise the cost of their labor—and therefore the standard of living of their people—by providing higher educated and better-trained labor. They made life difficult for their low-value added producers and made it very attractive for their high value-added producers. They made very close partners with the world’s leading high tech companies, figured out just what kind of skills they needed most and made sure that they could get those skills in Singapore. They paid very close attention to every segment of their workforce. They built a very high floor under the entire workforce by providing a world-class academic curriculum to all their students and creating a world-class teaching force to teach that curriculum. They built a system of polytechnics as good as any in the world to provide very highly skilled senior technical workers for a wide range of industries. Perhaps most impressive, they created a set of post-secondary vocational schools for the bottom quarter of their students as fine as any I have seen anywhere in the world, with facilities that rival those of many American universities. They turned vocational education and training from a dumping ground into a sought-after alternative that attracts more and more students every year.

And little wonder. Ninety percent of the graduates of their vocational schools have job offers in their chosen fields within six months of graduation. Singapore has one of the lowest rates of youth unemployment in the industrialized world. When I was there, I heard the head of Rolls-Royce Asia (which makes jet engines, not motor cars) explain that they decided to make Singapore their Asia manufacturing headquarters in no small measure because of the high quality of Singapore’s work force.

The distribution of income in the United States and many other advanced industrial countries is getting to look more like an hour glass every day, hollowing out the middle class and endangering their political stability as a result. That is not happening in Singapore, and that is true because Singapore had a strategy for improving the lives of their people, a strategy that married economic policy to education policy in very explicit ways. Singapore has created both a basic education system and a vocational education and training system that can sustain an economy that is shaped not like an hour glass but rather like a flattened diamond, with a big fat middle. Singapore’s population is about five million, right in the range of many American states and some European countries.

Here in the United States, educators and training organizations look to our Bureau of Labor Statistics to produce data about employers’ projected demand for labor as the basis for their own planning. They try, in other words, to produce the profile of skills and knowledge in the workforce that the economy will need. The Singaporeans have not done that. They have imagined the kind of economy they want, the kind of economy that will provide a good income and a decent life and rising standard of living for their population. And they have then worked very hard;mdash;and successfully—to produce a workforce with the skills needed to realize that dream.

In a world in which global employers can get the labor they need anywhere in the world and will seek to get that labor at the lowest possible price, it no longer makes sense for a country to base its education and training policies on projections of companies’ domestic human resources needs. The question should be not what domestic companies want to be more competitive (lower wages, fewer regulations, less restrictive labor practices, less concern about pollution), but what will attract global companies to produce services and goods in your country and pay high wages to the people who do that. Singapore bet that supply would create demand, as long as other government policies were carefully crafted to support its larger aims. Nations need not be helpless in the face of the changing dynamics of the global economy.

Automation is steadily taking over more and more of the routine work done in high wage economies. This is a good thing. What that leaves is interesting, challenging, creative work. Will it do that only for a few people, leaving increasing numbers unemployed or underemployed and desperate, or will these changes lead to full employment economies in which more and more people do interesting, challenging and creative work? The answer to that question does not depend on companies’ projections of what they will need. It depends on public policy, on what the people of a country decide they want for themselves, and it depends on whether a country invests in developing the skills, knowledge and capacity of their people in such a way as to make their country an attractive place to do business for the kinds of global companies that will offer interesting, creative and challenging work to enough people in enough occupations to provide full employment at high wages.

No country will be able to offer that kind of broadly shared prosperity if it is offering first class education and training only to its elites. Singapore realized that it could only get to broadly shared prosperity if it built a first class system of education and training for everyone. They put as much effort—perhaps more—into building their vocational education system as they did into their university system. They built an education and training system that would offer global employers not just highly educated and trained professionals and senior managers but highly trained and educated workers at every level, for all the work that needs to be done, in both manufacturing and services.

When I was in Australia, I was discouraged to hear some of my friends dismissing Singapore’s achievements on the grounds that Singapore is not a “liberal democracy,” just as I have heard some of my friends in the United States dismiss Singapore because its government does not tolerate either drug users or those who throw chewing gum on their sidewalks.

This, in my view, is a kind of cultural arrogance we can ill afford. Singapore is only half a century old. I have met many officials there with degrees from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge whose parents were illiterate and poor. These officials are sophisticated, worldly in their ambitions for themselves and their children. As the conference I was at in Singapore got underway, it featured a band of polytechnic students that included a young man with scarlet hair and others who found other ways of declaring their independence from the cultural commitments of their parents. These young people did not grow up with the sense of existential threat to the very existence of their country that made their parents quite willing to trade restrictions on their political freedoms for the chance to build a decent life for themselves and their children. There is every reason to believe that these young people will find a way to make the transition to liberal democracy just as their parents found a way to build a brilliantly successful economy. Our best hope for China is that the country continues to look to Singapore for inspiration. Many others could learn a thing or two from Singapore if they want a country with broadly shared prosperity, a strong middle class and the kind of freedoms that only a broad and prosperous middle class can guarantee.

The OECD’s A Skills Beyond School Review series is currently also being conducted in Austria, Egypt, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, England and the United States with case studies of Florida, Maryland, and Washington state.  Each review follows a standard methodology with the selected country preparing a background report and the OECD team making two visits to the country to discuss important issues with a number of stakeholders.  In addition to this work, the OECD is preparing a range of analytical studies on issues such as access and career guidance and counseling.  The complete body of work will conclude with a comparative report offering key policy messages for all OECD countries expected to be issued at the end of 2012.

In Denmark, postsecondary VET education takes the form of two different programs ⎯ academy profession (AP) degree programs and professional bachelor degree programs.  AP programs are short-cycle higher education programs that typically take about two-years to complete.  Admission is based on qualifications comparable to a Danish high school leaving certificate.  The AP program provides students with analytical and professional skills relevant for employment in businesses or industries.  The program also qualifies graduates for further studies within the same field at the university level.  Along with class work, a minimum three-month work placement and the submission of a project paper are required for graduation.  Most programs are offered at academies of professional higher education, which are independent organizations, separate from universities.  However current legislation outlines that prior to 2015, each academy should decide if they want to remain independent, in which case they will then have to transfer their bachelor programs to a higher education institution or merge with a higher education institution.  As of 2009, almost 19,000 students were registered in AP programs, which is a substantial increase from 2000 when nearly 13,000 students were enrolled.

Professional bachelor programs in Denmark require three to four and half years of study and are equivalent to a university bachelor degree with a stronger focus on professional practice.  The majority of the program takes place at a higher education institution and prepares students with theoretical knowledge and an understanding of how to apply theory to professional practice.  Along with all required coursework, a minimum six-month work placement and the submission of a project paper are required for graduation.  Admission to these programs is based on student performance on high school leaving examinations and other factors such as minimum grades.

A Skills Beyond School Review of Denmark identifies a number of strengths for this country’s postsecondary VET system including the mandatory, well-structured workplace training that outlines clear learning goals.  They also note Denmark’s effective policies to incentivize institutions to help students stay in school through graduation such as the school funding system, which funds institutions according to program completion numbers.  Additional laws are in place to encourage students to stay in school, for example, education institutions are required to refer students that wish to dropout to regional guidance centers and municipalities are legally required to make contact with and offer guidance to young people that are unemployed and not enrolled in school at least twice a year up until age 19.  Another impressive element of Denmark’s VET system is a parallel adult education system.  Over 40 percent of adults participate in formal and/or non-formal education each year and can expect to receive 1,794 hours of instruction during their working life, which is one of the highest levels across the OECD.  Lastly the OECD points out that both the employers and the employees are very engaged in planning, designing and steering the VET system.

