“Grattan Institute has appointed Dr Ben Jensen as Program Director: Schools Education,” Professor John Daley announced today. “Dr Jensen joins Grattan Institute after working for five years at the OECD’s Directorate for Education.”
“Dr Jensen’s appointment signals Grattan Institute’s emphasis on the importance of school education, and indicates that its initial focus will be on how improved management of teachers and schools could make a difference.”
“Whilst at OECD, Dr Jensen was responsible for work that has been influential around the globe on the best ways to measure educational outcomes in schools. He was lead analyst on the OECD’s project “Development of school–level Value Added Modelling in Education systems”, as well as lead author of the OECD’s publication, “Measuring improvements in learning outcomes – best practices to assess the value added of schools”.
Dr Jensen was also responsible at the OECD for an international survey of teachers and documentation of teaching practices to understand how teachers and students are affected by issues such as teacher management, teacher salaries, working hours and conditions, instruction hours within schools, and class sizes.
Dr Jensen commented that, “Australia’s own National Reform Agenda has argued that improved education and training has the biggest impact on economic growth of any policy option.
However we would benefit from more evidence and analysis on what reforms will make the most difference to improving school education.”
“Grattan Institute is engaging Australia’s best strategic and public policy thinkers to conduct independent, rigorous fact-based analysis on the issues that will make a difference to Australian society in the areas of Productivity, Cities, Energy, Water and Education,” Prof Daley concluded.