Education Policy in Japan

Annex C. OECD review team members

External experts

Graham Donaldson, a former teacher, headed Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education (HMIE) from 2002-10. As chief professional advisor to ministers on education, he has taken a leading role in a number of major reform programmes, including Scotland’s major reform of its curriculum.

After his retirement from HMIE, his report Teaching Scotland’s Future (2011), made 50 recommendations about teacher education in Scotland, which have all been accepted by the government and are the subject of an ongoing reform programme. He has also undertaken a review of the national curriculum in Wales, and the 68 recommendations in his radical report, Successful Futures (2015), have also been accepted in full and embodied in a major, long-term reform programme.

Graham has worked as an international expert for the OECD, participating in reviews of education in Australia, Portugal and Sweden. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath by the Queen in 2009 and given the Robert Owen Award as an Inspirational Educator by the Scottish Government in September 2015. In addition to various forms of consultancy and continuing to act periodically as an international expert to OECD projects, he was appointed as an Honorary Professor in Glasgow University in 2011 and an advisor to the Minister for Education and Skills in Wales in 2015. Graham is also a member of the First Minister of Scotland’s International Council of Education Advisors (2016).

Ben Jensen has extensive experience in education reform, advising governments in Australia and numerous international systems. He is the founding CEO of Learning First, an organisation committed to reforming school education. Learning First uses research, consulting and development to help improve education systems in Australia and around the world.

Before founding Learning First, Ben was Director of the School Education Program at the Grattan Institute for five years. His reports had a significant impact in Australia and internationally, focusing on areas such as school improvement programmes on teaching and learning, education reform strategy and cost effectiveness. Prior to this, he was at the OECD Directorate for Education, conducting international research on education policy and school and teacher effectiveness. While there, he led an expert group examining how to accurately and meaningfully measure school performance and an international network comparing public policies that affect how schools operate and are organised.

Ben has served on the Australian Government Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, the Rodel Foundation International Advisory Group for the State of Delaware school education strategy and the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) expert group.

Roger Smyth has thirty years’ experience in senior management in tertiary education. In addition to his in-depth knowledge of the New Zealand tertiary education system, Roger has a strong understanding of the political and policy context that governs tertiary education.

Roger had 14 years in university management and planning before moving to the New Zealand Ministry of Education in 2002, where he led the group responsible for the tertiary education policy programme. He was responsible for enhancing policy design and reform content by ensuring that policy advice is informed by research and analytical findings. By building linkages between research and analysis work and the tertiary education policy programme and advocating for the use of analytical results in support of policy advice, his group was able to better anticipate emerging policy questions and produce policy-relevant analysis.

Roger has been an active analyst and researcher on tertiary education, having published more than 25 papers and journal articles and written a large number of book chapters. He previously worked for the OECD as a member of the team that reviewed Iceland’s tertiary education system in 2005 and as national co-ordinator for New Zealand’s involvement in the OECD Thematic Review of Tertiary Education between 2005 and 2007. Since mid-2017, Roger has been working as a consultant in tertiary education policy.

OECD analysts

Beatriz Pont is a senior education policy analyst at the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. With extensive experience in education policy reform internationally, she currently leads OECD Education Policy and Implementation Reviews and recently led the comparative series on education reforms, Education Policy Outlook. She has specialised in various areas of education policy and reform, including equity and quality in education, school leadership, adult learning and adult skills and has also worked with individual countries, including Mexico, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom (Wales) in their school improvement reform efforts.

Previously, Beatriz was researcher on education and social policies in the Economic and Social Council of the Government of Spain and also worked for Andersen Consulting (Accenture). She has a PhD in Political Science from Complutense University, Madrid, a Masters in International Relations from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts from Pitzer College, Claremont, California. She has been research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences (Tokyo University) and at the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP, Sciences Po, Paris). She holds an honorary doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University.

Pierre Gouëdard is an analyst at the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. An economist specialised in economics of education, he has researched in areas of teacher careers and positive action in high schools, written on a range of related topics and taught in the field of economics. Formerly a researcher from the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP, Sciences Po, Paris), he developed an analytical framework to study aspirations of students when they apply to tertiary education. Pierre holds a PhD from Sciences Po, Paris, a Master’s in Analysis of Economic Policy from the Paris School of Economics and a Master’s in Economics from the University of Montreal.

Hiroko Ikesako is a research assistant at the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. She has worked for the OECD Education and Social Progress project and several education policy reviews in the OECD Country Reviews Programme. She holds master’s degrees in International Education Policy and Educational Research Methodology.