In South Korea, postsecondary VET accounts for 30 percent of higher education enrollment and is provided by both junior colleges and polytechnics.  The junior colleges enroll over 50 times more students than polytechnics.  However their admission processes are not very selective and some institutions can struggle to fill their rosters.  Ninety-five percent of junior colleges are private, and government funding accounts for less than 10 percent of total junior college income.  Completion of these programs typically takes two years although three-year and four-year degrees are offered in a number of fields such as engineering.  While the difference in wages between junior college and high school graduates has been decreasing over the past 30 years, there is still a benefit in terms of employment.  The polytechnic schools, on the other hand, are public and access is more selective.  These schools typically offer one- and two-year degrees in technical fields such as electronics, mechanical engineering or telecommunications.  In addition, polytechnics offer shorter programs for employed and unemployed individuals as well as retired military serviceman.  A strength of South Korea’s VET system is the ease with which students can apply credits from VET programs toward a university degree.  Currently about half of junior college graduates continue in the university program.  This can present challenges as the vocational programs and university programs do not align their programs of study, so many junior college graduates are unprepared for the university-level work.

A Skills Beyond School Review of Korea finds a skills mismatch between VET options and labor market needs.  The reviewers make a number of suggestions on this front: convene a national body of key stakeholder groups, including businesses, to lead the development and regular updating of standards and qualifications based on the skill demands in the South Korean economy and make recommendations to ensure students are trained in these important areas.  The reviewers also suggest making transparent standards for VET programs through the development of common, national standards and assessments.  Another recommendation is to improve quality assurance in junior colleges by basing funding allocations and accreditation status on the quality of the training provided.  Lastly, the reviewers suggest that South Korea work to improve career information available to prospective students and that junior colleges make workplace training mandatory.  It is important to note that most of the OECD’s recommendations are focused on the junior colleges, which unlike the polytechnics do not have a strong link to workforce priorities.  The point of building a national framework for VET is crucial so all programs meet the same standards and the value of the each qualification or degree is clear to prospective employers as well as students.

In both of these country reports, workplace training is stressed as a key part of students’ vocational education experiences; not only does it benefit students but it can also serve to substantially enhance relationships between VET providers and employers.  Other key elements of high-performing systems seem to be the high status of these programs and the flexibility for VET students to apply what they have learned and move on to university qualifications.  The quality of the teaching staff is also not to be overlooked.  High quality vocational education and training requires instructors with solid pedagogical skills as well as expertise in the field they are teaching.  This means teachers must have professional development opportunities available within the system.

The Credibility and Value of International Education and Training Qualifications

The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP), the European Union’s reference centre for vocational education and training, released a new report on International Qualifications in June 2012.  The report looks at a variety of education and training qualifications, diplomas, certificates and licenses that are awarded outside the jurisdiction of any one country.  The authors try to develop a typology for these qualifications and analyze their credibility and value in the labor market.  The qualifications they consider are as diverse as: a certificate for seafarers, the Association of Montessori International primary certificate, Cisco certifications and airplane pilot licenses.  Their typology includes five categories for describing each: purpose (what the qualification is for); type (how complete and how durable the qualification is); coverage (where the qualification can be used); competent body (who awards the qualification); and currency value (what the qualification can be exchanged into).  They look at the case of Welding in more detail where cooperation among different bodies has yielded defacto international standards, driven by the need for safety and quality in this occupation.  The report suggests that while national qualifications are becoming easier to evaluate for quality because of the development of national qualifications frameworks, international qualifications are becoming harder to value because of the lack of any international organizing structure and the new need to align them with national frameworks.  The authors believe that international qualifications will only maintain relevance with the transparency that comes from an overall system for cataloguing and monitoring the quality of these qualifications.

Many countries, of course, have fully elaborated systems of occupational skills standards.  Some have systems less robust and some, like the United States, still have no national occupational skill standards framework.  Those that do have been working to find ways to develop cross walks among their standards systems to make it possible for people certified in one system to have their skills recognized in others.  As the global economy continues to globalize, the pressures to rationalize these systems will increase.   As the pace of technological change increases and work organization changes as a consequence, it will be more and more challenging to make sure that skill standards systems lead and do not follow these changes.

How the Netherlands Successfully Support Child Well-Being 

In July 2012, Every Child Counts published The Netherlands Study: Learning from the Netherlands to improve outcomes for New Zealand’s children.  Every Child Counts is a collaboration of New Zealand-based nonprofits as well as UNICEF and Save the Children that was organized in 2004 as a watchdog for children’s advocacy in the country.  Rowe Davies Research, a New Zealand firm, prepared the report.

The authors were asked to analyze the policies in the Netherlands that contribute to its high levels of child well-being at relatively lower costs than many other OECD nations that achieve similarly high levels of child well-being.  The report notes that the programs in the Netherlands for children are more systemic and widespread than in New Zealand and that New Zealand is currently spending half of what the Netherlands spends on children overall, according to OECD numbers.

The report attributes the Netherlands success to nation-wide programs of support for parents and young children, including a targeted health service for all children from 0-19 delivered by local health centers that ensures preventative care and health education for all youth and also has a significant on-line support aspect; a broad system of free pre- and post-natal care for mothers that includes assistance with basic household chores that relate to the health of the mother and baby; a dramatic increase in childcare since the 2005 Dutch Childcare Act with parents, government and employers splitting the costs overall and subsidies available for lower-income parents; generous housing support for low-income parents with one in three Dutch citizens receiving some housing support; a means-tested childcare allowance and a mandatory 16-week paid parental leave policy; and a youth care agency in each locality to coordinate all youth services and provide a single point of contact.

Based on the lessons from the Netherlands, the report recommends that New Zealand consider the following investments:

• Expand parent support and education programs;
• Expand child care services;
• Develop services to deal with post-natal depression;
• Expand care before and afterschool for children whose parents work;
• Increase parental leave to 18 weeks and widen the eligibility to parents with less stable work histories; and
•   Increase the availability and quality of state funded housing for low-income parents, and add programming to housing to increase social mobility.

They also suggest some longer-term strategies:

• Adapting child digital files so that they can be used to store health information;
• Adopting national indicators of child wellbeing and monitoring new policies by how well they move the country towards these indicators; and
• Continuing dialogue with the Netherlands, as the two countries share many characteristics and are likely to learn from one another.

The report cautions that, in the face of global economic woes, the Netherlands is considering austerity measures that threaten to dismantle some elements of the system just described.  It also points to some of the ways that the Netherlands family and child services could be improved that echo issues in many other countries and systems: increasing professional development for family and child workers, encouraging more collaboration among agencies, better integrating funding streams.  The challenge will be to see how the Netherlands continues to develop and prioritizes investments in children in more difficult economic times.

Kathrin Hoeckel, Policy Analyst at the OECD

In May 2012, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its much-anticipated Skills Strategy, a major new initiative aimed at helping governments improve their economies through comprehensive skills policies.  Kathrin Hoeckel, a Policy Analyst at the OECD, worked closely on the strategy and its accompanying report, Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies.  Betsy Brown Ruzzi, Director of the Center on International Education Benchmarking, recently spoke with Hoeckel about the scope of the project, its implications for education and workforce issues, and next steps for countries interested in implementing the report’s recommendations.

Betsy Brown Ruzzi: There is a strong consensus around the world that investing in human capital is a major key to economic success.  The new OECD Skills report was designed to help countries committed to this goal.  Can you give us a brief summary of what the report recommends to policymakers around the world working on investing in their people?

