More than half of employers fear they will not be able to recruit enough high-skilled workers, according to a survey by the CBI. The employers’ organisation is warning that a skills shortage is ‘threatening to starve economic growth’.
“Firms are facing a skills emergency now,” said CBI deputy director-general Katja Hall.
“It’s all about understanding what students do at school and how to solve complicated problems using the latest methods,” said Nur Hidayah Ismail, the principal at Genius Young Minds tutorial centre. As a previous school teacher in a state school, parents kept asking me for help to coach them. I saw there was an urgency because they don’t know how to coach their child at home,” she added. “When I resigned I thought I needed to help as parents were out of touch with the syllabus.”
Read more: BBC News: ‘Back to school’ for parents in Singapore
The biggest ever global school rankings have been published, with Asian countries in the top five places and African countries at the bottom. Singapore heads the table, followed by Hong Kong, with Ghana at the bottom. The UK is in 20th place, among higher achieving European countries, with the US in 28th.
In Latin America, the regional rankings of these international tests taken by 15 year olds in maths, reading and science, are headed by diminutive Chile, ahead of economic powerhouses like Brazil and Mexico. But most countries remain off the ranking completely.
Read the full article here: Latin America’s wake-up call on global school tests | BBC News
The promise that all children globally would have primary education by 2015 – pledged by world leaders in the millennium year – has officially not been achieved. Unesco says there are 58 million children without access to primary school and 100 million who do not complete a primary education. Only a quarter of countries achieved the goal of halving adult illiteracy.
Read the full article here: BBC News: World Fails to Reach Millennium Education Targets
The man in charge of the Pisa tests, Andreas Schleicher, says the evidence from around the world reveals some big myths about what makes for a successful education system.
Read the full article here: BBC News: Seven Big Myths about Top-Performing School Systems
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