The Learning Curve: On tertiary education and internationalisation
As part of a project to create a better understanding of what leads to successful educational outcomes, Pearsons in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) published a report last week that received global press coverage. The report 'The Learning Curve. Lessons in country performance in education' formulates lessons and insights for policymakers to achieve better results on national education outcomes.
Lessons on inputs to outputs
The report mentions five lessons in the executive summary and provides general tips throughout the document on which inputs lead to higher outputs. It also provides an index, scoring the output of 40 countries (the top five being Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, and the last five being Colombia, Thailand, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia). The report ends with recommendations on how to pursue the research on education outputs further. Other features of the project launched before the report are a data bank, including a visualisation tool, and country profiles that might be handy for some working in the field.
The report has received quite some press and critique as well, including on the data used. In a Times Higher Education article, Denis McCauley, the EIU's executive editor for business research, voiced - in response to the critique - the hope that the report will serve as "a catalyst for further collaborative efforts by academics, practitioners and policymakers".
To contribute, two suggestions below can be given to the project itself, both relating to its scope.
What about tertiary education?
The report talks about education, suggesting that the results refer to the whole education system. However, the primary focus is on primary education (reference sources are PISA, PIRLS, and TIMSS). It would be interesting for policy makers in higher education if the project would also look at tertiary education.
In this respect, when references are made, it could build on work that is currently undertaken, including major initiatives as SABER (Systems Approach for Better Education Results - World Bank, also a source for primary education) and 
AHELO (Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes - OECD). The first offers a benchmarking of the system, while the latter aims to measure learning outcomes in tertiary (higher) education. Outputs on tertiary level require a different approach than primary education, but are very interesting since tertiary education is so crucial to a country’s welfare in many aspects.
What about internationalisation?
When exploring performance of tertiary education, what about including internationalisation or international cooperation as a factor? This contributes to the quality of an education system. Internationalisation efforts are often not taken into account in these kind of exercises on national level, whilst especially in tertiary higher education it is perceived as a possibility to improve education outputs. Furthermore, it can help to reach achievements that could not have been reached by institutions on their own. Of course the remaining key question will be how to measure and collect data for this. And also, what makes a good education outcome and how to define this?