Kathrin Hoeckel: The aim of the Skills Strategy report was to boost development in economic and social terms.  We approached this topic from a number of angles including education, labor and economics.  We examined the issue through three pillars.  First, how economies can develop the right skills, that is, how to ensure the education system produces good quality skills that are needed and makes them available to everyone.  Second, how economies can encourage people outside of the labor market, for example, women or older workers, to participate.  And lastly, how economies use the skills of their labor force, in other words, how they ensure that the jobs that people are in match their skills so there are not a lot of over-skilled or under-skilled people filling jobs.

Brown Ruzzi: Perhaps we can look at the first pillar more closely.  The report suggests that countries gather and use intelligence on the demand for skills.  Can you describe how countries can go about this today?  Are there any countries with particularly good systems for doing this?

Hoeckel: First, countries need to determine the demands of their labor markets. There are a number of countries that have developed sophisticated systems to assess these skills and extrapolate future needs.  Australia has a system to gather data on labor market needs, particularly job vacancies, as well as the Monash University system that is able to help project what the workforce needs will be in the future.  A number of countries, like the UK, work with user surveys from employers; the surveys provide information on recruiting and employers’ plans for the future.  However, OECD is cautious about relying too heavily on future projections of economic needs, because there are limitations to the usefulness of projections given unforeseen changes in the economy.

In addition to collecting data on labor market needs now and in the future, countries need to align the demand for skills and the education system.  Countries that have strong vocational education systems with strong participation from employers are more likely to quickly adapt and respond to the needs of the labor market.  These countries, for example, Germany, Switzerland and Australia, actively involve employers in educating and training their workforce and that leads to a better match between what employers need and the skills their workers have.

Brown Ruzzi: Our own research shows that some countries rely mostly on projections from employers with respect to their future skill requirements.  In those countries, demand will lead supply.  But others make policy decisions about what sort of economy they want for their country and base their projections at least in part on these decisions.  In these countries, supply will produce demand.  Can you name examples of countries that use these different approaches?  What combination of these approaches would you use?  Why?

Hoeckel: Shaping the demand is a major part of the skills strategy, because just having a match between skills and jobs might not be enough to drive an economy forward.  In a local labor market, if there are only low skilled employees doing low wage jobs, it will be impossible to raise the standard of living and the economy will stagnate.  There are a lot of context variables to take into consideration in order to move production up the value chain, such as industrial policy, innovation policy and the promotion of entrepreneurship.  A country that has made major progress on this front is South Korea.  South Korea’s economy was at the level of Ghana’s a few decades ago, but aggressive industrial and human capital policies allowed it to jump to the front of the line in the OECD.  They set ambitious goals regarding what they wanted the country to look like and what industries to invest in, and they provided the human capital to develop these industries to reach higher economic standards.  This required a comprehensive approach, including industrial policies and education policies that run parallel with labor market needs.  However, one thing to always keep in mind is that education policy always lags behind many other areas since it takes time to educate future workers to meet the needs of the new economy.

Brown Ruzzi: The report also recommends that countries design efficient and effective education and training systems.  What strategies should countries use to do this?

Hoeckel: Strategies depend on the country.  But in general, the education and training system should always be of a high quality that delivers not just qualifications but people with strong, comprehensive basic skills.  Another general rule is that you have to include employers in the entire process of building up and running an education system.  If the world of work and learning are too detached, then you won’t get good results.  It is also important to have an inclusive education system.  During the last decades, most countries have focused their attention on raising tertiary graduation rates, but these can distract from fundamentals including insuring a minimum education for all.  We see through our research that the largest problem that many countries face is helping the people with the most limited skills; they struggle in the labor market throughout their life unless they have basic skill levels.  If you look at the whole cross section of people, over a lifetime, it is very costly to educate everyone to a minimum level, but if you compare that to what a country must invest in the welfare system and other costs that might be required to support individuals if they do not have a minimum education, it looks like education is the better investment.

Brown Ruzzi: Raising the quality of education and promoting equity in educational opportunities is another recommendation in the report.  Singapore is a good example of a country that found out years ago that the bottom quartile of its students could not function at a level high enough to succeed in their vocational education system, and they redesigned their system so that they both raised the academic standards for their vocational education system and, at the same time, greatly raised the proportion of the students in the bottom quartile who could meet their standards.  Do you know of other countries that have done this?

Hoeckel: A number of countries have made major improvements here.  One concrete example is a non-OECD member, Brazil.  It is a country that has made large increases in enrollment at the lower levels of education but this also holds true for secondary and post-secondary education.  The trend today is looking at enrollment numbers and the targets you have for getting diplomas.  That is what they initially did in Brazil, but then they realized that while young people were graduating with qualifications, they did not necessarily have the right skills.  To combat this problem, Brazil greatly increased the number of highly qualified teachers, invested in the general infrastructure of their compulsory schools, and put in place financial incentives for poorer students to attend school.  But quality increases cost more.  Finland raised the standards of its least achieving students by adding an instructor to help these students as soon as they find out they are struggling.  It is a huge investment that pays off, as compared to making struggling students repeat a grade, which research shows does not work.

Brown Ruzzi: Another policy lever the report discusses is putting skills to effective use by increasing the demand for high-level skills.  This seems to be quite a task given the economic downturn in many parts of the world; however, it seems to be the real secret to economic success in the 21st century.  What did your report say about unlocking the secret of creating high value-added jobs?

Hoeckel: This is the key ingredient, but also the most difficult area to tackle.  For example, I just visited Spain, and they are struggling economically.  They have a fairly well educated workforce but not enough work.  But there are things countries can do to promote product innovation, innovations in work organization and workforce innovation.  In this arena employers and trade unions must be deeply involved.  For example, in the UK they have a number of incentive funds for innovation, encouraging employers to better use the skills of their staff.  In Northern Italy, private and public actors have invested jointly in a skills hub where local employers work closely with a polytechnic where their people are trained, where they do product research whose results are given back to employers to improve production, and where they provide free training to the unemployed.  This is a very local effort but in that local economy, it has led to moving production up the value chain.  A lot of bottom-up initiative is required, but government can help by providing incentives and an environment where innovation can flourish.

Figure 1.2: Source: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies, Page 23

Brown Ruzzi: Even in the economic downturn, companies across the globe report that they have a shortage of either technical workers or a shortage of workers with high-level math, science, technology or engineering skills, or both.  (See Figure 1.2 above)  What does the Skills report say about this issue to countries that want to help their employers match people with jobs?

Hoeckel: This is an interesting phenomenon—How can you have skills shortages at the same time as high unemployment?  One thing to keep in mind here is that employers always complain about not being able to find the right people with the right skills.  Often there are not really shortages, but the working conditions and pay may be so low that people just don’t want the jobs offered.  Others decide to stay at home if the pay is low and working conditions are bad, particularly if they have good government benefits.  There is always a group of employers with true shortages because of cyclical changes where the education system is not fast enough to provide people with the skills they need.  In Australia, for example, when mining boomed, they needed to recruit outside the country to fill the job vacancies.

If you want to solve this problem through the education system, there are some countries that have retrained older workers in the areas where they need people, for example in the care industry.  But obviously education is always a slow process.  Employers are faster than government in seeing these changes.  That is why we suggest that employers become part of the whole process in designing education systems, because they can be faster in terms of forecasting their skills needs.

Brown Ruzzi: As part of the report, you wrote about early findings from a new OECD survey that will measure the skills of adults in the labor force in member countries.  The survey is called PIACC and results from the first global application will be available in October 2013.  Can you tell us a little more about the early findings of the new PIACC survey that OECD has developed to directly measure skills of adults?

