David Istance is a senior analyst in the OECD’s Education and Skills Directorate, both in the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) and periodically in the policy review division.

David heads the CERI project Innovative Learning Environments (ILE), and is developing new work on innovative pedagogy. His most recent OECD publication is Schooling Redesigned: Towards Innovative Learning Systems (2015), and an “ILE Handbook” with tools for leaders and practitioners is in preparation. He has written extensively on learning, innovation and futures, and earlier headed the Schooling for Tomorrow project in which he wrote the OECD schooling scenarios.

He recently headed the OECD review of Scotland’s “Curriculum for Excellence”, and was co-author of the review report (Improving Schools in Scotland: An OECD Perspective, 2015).  He is currently also working with the policy review division on Aboriginal education.

He designed and wrote the initial volumes of the OECD overview reports Education Today: the OECD Perspective and Trends Shaping Education.  He edited an international reader on lifelong learning with Tom Schuller and Hans Schuetze (Open University Press, 2002), and his continuing interest in lifelong learning focuses especially on 3^rd and 4^th age adults. He wrote Education and Equity in OECD Countries, published by OECD in 1997, and before that worked on quality, teachers and gender.

In the first half of the 1990s, David was an academic in Wales in the Universities of Cardiff and Swansea and was involved in researching young people not in education, training or employment. David’s university qualifications are in the social sciences from the University of Oxford.