School pupils’ dreams are determined by class and gender, warns OECD director
School-aged students’ aspirations for university and future careers are limited by their circumstances rather than their ability, an education expert has warned.
Speaking at the Education World Forum in London on 20 January, OECD director for education and skills Andreas Schleicher said “students from privileged backgrounds are much more likely to want to go on to higher education than students from disadvantaged backgrounds” although they may have scored highly in the OECD’s PISA test.
He added that gender also had an impact on students’ aspirations, stressing that of “boys and girls who do really well in PISA mathematics and science tests…the boys want to become the engineers of tomorrow and the girls have much lower aspirations” in terms of careers.
“It’s not just about learning outcomes. It’s also the image that we create, the role models that people experience, that matter more for their dreams about the future and their expectations,” he said.
Schleicher added that future iterations of the PISA test, which runs every three years and ranks countries’ education systems by testing 15-year-old pupils in maths, science and English, should assess how well students interact with the digital world.
“If we think about the future, we need to embrace a wider range of cognitive, social and emotional skills,” he said. “There are a lot more things that are important in the lives of students that are not yet captured, not yet made visible, and it is very, very hard to improve what we cannot see.”
He explained that in future “we should probably build PISA and all international and national tests around giving [students] access to all the world’s resources” by letting students use mobiles to find information online.