Hoeckel: The survey is about the working age population (ages 16-64) and is being carried out in most of the OECD member countries and in some non-OECD member countries.  It includes responses from 5,000 individuals and looks at foundational skills such as reading, writing, problem solving and math.  It looks at the level and distribution of these skills.  We already see at this early stage in the results that in some countries the share of people not even reaching the minimum level of skills needing to operate in today’s economy and society is quite high.  I am sure to some this will be a shock.

If you look at distribution by level of qualification, the current proxy for human capital, you can see that it is a poor measure.  For example, the level and distribution of skills of people with a tertiary degree in one country is very similar to those with an upper secondary qualification in anotherquality varies across countries.  As the report points out, people acquire skills through work and other experiences and can also lose those skills if they don’t use them.  And, the older you get, the more skills you lose.  But this curve doesn’t have the same slope in all countries.  This means we can do something about it.  The extent to which people use skills in the workplace has something to do with the steepness of this curve, and we can figure out what countries and companies are doing to maintain these skills.  Another thing that is going to be interesting as we get the results from PIACC is the extent to which skills match or don’t match the requirements of your job.  We have observed that the higher your skills and the better the match, the more you will earn and the more training you will receive.

Brown Ruzzi: How do you see countries using the results from the PIACC survey in their skills policy?

Hoeckel: We hope that some of the results will be so striking that countries will wake up.  The issue of low skilled workers is pretty clear:  if countries see that one- third of their adult population is not reaching the minimum skill level, they might do something about it such as investing in adult education, promoting life long learning, and working on preventing high school dropouts.  We need to understand that training someone at the beginning of their working life is not enough; constantly maintaining and extending training should be the goal.  Our message is not just to governments, but to employers and individuals alike.

Brown Ruzzi: The report argues that countries around the world need to create a national skills policy. How is OECD helping their members do this?

Hoeckel: The whole point of the skills strategy is not just to look at skills and education, but to have a strategic approach and look at everything as a system.  There are so many elements that mutually influence each other: whether you are well matched with your job has an impact on your further skills acquisition. These issues are usually handled in different parts of government.  We want to encourage countries to adopt a strategic view.  In the future, starting with the framework we have laid out in the report, we will work with individual countries, offering a menu of options.  As a first step, we will offer a basic assessment using the framework to look at a given countries strengths and weaknesses.  Next, the OECD can help bring all of the key stakeholders together to discuss these issues and come up with joint solutions.  Third, the OECD can help countries take their strategy to an action level.  Our contribution as outsiders is that we can take a step back, take a look at things and put the right people in contact.  Once we have the PIACC data, we will be able to provide even more in the way of contributions to these countries skills strategies.

It is almost as if one could forego benchmarking trips elsewhere because you will find it all in Singapore.  That is true in the sense that you will find that Singapore has researched it, considered it and adapted it, but you are not likely to find the thing itself, because adaptation is not adoption.  Everything is made use of.  Nothing is replicated.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic

A few examples will do.  The purpose of this trip was to benchmark Singapore’s vocational and technical education system.  So these examples will be drawn from that arena.  But I could just as easily have drawn them from any other aspect of their education and training system.

Years ago, Singapore decided as it was developing its own vocational education system that it needed to have a system of occupational skill standards.  When I asked about that, they said that they had taken the methodology for developing their occupational skill standards from the American DACUM process for occupational job analysis and curriculum development and had borrowed the organization structure for involving industry in the development of skill standards from the Europeans.

But my organization, the National Center on Education and the Economy, has researched national occupational skill standards systems for years.  We long ago came to the conclusion that, notwithstanding their obvious value for getting students and training organizations to focus on the skills that industries feel they need, such systems have a very serious downside.  There is no point in having such systems unless industry drives the development of the standards.  The whole idea is to have standards that reflect industry needs.  The easiest way to do that is ask industry associations to take the lead in developing the standards. But, if you do that, you get a standard for average practice, which is almost always, by definition, behind leading edge practice.  When you set average practice as a standard, it takes a long time to change that standard.  The effect is to train young people for a standard that is more and more behind the times, making it less likely that industry leaders will be able to get people who can do the work the way they need to have it done.  They might be better off in a country with no skills standards.  So, you can see that national occupational skills standards can be an enormous advantage, but they can also be a deadly trap.

When we asked the leaders of Singapore’s polytechnics what they thought about these observations, they laughed and said that they, too, had come to the same conclusions.  So the government listened to what the industry groups had to say, but considered it only as advice, not as the last word, and felt free to change the standards that emerged from these processes if they felt that the standard needed to be changed to make Singapore more competitive, more in line with the most effective forms of work organization, better positioned to use the latest technologies, better aligned with the needs and practices of the world’s leading firms.  That is the essence of smart adaptation.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic Library

Here’s another one.  The Singaporeans looked hard at the famous German dual system of vocational education.  When we talked to them, they told is that the dual system is among the most important of the innovations they brought to Singapore.  But the dual-system, alternating formal education in school with on-the-job training in the workplace, is the primary upper-secondary education system for young Germans headed directly into the workforce.  In Singapore, young people not headed to University go either into the upper secondary vocational education system or into one of the polytechnics.  In the upper secondary vocational system, there is no sandwich program alternating time in the workplace with time in school.  It is all in school, but the Singaporeans have persuaded the companies to give them the state-of-the-art machines they need in the classrooms (working engines for current model cars, for example, with cutaway engines for the automechanics program) and have also persuaded the firms that it is in their interest to regularly cycle the school instructors through their firms to keep their skills up to date.  The Singaporeans figured out that, without the long European guild tradition to back it up, the German dual system would not work in Singapore.  Where they do use the apprenticeship system was in their adult education system, for employed workers who already had a firm attachment to the sponsoring firm.  Another smart adaptation.

Economic Development Board logo

In the late 1970’s, the Singaporean Economic Development Board (EDB), the nerve center of economic development strategy in Singapore, persuaded Germany and France to set up, at their own expense, several state-of-the-art vocational institutes in Singapore.  This was very similar to the move made in the 1960s by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s then prime minister, when he persuaded several leading nations to set up high-powered institutes of technology in India, on the model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  The vocational institutes in Singapore were to be upper secondary schools.  One of the top officials at the EDB insisted that these new schools be set up as “factory schools,” that is, that they look as much as possible like the very kinds of work environments the students would work in when they graduated, and the training in the school would be based on the production of actual advanced manufacturing systems produced under contract to local firms, with the students doing most of the work required to build those systems.  The foreign countries and the foreign firms they partnered with to build and staff these schools were persuaded by the EDB to build them in part by important economic concessions offered by the Board but also by the argument that students trained on the machines provided by these countries and firms would be inclined to order them when they joined the staffs of Singapore firms as foremen and supervisors.  The faculty members in these schools were required to take paid sabbaticals every few years, during which time they were expected to get an assignment anywhere in the world on the staff of one of the world’s leading technology firms.  On that person’s return, he or she was expected to update the school’s curriculum on the basis of what had been learned.  In this way, the schools’ curriculum was constantly refreshed, always reflecting the global state of the art.  So Singapore had a constant supply of young people coming into their firms in mid-level technical positions who were very well versed in the latest factory automation and microelectronics manufacturing techniques.  Was this benchmarking?  Not of the traditional sort, but the spirit was certainly there.  It was a remarkably effective and efficient system for constantly bringing back to Singapore the very best manufacturing technologies in the world, and making sure that Singapore could offer a workforce very well versed in those technologies.  We had learned about the German-Singapore Institute and its French mates on our first trip to Singapore in 1989.  What we learned this time was that Singapore had since built an entire system of world-class polytechnics on this model.  When we talked with a group of Singaporean employers toward the end of our visit, it was clear that they place a very high value on the skills, knowledge and attitudes that the graduates of these polytechnics bring to their firms.

