On 16 September, IPA Secretary General, José Borghino spoke via Zoom to delegates at the PEPCon5 Conference on the topic Educational Publishing's Impact on Global Student Ranking. Borghino used the OECD’s PISA rankings to postulate that governments’ textbook policies around the world were a major influence on educational outcomes for students and learners.
The IPA’s Educational Publishers Forum has long argued that high-quality educational resources are key predictors of learning success and that the best way of creating high-quality resources is to encourage educational publishers to compete in open, competitive markets in a virtuous circle of editorial improvement.
Borghino also warned the delegates about the growing influence of a number of mammoth global platforms whose influence is infiltrating government departments as well as non-government organisations. These platforms — the biggest, most profitable companies that have ever existed — invest huge amounts of money to undermine copyright as a framework for producing and circulating content, because they see copyright as an impediment to their unfettered harvesting of ever larger amounts of content without remunerating creators or publishers for their work.
