The OECD Observer
October/November 1998, No. 214

 

Preventing failure at school
By Karen Kovacs

 

Governments are under pressure to improve the quality, efficiency and relevance of their education systems. Too many young people leave initial schooling ill-equipped for life and work. A better understanding of educational failure and how to address it would help policy-makers to achieve their goals. (Education Policy Analysis, OECD Publications, Paris, forthcoming 1998.)

Educational ‘failure’ was once seen as an almost inevitable, if regrettable, consequence of schooling. Today, failure has become a target of policy action in its own right. Efforts to prevent failure, to boost overall achievement and to reduce the incidence of dropping out of school are being driven by a range of economic and social concerns.

Recent studies show that some 15-20% of young people in OECD countries leave secondary school without the skills and qualifications they need to enter the labour market. (The OECD Jobs Study, OECD Publications, Paris, 1994 (http://www.oecd.org/sge/min/cover_study.htm).) Moreover, it appears that as many as a third of all adults in seven member countries have levels of literacy and numeracy which are inadequate for their job requirements. (The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) was co-ordinated by Statistics Canada in partnership with OECD, the National Centre for Education Statistics, the US Department of Education and the Education Testing Service. The results for the first group of countries to participate in the survey (Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland—French and German cantons—Poland, the United States and Canada) were released in Literacy, Economy and Society, 1995. Comparable data for a second group (the Flemish Community of Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the United Kingdom) were published in Literacy Skills for the Knowledge Society, 1997.) The scale of this problem raises a concern which goes beyond factors relating to economic competitiveness. Low educational attainment has increasingly damaging consequences for individuals and societies. It can consign people to low-paid jobs or long-term unemployment and undermine social cohesion.

Another reason for dealing with under-achievement is more concrete and pragmatic, and that is to reduce the strain which low-achieving students exert on national educational resources. Back in the 1980s, France estimated that around 30% of its education budget covered costs arising from failure at school, mainly due to grade repeaters and drop-outs. The French Community of Belgium surmised that its education expenditure could be cut by around 10% if the practice of repeating grades was abolished. (European Commission report on ‘Measures to Combat Failure at School: A Challenge for the Construction of Europe’, Brussels, 1996.) In the 1990s, there is a shared awareness across the OECD area that failure is best addressed at an earlier rather than a later stage, since a successful outcome would be more likely and the intervention more cost-effective.

Seeing failure as a ‘process’

Dealing with educational failure, pressing as it might be, is a highly sensitive issue. Students and organisations can easily be stigmatised, and morale and self-confidence further impaired. This is why much controversy has been caused by drawing attention to institutions which are performing poorly in the hope that they will improve. Some OECD countries—for example France, New Zealand and the United Kingdom—argue that doing so publicly is a necessary first step in helping under-performing schools to do better. Other member countries—such as Australia, Denmark, Finland and Italy—prefer to take the spotlight away from failure by promoting measures to enhance the ‘success’ of students and schools.

Whatever approach is taken, or labels used, the fact remains that unacceptably large numbers of students leave school every year with little or no qualification to speak of. To develop effective means for addressing such failure, policy-makers have to see it as a ‘process’ which students experience. The process has three aspects:

• failure at school itself, when students are consistently low-achievers or do not attain a minimum standard of performance at a given level of schooling

• early school leaving, with pupils dropping out of school before the end of their statutory education period

• post-school transition, whereby some young adults have difficulty integrating into adult life because of their lack of suitable qualifications or skills.

Despite the differences between national education systems in different OECD countries, various international studies, in particular those conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), have helped to develop comparative measures of student achievement. They do this by giving similar samples of students from each participating country a common test. The IEA’s Reading Literacy and TIMSS studies show that there is a wide gap, within a country, between the highest scoring students and the lowest scoring ones. (The 1990-91 IEA Reading Literacy Study of 14-year olds (applied in 32 countries, 19 of which are OECD members) and the 1994-95 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) of 13-year olds (applied in 45 countries, 23 of which are from the OECD area). The target population studied by TIMSS is the higher of the two grade levels in which most 13-year olds are enrolled and which, by convention, is referred to as the 8th grade, since in most countries it refers to the eighth year of formal schooling.) The data can therefore be used to identify low-achievers, who are most at risk of failing at school.

The gap in achievement between the lowest and highest scoring students is equivalent to between two and three years of schooling for science and widens to four years in some countries for mathematics. A similar picture can be seen for reading. In all school systems, in all three subjects and in corresponding grades, there is a substantial gap—equivalent to between two and four years of schooling—between the level attained by the weakest 25% of pupils and the level attained by the strongest 25%.

A common way of tackling low achievement is to have some vulnerable children repeat their grades. Most repeating is done at secondary school rather than at primary level, and more boys repeat than girls. But despite the arguments for making students repeat their grades, the evidence shows that the approach does not in fact reduce under-achievement. Rather, it can increase it.