Again and again, I found myself very impressed by the quality of thought that had gone into the continually evolving design of the Singaporean education and training system.  I am choosing my words carefully here.  The keyword is “design.”  Everywhere one looks, one sees thoughtful designs of the kind that a very good engineer would create.  This was true of each subsystem and of the system as a whole.  And, indeed, when we asked about how the system was managed, this attention to systems design was reflected in the answer.  The organization of the system as a whole included features designed to assure that managers of all related parts of the system were in constant touch with one another, and that nothing was done that would affect the functioning of the larger system without close consultation with the managers of the adjoining system functions, both vertically in the system and horizontally as well.

This is no accident.  When I first discovered that the Economic Development Board is the nerve center of the Singapore government, during our first trip in 1989, I also discovered that the staff of the EDB was made up mostly not of economists but of engineers.  Economists tend to be analysts, but engineers are system designers.  This orientation came naturally to them.

But there was a related point that seemed no less important to me.  When Lee Kuan Yew took the helm in Singapore, even before Singapore gained its independence, he was determined to use economic development to lever his destitute little group of islands into a standard of living for his people far above what it was when Singapore was birthed.  And he believed that could only be accomplished by smart, honest, uncorrupted government officials.  He decided that he would have to attract to government the smartest people he could find in Singapore, so his policy was to provide people in government compensation comparable to what they would get for comparable jobs in private industry.  He identified the very top high school students and offered to pay for their education at institutions like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge if they would agree to come back and serve in his government.

It is those people who were responsible for vaulting Singapore from a tiny impoverished dot on the map in 1965 to its current status as one of the most successful economies in the world.  And today, this practice continues.  Leaders in government agencies in Singapore, including the Ministry of Education and its sub-agencies, are some of the most knowledgeable and forward-thinking education leaders we have met anywhere.

Many observers have likened Singapore not to a nation but to a large corporation.  This is partly because one does not see here the usual play of partisan politics and partly because the usual play of partisan politics has been replaced by a kind of rationale planning and attention to execution that is more characteristic of a well-managed corporation than of a liberal democracy.  That said, however, this is a nation that believes in government, in the capacity and legitimacy of government to lead.

And that, of course, could contain the seeds of a big problem for Singapore.  Countries and organizations with very strong leadership are often countries and organizations where everyone stands around waiting for the top to tell them what to do.  In today’s world, that is the death knell of economic competitiveness.  It is entirely plausible that the very instrument that enabled Singapore to climb to the top could be the instrument of its failure to compete in a world in which economic leadership is increasingly a function of innovation and entrepreneurship from below, not instructions from on high.

Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam

So I was especially happy to learn before we left for Singapore that we had managed to get some time with Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam.  In 2005, when Shanmugaratnam was Education Minister, he delivered a speech in which he commented on a trip he had just taken with several Ministry of Education officials to Japan. Japan, he said, had come to the same conclusion that the Singaporean government had come to, namely, that the future belonged to countries whose workforces could invent the future, could out-create and out-innovate their competition.  And the Japanese and the Singaporeans were in agreement on the kinds of changes that would be necessary in their schools to meet this challenge.  But, he said, the Japanese had imposed these changes from the top down, and there was no buy-in from the schools.  That would not happen in Singapore.  The goal would be reached with leadership from the schools, and support from the top, or as he put it, there would be “top-down support for bottom-up initiatives.”  For government to achieve its objectives, it would have to change the way it worked, in a pretty fundamental way.

I am telling this story in part because it says something very important about one small country’s route to top performance, but I am also telling it because it says something about the process of benchmarking.  Shanmugaratnam and his team learned something very important in Japan, but they did not copy it, just as they had earlier learned very important things from Germany and the United States, but did not copy them.  It is too early to tell whether Singapore will be able to make the deep cultural shifts that are needed to reach the goals they set for themselves a few years ago, and it is also too early to tell whether the Japanese will succeed in reaching similar goals, but it is, I think, a sure bet that Singapore’s deeply ingrained, almost reflexive, habit of constantly checking to see how their peers are responding to the neverending changes in the global competitive environment and then thinking hard about the implications of what they find for their own actions has served them very well over and over again as they have made their way to first world status.  It is a very powerful learning system.

Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education at Asia Society, a member of the Center on International Education Benchmarking Advisory Board, and author of A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation, spoke with Top of the Class about her latest trips to Singapore and Shanghai, both educational top-performers. While in Singapore and Shanghai, Stewart had the opportunity to visit schools and universities and meet with ministry officials in order to discuss how these systems are tackling challenges such as educational equity and how they plan to continue innovating and evolving to meet the exponential pace of change in the world.  Stewart shares what she learned with Top of the Class.

Top of the Class: Can you broadly outline which of the central features of Singapore’s education system you think have driven their excellent performance?

Stewart: Singapore is clearly a major global success story, having transformed itself from third-world to first-world status in fifty years. I was struck by a number of political and educational policies and practices that have driven the development of this high-performing education system, but let me just mention three.

First, Singapore leaders across the board share a palpable consensus about the centrality of human resources to economic development and the building of a multi-cultural nation.  Recognizing that human resources are their only natural resources, there is an urgent focus on human capital development and education is Singapore’s “core business.”

The strong link between its education and economic development goals is achieved through close communication between the Economic Development Board, the Manpower Ministry, and the Ministry of Education, and by rotation of ministers between departments.  This linkage has made investment in education a central priority, has led to the development of high-quality math and science education and world-class technical education, and has kept education dynamic and open to change rather than being tied to the past.

Second, teacher and principal quality is extremely high. In order to attract the best possible people into teaching, Singapore aligns initial salaries to those of other college graduates like engineers and lawyers, has a high-quality teacher preparation program, has established a set of career paths for teachers and uses a variety of bully pulpits to promote recognition of the value of teaching to the nation. The career paths are rooted in significant professional development and premised on performance as measured by serious multi-faceted evaluations. Highly accomplished teachers can earn as much as a principal. Singapore has also created a system for developing the pipeline of school leaders through early identification and nurturing of talent.

Third, every critical element of the system – from curriculum to assessment, teacher training, financing, student support, and staffing of the Ministry are aligned around the twin goals of excellence and equity.

Top of the Class: As you mentioned, Singapore is now a world leader in technical education for students at the secondary level.  How did they build such a strong vocational system, and how does it function now?

Stewart: In the 1960s and 70s, Singapore’s vocational and technical training programs were focused on quickly providing basic skills to workers who were faced with entering an entirely new and different labor market. Although the government’s priority in education in the 1960s was to expand primary and secondary education, Singapore’s first vocational institute was created in 1964.  At that time, only about 15 percent of students opted for vocational or technical education as opposed to mainstream academic education, as it was not seen as a desirable option. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Singapore created several new vocational institutes as well as an Industrial Training Board (ITB). The ITB became a locus for central oversight, allowing the entire vocational education system to become both centralized and formalized. Singapore also partnered with several multinational corporations in the 1970s to create “Joint Government Training Centres” to directly provide skilled workers to the industries that most needed them. In the 1980s, economic restructuring dictated a change in vocational education, and the Singapore government established a Continuing Education and Training program to re-train and re-skill much of the workforce to meet changing economic needs.

