Sousa, Diana;
Morris, Paul;
Moss, Peter;
(2026)
The International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study, PISA and the decline of the OECD's testing regime.
Globalisation, Societies and Education
10.1080/14767724.2025.2601162.
(In press).
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Abstract
International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) have had a global influence on education in recent decades, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has played a leading role, most notably with the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The organisation's latest ILSA is the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS), a test of five-year-olds, which first reported in 2020. The OECD has portrayed IELS as significant, describing it as ‘a great example’ and the ‘future of assessment’. We locate IELS within the OECD's ILSA testing regime and its extensive critiques. Subsequently, through an analysis of IELS documentation, we explore its rationale and processes and then contrast these with its reported outcomes. We demonstrate that IELS has failed to deliver on its intentions and acutely manifests many of the problems that critics of ILSAs have identified. We argue that IELS has contributed to the waning interest in the OECD's testing regime and that other approaches to comparative research should be given greater attention.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study, PISA and the decline of the OECD's testing regime |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/14767724.2025.2601162 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2025.2601162 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | International Large-Scale Assessments; Programme for International Student Assessment; International Early Learning and Wellbeing Study; Early Childhood Education and Care; OECD; science of solutions |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Education, Practice and Society UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10220386 |
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