As a result, grade repeating has been abandoned by some countries—including Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom—and it has been restricted in France and Portugal. A new approach for helping slower learners is the system of two or three-year ‘cycles’. In this method, repeating is not allowed, except to some extent at the end of a cycle. It is being implemented at primary level in France and Spain, as well as in the French Community of Belgium. One advantage of this system is the flexible curriculum: children of the same age group can progress at different rates through the stages of a cycle. Another advantage is that courses can be geared more to individual needs than is possible in conventional systems, permitting multi-grade teaching and more accurate assessment of students’ strengths and weaknesses.

Early school leaving

Young people who drop out of school without finishing a course of study, or who leave without the proper qualifications, run a higher risk of being unemployed or trapped in low income work. Even if they find work fairly quickly, the jobs they take are often only short-lived or low-paid. While they may appear good enough to tempt some pupils away from education, particularly those who come from areas of high unemployment, they are likely to offer little or no long-term prospects.

The age at which compulsory schooling ends in OECD countries varies between 14 and 18. Education systems with higher leaving ages seem to succeed in keeping more young people at school until the end of upper secondary education. So, would raising the age for completing compulsory education in those countries where it is lowest resolve the drop-out problem? Only in part, since there are many reasons why students decide to quit school early. Findings of the recent International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) show that drop-outs are twice as likely to have left school for economic or family reasons beyond their control than because of a lack of interest in school or a desire to get a job.

What then can the education system do to ameliorate the drop-out problem? Reform of the curriculum to make it more interesting and useful to a wider range of students is one approach. Such reform has recently been carried out in Japan, where the conventional curriculum was judged to be excessively narrow. Other approaches include opening different pathways for students to advance through schooling and improving career guidance. Experience with new pathways is being examined in the OECD’s review of the transition from initial education to work.

Inadequate basic skills

Some students finish compulsory education without having acquired the basic skills necessary to succeed in today’s society. The link between inadequate skills and labour market potential has been analysed by IALS. The survey threw up several interesting points. For example, the highest risks of marginalisation, unemployment or low-income jobs used to be confined to those who failed to complete lower secondary schooling. Now, however, even the statutory period of education may be an insufficient basis for adult life. In most OECD countries, it seems that upper secondary education is increasingly necessary to improve the prospects of finding suitable employment with adequate pay.

Having said that, IALS shows that even many of those who have completed upper secondary education have poor basic skills. This implies that failure to acquire skills cannot be looked at narrowly in terms of school completion, but raises questions about the suitability of the school curriculum. Countries have to ensure that their secondary school graduates have the knowledge and skills necessary for their social and productive integration into modern society. Such a need is reflected in the efforts undertaken in some OECD countries (for example, in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States) to spell out more closely the standards or levels of skills young people should have attained by the time they complete a full secondary cycle. It is another matter to consider the ways by which this might be achieved.

Finally, the survey confirms that in Canada, Ireland and the United States the unemployment rate for young adults with poor skills is twice that for those with high skills. In the Netherlands and the United Kingdom the discrepancy is even larger. These findings highlight the importance of addressing the problems associated with under-achievement in school and ensuring wider educational opportunities for all.

Strategies to fight against failure

Against the backdrop of global competition, combating failure or promoting success at school will remain a priority for OECD policy-makers in the years ahead. The following four principles should guide their efforts:

• Act early: Once under-achievement in its different manifestations has been properly identified, prompt action should be taken to prevent students at risk from continuing unchecked on the path to failure. It is also more cost-efficient to address the problems early.

• Combat failure together: Overcoming failure requires a long-term effort by educational authorities in conjunction with teachers and parents, along with other community groups. Clear leadership at the national level is required to mobilise public support and to co-ordinate the work of the relevant agencies.

• Encourage flexibility: Experience shows the importance of individually-oriented instruction and assistance; adequate assessment of students’ strengths and weaknesses; a flexible curriculum; smooth pathways and transitions across levels; and appropriate career guidance.

• Develop the tools for action: In spite of the differences between member countries, learning from the experiences of others helps to build successful policies. Coming up with a set of best-practice guidelines would make sense, though to do so requires effective monitoring. Developing a comparable OECD database on educational failure and success would be an important step in this direction.

 

OECD Bibliography

Education at a Glance, forthcoming 1998

Education Policy Analysis, forthcoming 1998

Overcoming Failure at School, forthcoming 1998

Literacy Skills for the Knowledge Society: Further Results of the First International Adult Literacy Survey, OECD/Statistics Canada, 1997

Human Capital Investment, 1998

Tom Healy, ‘Counting Human Capital’, The OECD Observer, No. 212, June/July 1998
(http://www.oecd.org/publications/observer/212/Article8_eng.htm)

Mapping the Future: Young People and Career Guidance, 1996

Integrated Services for our Children and Families at Risk, 1996

Peter Evans, ‘Co-ordinating Services for Children at Risk’, The OECD Observer, No. 202, October/November 1996
(http://www.oecd.org/publications/observer/202/ob202e.html)

Literacy, Economy and Society: Results of the First International Adult Literacy Survey, OECD/Statistics Canada, 1995

Our Children at Risk, 1995

The OECD Jobs Study, 1994 (http://www.oecd.org/sge/min/cover_study.htm)

 

Karen Kovacs: OECD Directorate for Education, Employment, Labour and Social Affairs