In the early 1990s, the Singapore Economic Development Board decided that in order to attract new kinds of industry to Singapore, they needed a highly skilled workforce specific to these desired fields.  At the same time, they needed to rehabilitate the poor image of vocational and technical education in order to make it an attractive option.  In order to do so, they organized the Institute for Technical Education (ITE) and developed a workforce qualification system, completely revamping the previous vocational/technical curriculum.  They developed courses in new industries and consolidated existing technical colleges into three mega-campuses with physical and technological facilities comparable to the best universities.  All three campuses of ITE offer business, information and communication technology (ICT), and engineering but each campus also has special programs and the west campus, that I visited this time, has a school of hospitality to serve the burgeoning luxury tourism industry.  Every course has close ties to industry including the most modern multinational corporations. This keeps the courses up-to-date, the equipment modern, and internships readily available.  To combat prejudice against less academically inclined students, the ITE carried out a major marketing campaign for its “hands-on, minds-on, hearts-on” type of learning.

Twenty-five percent of students in grades 10-14 are now in the ITE after their ten years of general education.   It is designed to serve the bottom quarter of students in terms of school achievement.  Whereas in the United States, the bottom 25 percent of students drop out of high school, in Singapore, 90 percent of the bottom 25 percent of students graduate from ITE and get jobs and Singapore has the lowest youth unemployment rate in the region.  The ITE has helped Singapore to adapt rapidly to the very open global economy and it now runs internal training programs for companies as well.

Top of the Class: Singapore’s education system was built with an eye always on Singapore’s place in the global economy.  As the economy continues to grow and evolve, what does Singapore plan for the education system going forward?

Stewart: Singapore has built a strong  “academic knowledge transmission” type of education system, characterized by high standards and considerable social mobility. But as Singapore seeks to move from manufacturing to becoming a leader in the global knowledge economy, the challenge is to make its education more student–centered and oriented towards a more holistic range of 21st century outcomes and values, including self-direction, critical thinking, active citizenship and global awareness.

To produce these “future-ready” Singaporeans, the education system is broadening its curriculum to include more emphasis on arts and physical education and on integrating inquiry methods and ICT into schools. The system is also developing a portfolio of schools, each with its own character, and encouraging schools to become centers of innovation.  For example, it has replaced its past centrally directed inspectorate system with a school excellence/self-improvement model based on European experience and on the Malcolm Baldrige awards. At the higher education level, Singapore is both expanding graduate level training in critical fields such as biomedical sciences, information technology and chemical engineering and introducing liberal arts into its undergraduate programs.

Top of the Class: What challenges lie ahead for Singapore?

Stewart: Singapore certainly has its challenges.  For example, a side effect of examination pressure (derived from the importance that the Singapore system places on exam performance) is massive tutoring outside of schools and a level of streaming that many Americans would not agree with.  The examination system maintains high standards but is also a constraint on innovation.  And while Singapore has significantly closed its achievement gaps and focused on bringing up the lowest achievers, there is still a correlation between socio-economic status and achievement (although far less than in many other countries).  But Singapore educators are not resting on their past achievements.  Singapore is now revamping its curriculum, teacher training and assessments to encourage the development of the kind of high-skilled, creative knowledge workers they believe are needed for the 21st century.

Top of the Class: How did your visit to Shanghai compare to your visit to Singapore?

Stewart: Singapore is a relatively small system and you are able to connect to each of the parts of a very well-managed system in a short period of time, but the scale of Shanghai, a city of 22 million people, makes that impossible.  Discussions during this most recent visit to Shanghai focused primarily on their approach to turning around low-performing schools, the teaching profession in China, and how Chinese education is changing to meet the demands of a global knowledge economy.

Top of the Class: Can you give us a brief overview of how Shanghai’s education system has changed in the last 30 years?

Stewart: Shanghai has had forty years of educational expansion and improvement.  In the 1970s and 1980s, the focus was on expanding access rapidly to basic education  (Don’t forget that schools had been closed during the Cultural Revolution).  Then in the 1990s, the focus shifted to quality.  A major curriculum reform effort, piloted in Shanghai and then spread around the country, broadened the curriculum beyond its traditional focus on math and science to include more arts, humanities and languages, and initiated the move towards more active forms of pedagogy.  A major emphasis was also placed on upgrading the quality of teachers and trying to reduce examination pressure.  Shanghai abolished its end-of-primary school examinations and moved to a system of choice among neighborhood schools.  Efforts to close the gap between low- and high-performing schools also began in this period. Since 2000, there has also been a big expansion of higher education opportunities in Shanghai and in 2006, Shanghai began administering the PISA assessment to all 15-year-olds as part of its efforts to encourage a more applied and problem-solving kind of learning.

Top of the Class: Shanghai is at the forefront of addressing educational equity issues in cities in China, a country where educational quality is highly variable.  How are they addressing low-performing schools, particularly given that such a large number of students in Shanghai are the children of migrant workers?

Stewart: Recognizing the huge socio-economic differences in Shanghai, in part due to this enormous migration to the city from rural areas, Shanghai has focused in recent years on improving lower-performing schools.  The essential strategy is to get principals and teachers from high-performing schools working with weaker schools on management, school culture and teaching quality.  This can take a variety of forms.  A principal of a successful school can be asked to manage several schools, not just one.  Schools in a geographic area may be formed into clusters to share teaching resources and best practices.  Under the “empowered management” policy, a high-performing school, including entities outside the Shanghai public system, can receive funds from the Education Commission to improve the management and teaching in a low-performing school.  Teachers from the lower-performing school may spend time observing in the higher-performing school and principals and lead teachers from the high-performing school will spend time each week in the weaker school.  These administrators are granted two-year contracts for approximately $500,000; these are awarded initially by the Commission and may be extended if performance improves.  So far, Shanghai has had three, two-year rounds of such “empowered administration,” involving about 60 weaker schools.  If a school does not improve after this intensive support, the Commission can close or restructure it.

Top of the Class: What do you find interesting about the teaching profession in Shanghai?

Stewart: Teaching is traditionally a respected profession in China but since Shanghai is the major commercial center of China, there is great competition for educated talent.  So to attract high-quality people into teaching, the Education Commission has raised salaries and academic requirements for entering teachers and provides early admission to universities for people who want to teach. Once in schools, there is a career ladder of beginning, middle and senior lead teachers. Shanghai follows the Chinese tradition of apprenticeship in which the schools’ master teachers mentor, observe and meet weekly with newer teachers. All teachers have several open classrooms each year so that other teachers can observe and learn from them. Shanghai also follows the Chinese tradition of teacher research; there is a teaching and research panel of 900 members throughout the city, where senior teachers work on improvement of practice and through which innovations can be disseminated across the system.

Top of the Class: Where does Shanghai go from here?

Stewart: First, let me discuss where China is going overall.  China has a 2020 National Education Plan, which was drafted with online input from millions of people. The Plan aims to make upper secondary education universal; to reduce the gap between richer urban and poorer rural areas and between top and weaker schools; to reduce examination pressure by diversifying the university entrance examination; and to expand higher education enrollment to 40 percent of an age cohort.  It seems possible that in a few years, China might be graduating a higher proportion of a high school cohort than many other countries and, of course, the numbers are immensely larger. Shanghai, which is the leading city in China for education, has its own 2020 plan within this framework, with a   major emphasis on making higher education widely accessible. The Education Commission, which is responsible for higher education as well as elementary and secondary, is therefore focused on the challenges of financing and of faculty recruitment.

Top of the Class: What did you learn on this trip about China’s education challenges?

