Top Class: The OECD Education Policy Podcast | Teachers, PISA, Students

People who graduate from university have on average better health, better life expectancy, and better earnings than those who don’t. But many students just can’t afford higher education, especially in countries where there’s less public money going into grants, bursaries and tuition waivers. With higher education budgets possibly tightening, where will the money come from? Lorraine Dearden, Professor of Economics and Social Statistics in the Social Research Institute at University College London talks about how student loans are handled in a number of countries and why, just like free lunches, there’s no such thing as free tuition. Host: Clara Young, Editors: Taline Shahinian & Ilse Sánchez Pacheco

In the OECD’s PISA survey of 66 countries in 2018, 88% of high-school principals reported that climate change was covered in their school’s curriculum. But it was Italy that was the first country in the world to make climate change coursework mandatory in all public schools. As Italy’s Minister of Education, University and Research in 2019, Lorenzo Fioramonti drove Italy’s climate education reform. Nita Seng is a middle-school math and science teacher in the United States and co-director of Subject to Climate. She gives us the teacher’s point of view on reforming school curricula to integrate climate education. Host: Clara Young, Producer: Taline Shahinian. Learn more about the OECD's Global Teaching Insights work on climate action here: bit.ly/GTIclimate

Are schools teaching students enough about climate change? And are they empowering them to do something about it? In PISA 2018, an average of 88% of high-school principals in 66 countries reported that climate change was covered in the school curriculum. But maybe this needs to come earlier. We hear from Shreya KC, 23, from Solukhumbu, Nepal. Shreya was a delegate at COP25 in Madrid, Spain in 2019, an organiser of the Mock Cop initiative in 2020, and is currently the National Network Coordinator for Nepalese Youth for Climate Action. Also in this podcast is Eleanor May, 18, from Ivybridge, England. Eleanor is a campaigner for the UK’s Teach the Future, a movement by secondary and tertiary education students to improve climate change education in the UK. Host: Clara Young, Producer: Taline Shahinian.

Alperton Community School is in one of London’s lowest-income areas, Brent. Almost half of the children there live below the poverty line. And yet this secondary school is in the top 1-5% of the country in terms of qualifications and accreditations. What’s Alperton’s secret sauce? Well, to start with, its teachers. Andria Zafirakou teaches arts and textiles at Alperton. In 2018, she won the Varkey Foundation Global Teacher prize – what is essentially the Nobel prize in teaching. Host: Clara Young; Producer: Taline Shahinian.

Children have probably spent more time online this year than they ever have before. Which is why the OECD’s newly adopted Recommendation on Children in the Digital Environment comes right in time. How much do children know about the privacy of their data? Or how to tell the difference between good and bad information? How do we deal with cyberbullying and hate content? Elizabeth Milovidov is an expert on digital parenting and children’s digital rights at the Council of Europe. Tracey Burns is a senior analyst at the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. She consulted on the OECD’s Recommendation on Children in the Digital Environment. It sets out the principles of a safe digital environment for children. Host: Clara Young; Producer: Taline Shahinian.

We’ve heard a great deal about what boosts our immune system during this pandemic. But what boosts our “commune” system? Michael Ungar, director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University, Canada, discusses how community helps us through hard times. And as young people navigate through the pandemic and its aftermath, their resilience will serve them well – a resilience not of individual grit, but formed through the people around us. Host: Clara Young; Producer: Taline Shahinian.

If we looked into a crystal ball, what kinds of school would we see? Would classes be happening exclusively within school walls with a teacher in front and students in rows? Or would it be a robot conducting class? Would some school be online? Or would learning take place anytime and anywhere? The OECD has put together four scenarios of what the future of education might be. Keri Facer, Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol in the UK, and Tracey Burns, Senior Analyst in the OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation and co-author of a new report Back to the Future of Education FOUR OECD SCENARIOS FOR SCHOOLING, talk about the future we want for schools… and the future we might get. Host: Clara Young Producer: Taline Shahinian

Remote schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic has opened our eyes to the difficulties of intersecting digital technologies and traditional schooling. Sanjay Sarma, who is Vice President for Open Learning at MIT, talks about online learning and how it can work hand-in-hand with teachers and students… with some serious cognitive science know-how.

Over the course of 2020, millions of students across the globe were unable to attend classes due to school closures, meaning that countries were forced to rely on emergency measures to keep learning going. Online classes were a popular choice in countries that had the technical capacity, but strategies differed between countries and depended heavily on the context of each area. In this podcast, we talk to Earl Phalen, Founder and CEO of George and Veronica Phalen Leadership Academies, Ryoko Tsuneyoshi, Professor of Comparative Education at the University of Tokyo, and Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, Senior Analyst at the OECD, about how schools fared and what the situation was like in the United States and Japan in particular. To read more stories of how schools managed the crisis, visit oecdedutoday.com/coronavirus/#Continuity-stories

It could be said that there have been not one but two pandemics being propagated across the world over the past year. Alongside the spread of COVID-19 there has been an equally prolific spread of misinformation surrounding the origins, characteristics and treatments of the virus – some are calling it an “infodemic”. False information about the crisis fuels division and hinders government efforts to control the spread, especially in areas with already low levels of trust in government. The young are particularly vulnerable to being exposed to misinformation online, and it has become vital to support them in developing a critical eye when reading the news. But what is the best way of doing that? To find out we caught up with Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck, Founder and CEO of Lie Detectors, Amy Mitchell, Director of Journalism Research at Pew Research Center, and Francesco Avvisati, Senior Survey Methodology Specialist in the OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills.