A Cambridge Approach to Improving Education

With Tim Oates CBE, Director of Assessment Research and Development at Cambridge Assessment

Respondent: Dr. John Jerrim, Reader in Educational and Social Statistics at the UCL Institute of Education

Education improvement is a key objective of policy makers and educationalists around the world, and there is an increasing transnational dialogue about how to identify the most promising improvement strategy, and how to manage effective implementation.

To address this need Tim Oates CBE, Cambridge Assessment’s Director of Assessment Research and Development, has led research into and now written A Cambridge Approach to Improving Education – using international insights to manage complexity where he sets out his findings and guiding principles for policy makers.

He addressed Policy Exchange, the UK’s most influential think tank on education in the past 15 years, to outline his findings and further the debate on how best to improve education here, and around the world.

His talk was followed by a response from UCL’s Dr John Jerrim.

Tim Oates CBE joined Cambridge Assessment in May 2006 from the Qualifications and Curriculum Agency, where he had been Head of Research and Statistics for most of the last decade. He has advised the UK Government for many years on both practical matters and assessment policy.

Tim was awarded CBE in the 2015 New Year’s Honours for services to education.

Dr John Jerrim has worked extensively with the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. In October 2011 he was awarded a prestigious ESRC post-doctoral fellowship to continue his research into the educational and labour market expectations of adolescents and young adults. Since then he has won the inaugural ESRC Early Career Outstanding Impact award and has just received an ESRC grant to study cross-national comparisons of educational attainment and social mobility.