Last week, several EPPE Network members and postgraduate students participated in technical meetings at the OECD and UNESCO as part of a fact-finding visit to Paris. The visit is organized every year as part of the EPPE MSc course run by the University of Glasgow’s School of Education.
The main aim of the trip is to introduce students to key institutions linked with global education policy. At the OECD, participants had the opportunity to understand in-depth the objectives of this global institution and explore one of its more important projects: The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which they discussed with statistician Judit Pál.
While visiting UNESCO, the group participated in several meetings led by experts from different departments within the international organization. The areas covered during the meetings were Global Citizen Education, Inclusive Education and the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report . In these technical seminars, participants had the opportunity to discuss key global educational issues with Anne Muller (Unit of Knowledge Management Services), Marco Pasqualini (Section for Global Citizenship and Peace Education), Florence Migeon (Section for Education for Inclusion and Gender Equality) and Alasdair McWilliam (Global Education Monitoring Research Team).
For EPPE Network member Abass Bolaji, this experience represented a great opportunity to better understand the role and concrete impact of those global institutions in the field of education worldwide:
“It gave me a great insight on how these two organizations get into the hub of global policy making and research. The ways they communicate their recommendations and monitor implementation spurred my interest in policy research and future collaboration. I learned a lot about their core values and effectual prospects for the world in terms of policy description and decision making.”
The technical visit was led by Dr. Kristinn Hermannsson, programme director of the Education, Public Policy and Equity MSc and Associate Fellow of the EPPE Network. For Dr. Hermannsson, this activity has become a key element of the MSc programme, allowing an important connection between the theoretical concepts explored through the course and their real implications for educational issues in global policy making:
“for students about to become graduates working on education policy issues, visits to international organisations like these are beneficial on so many levels. Naturally, we learned a lot about the ongoing research and policy priorities of these institutions. That in itself is valuable. But it is also important to take in that these iconic institutions, which are so influential in setting the education policy agenda, are ultimately run by other human beings and their priorities are predicated on the same type of social and educational research methods that we are examining in the seminar room”
Many thanks to Abass and Kristinn for their comments this week. If you would like to learn more about the MSc Education, Public Policy and Equity programme, you can do so on the course website.