Every year, the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) features a topic of central importance to global development. The 2018 WDR—LEARNING to Realize Education’s Promise—is the first ever devoted entirely to education. And the time is right: education has long been critical to human welfare, but it is even more so in a time of rapid economic and social change. The best way to equip children and youth for the future is to make their learning the center of all efforts to promote education. The 2018 WDR explores four main themes: First, education’s promise: education is a powerful instrument for eradicating poverty and promoting shared prosperity, but fulfilling its potential requires better policies—both within and outside the education system. Second, the need to shine a light on learning: despite gains in access to education, recent learning assessments reveal that many young people around the world, especially those who are poor or marginalized, are leaving school unequipped with even the foundational skills they need for life. At the same time, internationally comparable learning assessments show that skills in many middle-income countries lag far behind what those countries aspire to. And too often these shortcomings are hidden—so as a first step to tackling this learning crisis, it is essential to shine a light on it by assessing student learning better. Third, how to make schools work for all learners: research on areas such as brain science, pedagogical innovations, and school management has identified interventions that promote learning by ensuring that learners are prepared, teachers are both skilled and motivated, and other inputs support the teacher-learner relationship. Fourth, how to make systems work for learning: achieving learning throughout an education system requires more than just scaling up effective interventions. Countries must also overcome technical and political barriers by deploying salient metrics for mobilizing actors and tracking progress, building coalitions for learning, and taking an adaptive approach to reform.

Governing multi-level education systems requires governance models that balance responsiveness to local diversity with the ability to ensure national objectives.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken long-accepted beliefs about education, showing that learning can occur anywhere, at any time, and that education systems are not too heavy to move. When surveyed in May 2020, only around one-fifth of OECD education systems aimed to reinstate the status quo. Policy makers must therefore maintain the momentum of collective emergency action to drive education into a new and better normal.

Building on the OECD’s Framework of Responsiveness and Resilience in Education Policy, as well as analysis of international policies and practices from over 40 education systems, this report identifies three policy areas that education policymakers can undertake in 2023: 1) enhancing the relevance of learning pathways, 2) easing transitions throughout learners’ pathways, and 3) nurturing learners’ aspirations. Lessons emerging from recent policy efforts are synthesised into key policy pointers for 2023.

The second volume of the Partnership for Democratic Governance Series investigates whether ‘contracting out’ core government functions and services has been conducive to capacity development. Case studies discusses the evidence and emerging lessons of contracting out.

This book uses PISA data to show that a substantial proportion of students in OECD countries now attend schools that have high degrees of autonomy in different areas of decision making.

The OECD education indicators enable countries to see themselves in light of other countries performance. They reflect on both the human and financial resources invested in education and on the returns of these investments.