Research School Network: We’ve joined the OECD’s Schools+ Network Together, we create better policies for better lives, collaboration is key to school success.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an international organisation that works to build better policies for better lives. Their goal is to shape policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity and well-being for all, drawing on 60 years of experience and insights to better prepare the world of tomorrow.

The Schools+ Community is where all the members come together twice a year to share insights and collaborate on common challenges. The Community is comprised of representatives of governments (including ministries and local education bodies), organisations, research bodies and schools themselves.

Meeting the challenges of the 21^st Century means that schools must be empowered to play a more central and active role in leading improvements in education.​To support this, Schools+ brings together major education networks to put schools at the centre of education design. Schools+ participants unite around three core objectives:

• Foster exchange: to provide a space for education networks to learn with and from each other on the leading practices to support schools.
• Drive structured learning & innovation: to advance schools’ knowledge by identifying grassroots innovations and facilitating co-creation and evidence generation on common pressing challenges.
  
• Inform policy: to leverage schools’ innovations and expertise to better inform education policy across countries.

As a ​‘network of networks’, Schools+ brings together education experts, school leaders and teachers from across the globe to respond to common challenges and inspire advances in classrooms, schools and policies.​During 2023 and 2024, Schools+ participating networks join forces to examine new approaches to classroom practice:

• Create connections within a new Global Community, providing opportunities for peer-learning and exchange, as well as shaping the global learning agenda.
• Gather schools in a learning circle, to co-create practical solutions to pressing common challenges and co-develop new resources that help set global standards. 
• Collect and showcase schools’ promising practices in an open online platform that synthesizes and disseminates new school-level evidence, innovation and learning.
• Shape the global education conversation and policy through a new Schools’ Outlook Report and a Global Schools’ Council.

The cornerstone of the work of Schools+ is the Schools Learning Circle, where some 150 schools from 40 countries are working together to build a Toolbox of Effective Classroom Practices. Together the schools are working with evidence on the 5 dimensions in the pedagogical taxonomy to understand what research says about effective teaching and learning, and how it can be applied in classrooms across the globe. The Toolbox is being developed around five key dimensions of teaching:

• Classroom interaction
• Cognitive engagement
• Formative assessment and feedback
• Quality of subject matter
• Social and emotional support