Ideas@TheCentre
OECD study holds lessons for Australian education policy
This week, the OECD released its annual Education At A Glance report which provides country comparisons of spending, participation, completion, performance and various other aspects of education.
At 475 pages, it contains much useful information, but for those who can’t bring themselves to read the whole report, here are some highlights.
As usual, Australia is ranked fairly close to the OECD average in terms of overall spending on education with the exception of pre-primary education, where we are right at the bottom.
The federal government has chosen to blow steam about this figure out of the thousands of possible figures, but this report suffers from the same flaw as all other OECD publications on early childhood education and care. The expenditure figure is misleading because it only includes direct spending on pre-school education and government programs and administration. It does not include the enormous household subsidies for child care in this country, which form a large part of the early childhood education sector.
There are some interesting figures relating to school education.
Although public spending on school education is below OECD average, private investment in school education in Australia as a percentage of GDP is exceeded by only two other countries – Korea and Chile.
Australia is among the countries with the highest number of instruction hours, with an average of 962 hours a year for 12 to 14 year olds. This compares with an OECD average of 892 hours per year. The countries that outperform us in the PISA literacy, numeracy and science assessments have much fewer instruction hours per year– Sweden (741), South Korea ( 867) and Finland (777) – but devote proportionally more compulsory instruction time to these core subjects. Australia only devotes 13% of compulsory instruction time to reading, writing and literature, which is the lowest in the OECD.
New analyses of the 2006 PISA results show that socioeconomic disadvantage has a relatively low impact on performance in Australia compared with most other OECD countries. In the science component of PISA 2006, 39.4% of ‘strong’ performers (with scores in the top two performance bands) were students with a socioeconomic status index below the national average.
Figures provided in OECD publications are often accepted as Gospel, but they should always be viewed with caution and considered in light of each country’s policy context. The above figures, while interesting and informative, are no exception.
Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at the Centre.