Stewart: Despite its impressive educational developments, China faces huge challenges as it tries to turn its enormous population from a burden into an asset.  The gap between the poorer rural areas and the increasingly affluent cities is a significant cause of political unrest and the massive migration to the cities poses serious challenges to city school systems. (Not all cities have attempted to integrate migrant students into city schools as Shanghai has). Very large class sizes also make less didactic teaching practices more difficult to achieve.   The national university entrance examination (the “bad master”) is another obstacle, and this university-developed examination is at odds with the goals of curriculum reform to promote creativity and critical thinking.  The government is trying to reduce the influence of the exam by allowing provinces to develop their own and to experiment with allowing some students to enter university by alternate routes.  But the belief in examinations as the guarantor of meritocracy is very strong and this examination cult means that high schools are very exam-focused and that students, while working hard, are spending a great deal of time with tutors on preparation and memorization for exams.  Finally, as the system expands at breakneck speed, there are problems with capacity at every level, from the shortage of English teachers to the lack of well-trained faculty for the new universities.

Top of the Class: Taking into account your many visits to Singapore and Shanghai, what do you think are the highest priority lessons for other nations trying to improve their education systems?

Stewart:  We have to recognize that education policies always need to be adapted to suit different cultural, political and economic contexts, but high-performing countries around the world, which differ significantly on these dimensions, do seem to have some common success factors.

First, the Singapore government has built a highly successful education system by creating a policy infrastructure that drives performance-through high standards, early intervention, and aligned curriculum, instruction, and assessment-and by building the capacity of educators to deliver high-quality education in every school.  While the small size and tightly coupled nature of the education system may make it less relevant to larger countries, Singapore is the size of many small countries, smaller states or provinces in larger countries, and some larger cities, so its practices could be examined through that lens.  These systems could ask themselves in what form they could develop their own version of the long-term vision and leadership that has driven Singapore to the top.

There is a balance in every system between top-down policies and local school autonomy. When systems have weak or highly uneven performance, more centralized policies may be needed to raise standards and reduce inequities, but when systems have higher performance levels and strong capacity at the school level, greater autonomy for school innovation becomes the norm combined with mechanisms for diffusing innovation across schools.

Second, Singapore has built one of the world’s best human resource development systems. Given the centrality of teaching and school leadership to the quality of any education system, a key question for systems wanting to improve is how can different levels of government work together to raise the image, quality, professional training and effectiveness of the teaching profession and of school leadership?

Third, Singapore has leveraged the connection between education and economic development to create jobs, raise education and skill levels and drive per capita GDP to first world levels. And in today’s world, when many jobs can move anywhere there is an internet connection, developing stronger connections between education and economic development, closing the gap between the skills needed for high-wage jobs and the output of the education system, and reimagining technical education for the 21st century as Singapore has done would also seem to be essential to future prosperity.

Shanghai also demonstrates the importance of a serious, long-term vision for education.  And both Singapore and Shanghai have used international benchmarking as a tool for continuous improvement, sending not just policymakers but also principals and teachers to study international best practices   A key question for any country is how can its policies encourage uniformly high standards, commitment to equity, alignment and coherence while also encouraging flexibility for innovation and continuous learning rather than mere adherence to the letter of the law?

Singapore and Shanghai are two strong examples of commitment to large-scale educational improvement in both the short- and long-term, and countries looking to improve various aspects of their own education systems, from vocational and technical training to issues of equity and access, can draw some strong lessons from these two cases.

School Profile: Zhabei No. 8 Middle School, Shanghai

By Vivien Stewart

The Zhabei district of Shanghai is a lower income area with poor educational performance. In 1994, Liu Jinghai became the principal of Zhabei District School No 8, a school that had been among the poorest performing in the district but has now leaped to the head of the pack. Mr. Liu applied a strategy that he called ‘success’ education that he had developed through many years as a researcher.  His approach is based on the observation that low-performing students have no confidence in their ability to succeed, a situation made worse by the examination pressures in schools in China. In addition, teachers in these schools lack belief in their ability to be successful with such students.  His strategy is to offer students a wide range of curricula and extra-curricular activities so that they can find a talent and a passion to increase their confidence; to systematically raise the quality of teaching; and to regularly connect to parents.  This success education program has transformed the school, greatly improving its ranking in the district and increasing the number of secondary school graduates who go on to higher education to 80 percent. The school has subsequently helped to turn around ten other low-performing schools in Shanghai.

I had an opportunity to observe a music class and a math class and to have a discussion with Principal Liu and several teachers and students.  The classes I observed had very well-organized lessons with clear objectives and a variety of classroom activities. Students were intensely focused, with no time wasted, and other teachers were observing the lesson.  Believing that effective teachers have a very clear idea of what they want to teach and how and that all people learn through imitation, the school tries to make the hidden characteristics of good teaching visible to others. The emphasis is on helping younger teachers to develop strong fundamentals of good teaching practice. Once they have mastered the discipline of good lessons, then they can innovate.   New teachers arrive in schools knowing educational theory but not how to deal with the individual needs of students, what points of a lesson to emphasize and how to effectively convey the most difficult concepts.  Each teacher has a mentor teacher who observes classes, helps with the lesson and checks that every student in the class is engaged.   All teachers of a particular subject are part of a teachers’ study group and work together on lesson plans and cross-observe each other’s lessons.

Since 2005, Zhabei School has worked with ten other “weak” or “rural” schools under Shanghai’s “empowered administration” policy.  Under this policy, the successful school receives funds from the Shanghai Education Commission to improve the weaker schools. Believing that the fundamental problem in these schools is that administrators believe their teachers are weak while the teachers believe their students are weak, Zhabei applies its ‘success for all” methods of finding and encouraging students’ different talents and self-confidence and working with teachers to increase the effectiveness of their instruction.  Teachers come to Zhabei Middle School to shadow effective teachers and Zhabei teachers and the principal go to the low-performing school to improve school management, culture and instruction.  Zhabei has also created an E-Learning platform to enable the school to support teachers at a distance. Principal Liu reported that all ten of the schools showed improvement in the first year.

School Profile: Tampines Elementary School, Singapore

By Vivien Stewart

This school is in a working class neighborhood and is the first community school in Singapore, integrated into the community and open to the community after hours. It is one of a portfolio of different types of schools, each with its own character, that Singapore is trying to create. Its mission is that its pupils should be “enriched beyond limits, and loved beyond measure.” The goals of the school-excellence, self-directed learners, physical and aesthetic excellence and creativity-are expressions of the 21st century competencies that Singapore schools are trying to inculcate.  The school employs holistic assessment across seven domains-cognitive, aesthetic, physical, creative, technological, socio-emotional, moral-mental, and leadership. A lot of emphasis was placed on the support of teams of effective teachers and on the need to engage the hearts of learners before engaging their minds.  A black box theatre donated by the community, for example, allowed the use of drama to encourage self-confident speaking in both English and Chinese.

In this section of our newsletter, we provide a summary of the key findings of the OECD report.  In our Statistic of the Month section, you can find graphic displays taken from this report and another recent OECD report that neatly summarize some of the most important findings and show how a number of the countries surveyed for the report sort themselves out along the dimensions of interest.  This article should be read in conjunction with those graphics.

Unsurprisingly, the report finds that certain investments in educational equity pay off.  They argue for early government investment in education, and maintaining a strong investment in the system through upper secondary school, with specific, targeted investments in and policies for low-performing schools. The authors recommend elimination of system practices that hinder education, among them grade repetition, early tracking, school-choice schemes that do not actually offer “choice” to all students, and “dead-end” upper secondary programs as opposed to academically demanding vocational tracks in upper secondary school that ensure that all students have a high quality pathway to the job market.  The authors also propose several broadly outlined strategies for improving low-performing schools with a particular emphasis on strong school leadership, highly-qualified teachers and strong links to the community.

