Andreas Schleicher is the head of the Indicators and Analysis Division for OECD’s Directorate for Education. Originally a graduate in physics, he subsequently studied mathematics at Deakin University in Australia, where his master's thesis received the Bruce Choppin Award. In 2003, Schleicher was awarded the "Theodor Heuss" prize, named after the first president of the German Federal Republic of Germany, for "exemplary democratic engagement" in association with the public debate on PISA. He also holds an honorary professorship at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. In 2002, Schleicher was awarded the "educación y libertad en el ámbito educativo" prize by the Spanish national association of private schools. A German citizen, Schleicher is married, with three children. He speaks German, English, Italian, French and Spanish.

Here is what he had to say about global trends, inefficiencies and changes within the education sector globally:

EdPath:  Generally speaking, what kind of trends are you seeing within education systems globally?

Schleicher: I think there are broad issues that you need to think about when you talk about trends. One has to do with efforts to raise quality and looking at the enormous success you see in some countries. Another issue has to do with addressing inequality — equity and gender. We can see, in the past, a sort of tall pyramid where education had a few people at the top end, some people in the middle who implemented the ideas, and lots of people on the bottom. This has totally changed for OECD countries. If you think about the impact of digitization and automation outsourcing, there have been dramatic increases in skill demands in OECD countries that have put equity into a totally different perspective. In the past, some people might have said that equity is "lets make sure we have taken care of the disadvantaged people." But today it is a fundamental economic and social issue where societies cannot afford to have people excluded. Also, the question of efficiency is a very interesting one. If education expands and more people participate, how do you ensure that there is some kind of reasonable balance between those who pay and those who benefit? How do you identify the relative benefits of education? Who is going to pay for it, and how do you manage those systems more efficiently? These are interesting questions that we increasingly need to look at. If you look at global trends, you do see dramatic changes in terms of quality. I think that is really striking. You see improvements in quality. If you look at our PISA comparisons of student learning outcomes, you can see some countries — such as Poland — that in six years have been upgrading their entire education system by almost a school year in terms of quality. That is really very significant progress. In terms of equity, we see the same thing. But we also see rising challenges in some countries. Society growth, etc. — the question is really how successful a country is modernizing with equality.

EdPath: How can institutions tackle some of their problems related to inefficiencies?

Schleicher: Inefficiency is something that everyone realizes is an issue, but I don’t think anybody has a handle on this. If you look at the broad trends, and if we are honest about it, we see declining levels of education productivity in the sense that things are becoming more expensive but not necessarily better. That is something that we have to stop and think about, and it is a very difficult issue conceptually. But I think it is time for institutions and countries to think about how they can actually make sure that increases in investment are matched by rises in quality.

EdPath: How has the education sector changed in recent years?

Schleicher: If you think about it, one of the challenges is that education has not changed in the same way as other sectors in our society and economy in terms of becoming more knowledge based, becoming more information rich, becoming more professionalized. That is part of the problem, in my view. If you look at what’s happening in the classrooms, teachers are often still left in isolation to teach and there is no professionalism in the sense of support systems, no collaborations across classrooms and schools. I think that is really a big worry. I mean if you work as a doctor or whatever, you find today a totally different work environment than what you had 50 years ago. That is not true for schooling. The way schools look today, the way we teach, the way we learn, the way we structure schooling, the way we manage it is still left unchanged. That means it is becoming more expensive because salaries increase and salaries determine spending on education. But that alone is not leading toward real improvement.