IELS: International Testing Comes to the Kindergarten

In this blogpost, which is part of NORRAG’s Early Childhood Education blog series, Diana Sousa, Paul Morris and Peter Moss discuss the limitations of the OECD’s International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS).

OECD, ILSAs and IELS

Education has been subject to a spreading web of ‘International Large-Scale Assessments’ (ILSAs). The most prolific web spinner has been the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), established in 1961 with the aim of achieving ‘the highest sustainable economic growth and employment and a rising standard of living in Member countries’. Over time, OECD has reached into other policy fields, on grounds they effect economic outcomes, and today is a major international player in the field of education, with ILSAs as its trump card.

Best known and best established is the ‘Programme for International Student Assessment’, PISA for short, a triennial testing of 15-year-olds in reading, maths and science. Begun in 2000, the results from the eighth round of PISA testing, involving 690,000 students from 81 countries and economies, were published in 2023.  Other ILSAs have followed, mostly with less success than PISA, the most recent being the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS). This, in OECD’s own words, is an ‘international survey that assesses children at age 5 who attend Early Childhood Education and Care centres and/or schools…[measuring] Emergent Literacy, Emergent Numeracy, Self-regulation, Empathy & Trust and Pro-social behaviour’.

Initially mooted in 2012, the first cycle of IELS testing got underway in 2016, though only three countries signed up, agreeing to pay to participate: England, Estonia and the USA. Four years of development work, testing, data analysis and writing-up followed, with reports appearing in 2020. Now OECD is running a second cycle, starting in 2022 and due to report in 2026; testing is scheduled for the first part of 2025. This time OECD has signed up a motley collection of participants: five countries (England, Korea, Malta, Netherlands, UAE) and regions or provinces from four other countries (Baku in Azerbaijan, Flanders in Belgium, three states in Brazil, Hangzhou in China). Only England of the three initial countries has come back for more.

What’s it all about?

Why is the OECD so invested in ILSAs? And why is it adding early childhood education [ECE] to its web? ILSAs have come to define the OECD globally, enabling the organisation to claim that it helps improve outcomes by identifying ‘best practices’ – despite learning outcomes as measured by PISA declining since its first round of testing. Typically, the OECD defines the purpose of IELS as:

to provide countries with a common language and framework, encompassing a collection of robust empirical information and in-depth insights on children’s learning development at a critical age. With this information, countries will be able to share best practices, working towards the ultimate goal of improving children’s early learning outcomes and overall well-being.

IELS extends the OECD’s testing reach into a sector of education that today attracts much policy attention. The rationale for IELS draws on American studies – including the Abecedarian Project, Perry Preschool Study, Head Start Impact Study and Chicago Child-Parent Center Program – which are cited as providing ‘evidence’ that ‘successful’ early childhood programmes foster higher adult earnings and reduce poverty and disadvantage. Longitudinal studies such as these, OECD says, ‘demonstrate that the impact of positive early learning re-emerges later in schooling and continues into adulthood…[and that] children’s test scores at the age of five better predict adult outcomes than those in primary school’. Though somewhat paradoxically, the same report also concludes that though ‘many countries have increased ECEC participation rates and increased their overall investments in early years policies…[t]he expected benefits for children, however, are not always apparent’.

Another, more sceptical view sees OECD’s drive to test as an imperial project, a way of building its ‘soft power’ and increasing its influence. Through its burgeoning range of ILSAs the:

OECD strives to establish itself as the global arbiter and governor of education – defining standards, measuring indicators, drawing comparisons and encouraging benchmarking, and offering prescriptions for improving performance. The OECD has no formal legal power over education. Instead, it exerts great influence by this growing use of comparisons, statistics and indicators.

What’s wrong with IELS?

OECD’s ILSAs, especially PISA, have been subject to sustained and extensive criticism, and IELS is no exception. It has been described as an instance of what the great Italian educator, Loris Malaguzzi, called ‘Anglo-Saxon testology’, which he decried as ‘nothing but a ridiculous simplification of knowledge, and a robbing of meaning from individual histories’. Other criticisms include:

• disinterest in context: apart from limited data on children’s individual background, home-learning environment and early childhood education and care experience, there is no information on the social, cultural, systemic or pedagogical contexts of participating countries;
• adopting a universal approach, with no sensitivity to diversity of countries and their ECE;
• no recognition of or rationale for paradigmatic or disciplinary positioning: OECD assumes a positivist paradigm and adopts developmental psychology as its guiding discipline, but does not acknowledge its assumptions or recognise the existence of alternatives;
• context-free assessment of what is easily measured, a reminder that ‘many a standardized test can be perfectly “scientific” and useless at the same time’;
• a paucity of original results from the first cycle, telling us ‘very little that we did not know already’;
• ignoring the political and cultural, instead treating ECE as a purely technical practice and comparative education ‘as a technical process modelled on industrial benchmarking’, which sees children as future sources of human capital.

IELS also fails as comparative research – the ‘international’ bit of IELS. Apart from their willingness to pay, no rationale is provided for the inclusion of participating countries: why, for example, compare (as in the first cycle) such very different countries, with very different ECE systems, as England, Estonia and the USA? Even if there was some rationale, what can be gleaned from such comparison, given the minimal contextual information that IELS gathers on each country? The Education Minister responsible for ECE in England recently sought to explain his country’s repeat participation in IELS on the grounds it ‘aims to provide evidence on early learning that is comparable across countries, which can help identify effective practices and policies that support early childhood development’ (direct correspondence). Yet he fails to explain how these practices and policies can be identified, given the dearth of contextual information, and does not point to any recommendations that have actually been identified from the first cycle.

Why compare?

But perhaps the biggest issue IELS raises concerns the purpose of comparative education studies. IELS and other OECD ILSAs represent an approach to such studies that Antonio Nóvoa has called a ‘science of solutions’, which is ’based on the false idea of consensus on the aims of education and the paths to achieving them’; and which involves ‘an uncritical appropriation and generalisation of global solutions.’ Stifling the rich diversity of educational thought and practice, this approach offers prescriptions for governments to follow, based on identifying ‘best practice’ and ‘evidence on what works’, ignoring the political and the cultural and treating education as a purely technical practice.

Nóvoa contrasts this approach with a ‘science of difference’, which includes the ability to see the unknown and therefore to distance ourselves from what is already known, opening up to new possibilities of thinking that are not limited to the ‘naturalization’ of solutions that come from a unifying vision of education…[it is a] science that allows a plurality of perspectives and ways of thinking.

This mirrors the views of Joseph Tobin, a leading exponent of comparative ethnographic studies  who has mapped how the aims of ECE and the paths to achieving them vary markedly across cultures/contexts.  He argues for comparative studies that can ‘push back against this provincialism [of conflating national experience with universal truths] by challenging taken-for-granted assumptions, expanding the menu of the possible, and illuminating the processes of global circulation of early childhood education policies and practices.’

Comparative education to support uniformity and performance or to provoke new thought and new possibilities? This question goes to the heart of the matter.

How has OECD responded to such criticisms of IELS? With disdain, ignoring them, as it has done with questioning of its other ILSAs. Its constituency is its member state governments, and as long as none raise awkward questions, OECD can carry on undisturbed. It’s time ‘soft power’ was held to wider and more effective account.

The Authors:

Paul Morris is Professor of Comparative Education at the Institute of Education, University College London.

Peter Moss is Emeritus Professor, at the Institute of Education, University College London.

Diana Sousa is Lecturer in Education Policy and Politics at the Institute of Education, University College London.