JET Exchanges: How can PISA for Schools be of use to South Africa?

On 5 November 2020, JET Education Services (JET) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) co-hosted a seminar to explore the potential which the PISA for Schools project (OECD, 2020a) may hold for South Africa. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a programme of the OECD, is an internationally-benchmarked assessment which measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. While PISA allows countries to measure the performance of a representative sample of schools against objective benchmarks and against those of other participating countries, PISA for Schools (PFS) enables individual schools to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their students in these subjects.