The report points to countries that have been unusually successful at minimizing the effects of socio-economic status on school performance. Finland, in particular, and to a somewhat lesser extent Canada, South Korea and Japan, have all been able to help a high proportion of their students from low socio-economic backgrounds achieve at high levels, as measured by the 2009 PISA scores in reading. The OECD average reading score is far lower than it is in any of the countries just listed, while the average percent of variance in reading achievement among students from various social backgrounds is nearly twice as high as it is in Finland. Other countries, like the United States and New Zealand, have higher average PISA scores than the OECD average, but also a higher percent of variance in those scores – showing that those systems are both lower achieving overall and more unequal within their countries.

Other Recent Reports of Note

• The measurement of educational inequality: achievement and opportunity, The World Bank (publication date: November, 2011). The authors of this working paper examine educational inequality and measurement issues in international standardized assessments like PISA. They use these measurement issues to calculate inequality indices for 57 countries and provide results along with an analysis of whether education inequality correlates with factors like GDP, school spending and student tracking.
• Student Standardised Testing: Current Practices in OECD Countries and a Literature Review, OECD (publication date: October 11, 2011). This report discusses the most relevant issues concerning student standardised testing in which there are no-stakes for students through a literature review and a review of the trends in standardised testing in OECD countries. It provides an overview of the standardised testing typology in the no-stakes context, including identifying the driving trends behind the gradual increase in standardised testing in OECD countries and the different purposes of standardised tests.
• Teachers’ and School Heads’ Salaries and Allowances in Europe, 2009/10, Eurydice (publication date: October 4, 2011). This Eurydice data collection and comparative study on teachers’ and school heads’ salaries and allowances covers full-time, fully qualified teachers and school heads at pre-primary, primary, lower secondary and upper secondary education levels for the 2009/10 school year. The cross-country comparative analysis focuses on comparing the decision-making levels that are responsible for setting teachers’ and school heads’ statutory salaries. The minimum and maximum statutory salaries are presented relative to the GDP per capita in each country, with an indication of salary progression and its relation to professional experience. The latest increase/decrease in the purchasing power of personnel employed in education in relation to the impact of the economic crisis since 2008 is also analyzed. Finally, the different types of allowances that teachers may receive are presented as well as the decision-making levels responsible for their allocation and their levels.

“Bob King and Bob Schwartz are two of this nation’s most highly respected educators and the National Center is fortunate to have them on its Board of Trustees,” said Marc Tucker, President and CEO of NCEE.  “Bob Schwartz brings his experiences as a high school teacher, principal, a governor’s education advisor, foundation executive and university dean to the National Center which is deeply involved with benchmarking the top-performing education systems around the world – many systems that Bob knows well.  Bob King also has had a sterling career in government at both the state and county level.  His efforts to bring best-in-class educational opportunities to all of the students in the states he has led have made him an invaluable partner in the National Center’s work on bringing world-class instructional systems to U.S. high schools.” Read the full press release here.

NCEE in the News
In his Education Week blog, Top Performers, Marc Tucker reviews How Well Are American Students Learning?, the latest report out of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, and reinforces that raising academic standards is an integral step in a much larger process to develop powerful instructional systems to raise student achievement. Marc also blogs about his proposed education agenda for the next American president, the death of vocational education and the demise of the American middle class, and more in Top Performers.

In the Des Moines Register, Head of Iowa State Department of Education Jason Glass, writes about lessons learned from Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems (NCEE’s latest publication) and how they could inform an education reform package currently being considered in the state.  District Administration magazine interviews Marc Tucker and asks, “What Can U.S. Schools Learn from Foreign Counterparts?” Atlanta Journal Constitution education reporter Maureen Downey explains why American politicians and educators should pay attention to successful school reform models elsewhere in the world. Read these stories and more here.

New Book: Nancy Hoffman, Schooling in the Workplace: How Six of the World’s Best Vocational Education Systems Prepare Young People for Jobs and Life. Harvard Education Press, Nov. 2011

On the shelf with literature on education there is a wealth of books and articles on higher education issues but little on the possibilities for the large group of young people who do not opt for an academic education.  This seems out of balance considering the growing rate of the challenges faced by the latter group as they transition from school into meaningful employment and careers.  The present knowledge based economy places new and much larger demands on our workforce regarding skills, competences, and attitudes. This deepens the gap between the world of school and the world of work, and if we include the impact of the present economic crisis the result is a chilling increase in unemployed youth and school dropouts.

Fortunately, in recent years a growing number of articles and books on this “forgotten” group have been published. Multilateral organizations like the OECD and the European Commission have conducted a lot of recent research and policy initiatives such as setting ambitious multilateral targets. This has been followed up by national targets to reduce school drop-out rates and increase completion rates, but a lot still remains to be done.

Nancy Hoffman’s new book is extremely refreshing in this context. Hoffman combines her life experience working to increase the number of low-income and at-risk young people that finish education with her very recent participation in OECD-reviews of VET (Vocational Education and Training) systems among member states. She states that the book is “written out of a desire to provoke discussion in the United States about features of strong vocational education systems.” Another important quality of the book is that it contains an abundance of facts, issues and lessons for educators, policy makers, business leaders and politicians all over the world.

Hoffman profiles six very different countries in the book: Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands. However, experience from other countries is included in the analysis too. Instead of tedious presentations of the different countries’ systems the book is organized around anticipated questions “that thoughtful and knowledgeable U.S. readers have about vocational education in Europe and Australia” such as: How can countries ensure that VET is broad based and not preparation for a narrow trade? How can countries incentivize firms to engage them in educating young people? What kinds of intermediary organizations do the strongest VET systems employ to liaise between young people, employers, schools, and the state? What kind of pedagogy is relevant in the workplace? How do countries serve struggling young people and those at risk of dropping out of school and being excluded from the labor market? And is there a risk that early tracking results in the replication of social class structures?

By carefully defining fundamental concepts, Hoffman avoids misunderstandings due to different usages of the terms, i.e., What is the difference between certificates, certifications, and licenses? And what is the difference between work-based learning and workplace learning? In my opinion this is crucial in order to communicate features of fundamentally different systems across borders. In addition, Hoffman includes two “Journal Essays” as chapters in the book. One is her own reflections on visits to Swiss companies and their training programs for apprentices; a chapter giving the reader a sense of the young people’s views, aspirations, and experiences. The other essay presents observations and reflections on the German dual system by Harvard professor Robert B. Schwartz.

Hoffmann is by no means arguing for specific solutions in the U.S. case. She has a very clear view of the dissimilarities, flaws and shortcomings of the different systems in play. She offers critiques for the well functioning systems and a clear outline of the different solutions addressing the same national and global challenges. Her attitude is not “they’re good, we’re failing, or vice versa”. Rather, she has one very consistent argument – here cited with one of her many striking statements and in concordance with OECD conclusions – namely that “workplace learning “has compelling attractions” both for young people and for employers; indeed, done well, it appears to be the best way for the majority of young people to prepare for the world of work.”

One of the important contributions of the book is the focus on the upper secondary completion agenda and the national targets for graduation. One of Hoffmann’s conclusions is that in the VET countries, the goal is not to get young people to complete upper secondary school, but rather the higher ambition of engaging them in learning for jobs. Apprenticeships and workplace learning can offer possibilities that schools cannot provide. This important message deserves to be considered by policy makers worldwide.

The final chapter looks at the possibilities for the United States. Hoffman presents a number of promising initiatives and policy developments and offers some reflections on what it would take to improve the designs of the high school and community college programs.

In closing, I enthusiastically endorse Hoffman’s final suggestion to the reader: “Buy a plane ticket to one of the strong VET countries, talk to employers, see young people at work, and decide for yourself whether the system performs as described here.”  Before you travel, I whole-heartedly recommend that you read this book.