OECD Findings : Learning that drives Student Success

My father used to love the story of me as a 5 year old at a family gathering with my elderly and frail grandmother.  It seems she was passing around a box of boiled sweets, and everyone had taken one, but when I reached to take mine she did not see me, snapped the lid shut, turned away and put the box up on a high shelf out of my reach.  Feeling scolded and that I had done something wrong, I turned bright red, became teary and went and sat in a corner, head in hands.  My father, seeing this, took down the box and gave me a sweet.  I jumped up, and ran over to wave it under my grandmother nose, crying “See!  See!”  

I love that story for the laughter it brought my father, and the fact that “See!  See!” has become a family saying – wheeled out when someone feels somehow affirmed, or vindicated in a particular course of action.  And it comes to mind now when I read the latest OECD report published a month ago.  Alas I am not holding up a sweet now, but a rather less digestible 173-page report entitled Beyond Academic Learning.  Here’s Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director of Education and Skills setting the context:

OECD is perhaps better known for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills.  These have long been seen as global metrics for academic schooling outcomes.  But as the OECD says these are just part of the story of what makes individuals, businesses and countries successful. For the first time the OECD is now publishing an international comparative assessment of social and emotional skills that complements the picture.   And so the report investigates (across 10 globally distributed cities) student self-reports, triangulated against reports and assessments from teachers, parents and principals to consider skills in six domains broken down into Curiosity, Tolerance, Creativity, Responsibility, Self-Control, Persistence, Sociability, Assertiveness, Energy, Empathy, Trust, Co-operations, Stress-Resistance, Optimism, Emotional Control, Achievement Motivation and Self-Efficacy.  These skills have, of course, long been championed by educators, parents, and the business press – anyone, in fact, who has ever tried to actually get anything done in an organisation.

The headline here is that the 2018 – 2020 OECD study strikingly confirms the importance of holistic education and the importance of Social and Emotional Skills for three overall reasons.  Students’ social and emotional skills ….

• are strong predictors of school grades across students’ background, age cohorts, and cities (especially being intellectually curious and persistent)
• are strongly related to students’ psychological well-being after accounting
  for socio-economic status and gender (especially being stress resistant, optimistic and in control of emotions)
• are related to employment outcomes (other OECD studies shows that social and emotional skills are better predictors of income at age 25 compared to cognitive skills).

One particularly interesting finding that emerges is that young people’s social and emotional skills dip as they enter adolescence. 15-year-olds, regardless of their gender or socio-economic background, reported lower skills than 10-year-olds with the differences being particularly pronounced in cases of skills such as optimism, trust, energy and sociability.  The report rightly notes that while developmental factors may play a role here (the teenage years….), educational systems focussed on compliance may drive out curiosityand creativity as students grow older.  There is a clear suggestion that heavy emphasis on compliance is damaging – which certainly resonated with us as a school that has just enshrined autonomy as one of its three principles underlying student and adult wellbeing (more on that here).  

The overall OECD takeaway is as simple as it is compelling:  In a world that is shifting, evolving and polarising as quickly as ours, schools need to send our children out with a fully packed tool box – not just of cognitive skills, but social and emotional ones  too….  Schools would do well in providing opportunities for students to practice and learn about their creative potential in a variety of formats, such as individual and group activities, and competitive and cooperative formats.  

Or speaking as a leader in one of the many schools that has been foregrounding an holistic approach for many decades – See!  See!