Fellow Travellers, Or Best of Enemies? Faith-Based Education in Dialogue with the OECD’s Education for Human Flourishing (2025)
Simon Uttley
Abstract
The OECD’s Education for Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Framework (OECD, 2025) proposes the most substantial reworking of educational purpose the organisation has attempted, displacing human capital theory in favour of a neo-Aristotelian account of the flourishing life and five supporting competencies. This paper examines what faith-based education, and Catholic education in particular, stands to gain from that reworking and what it should contest in it. Six areas of convergence are identified: a shared objection to the instrumentalisation of schooling; the recovery of virtue and practical wisdom; an account of obligation to others that parallels the common good tradition; the restoration of beauty and wonder as educational goods; the treatment of purpose and agency, which faith traditions name as vocation; and an ecosystemic view of formation that denominational schooling has long practised. Six tensions are then set out, of which the most serious is the framework’s adoption of Andersen’s stadial schema of cultural codes, which files religious belief under a superseded pre-modern order at a point when roughly three-quarters of the world’s population is religiously affiliated. Further difficulties arise from an immanent construal of the human end, the ambiguity of “synthesis” as an epistemic goal, the framework’s declared metrological ambition, and an unresolved account of autonomy. The paper argues that, despite its critics, faith-based education is better placed than most sectors to supply what the framework acknowledges it lacks and, in that sense, to occupy the space of fellow traveller; I propose specific responses for schools, systems, and the OECD.
Keywords: human flourishing; Catholic education; faith schools; OECD; educational purpose; virtue; eudaimonia; assessment
1. Introduction
In November 2025 the OECD published Education for Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Framework, the principal output of its PISA High Performing Systems for Tomorrow project (OECD, 2025). Authored and edited by Michael Stevenson, with contributions from the University of Tartu’s Centre for Ethics, the National Institute of Education in Singapore and a number of individual scholars, the paper was developed over two years with senior officials from British Columbia, Estonia, Finland, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia, and with the support of the Templeton World Charity Foundation and the National Centre on Education and the Economy.
Its argument is direct. The human capital theory that has organised education policy since the 1970s has not delivered. PISA results have flattened, equity gaps have proved stubborn, and the economic model that schooling was built to serve has damaged both societies and the planet. Alongside these failures sits a third problem the report treats as urgent: large numbers of young people report that their lives lack meaning, and the report is willing to read the adolescent mental health crisis as an ethical and existential difficulty rather than a purely clinical one.
For anyone who, like this author, has spent a career leading schools with a religious character, the diagnosis will be familiar. Catholic schools have argued for decades that reducing education to labour market preparation misdescribes both the child and the purpose of the institution (Congregation for Catholic Education, 1977; Grace, 2002). What is new is that the organisation whose assessment regime did more than any other to entrench the model being criticised is now making the argument. Andreas Schleicher’s foreword states plainly that the framework is intended to shape the metrics by which educational success is judged in future.
That creates both an opportunity and a risk for what are often termed ‘faith-based providers.’ The opportunity is obvious: an international policy framework has arrived at conclusions about the purpose of schooling that denominational education has held as a matter of principle and has done so in language that policymakers will take seriously. The risk is subtler. A framework that recovers the vocabulary of flourishing, virtue, meaning, awe and the common good, while treating religious belief as a historical stage that modernity has superseded, may prove harder to argue with than a framework that ignored these things altogether. Appropriation without acknowledgement is a more difficult position to contest than exclusion.
This paper sets out what faith-based education should welcome in the framework, what it should press on, and what it might offer in return. The analysis is conducted primarily from within this author’s own Catholic tradition, since that is where the relevant magisterial and scholarly literature is densest, but the arguments generalise to other confessional settings, and several apply to any school whose account of the person is theologically grounded.
2. The Framework in Outline
The report builds on a neo-Aristotelian conception of flourishing drawn principally from Kristjánsson (2017, 2020), whose account has three components: morally serious, reason-infused and emotionally engaged activity that has some consequence in the world; contemplation, understood as deriving principles from observation; and awe-struck enchantment before what is sublime. Aristotle’s dimensions of the flourishing life are mapped onto Seligman’s PERMA model, yielding four goals: happiness, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. Two further commitments are added. The first is student well-being, understood subjectively and in the present tense, which the report carefully distinguishes from objective flourishing across a lifetime. The second is an obligation to others, developed by reference to Ubuntu, Confucian and Buddhist traditions, and extended by the planetary crisis to other species and to future generations.
Five competencies are proposed. Adaptive problem-solving concerns transferring learning to novel and uncertain situations. Ethical competence concerns evaluating the claims others make on us and is described as the framework’s foundation stone. Understanding the world concerns the capacity to interpret and reconcile competing worldviews. Appreciating the world concerns aesthetic perception, the recognition of beauty in nature and in human making, and through it an opening onto the sublime. Acting in the world, which the report treats as the keystone, concerns identifying purpose, forming intent, and choosing the activity through which a person makes a mark.
The framework presents itself as a development of the OECD Learning Compass 2030 (OECD, 2019), extending it in three respects: by setting out principles for correcting the weaknesses of the current paradigm, by foregrounding artificial intelligence, and by distinguishing flourishing from well-being.
These rest on three integrated elements: the core literacies of mathematics, science and reading; social and emotional skills; and a set of well-being domains including psychological well-being, agency and belonging. The competencies are presented not as curricular additions but as emergent properties of the curriculum taken as a whole, and the report is emphatic that they are demanding rather than soft. It is explicit, too, about their logical status: they are held to be necessary conditions for becoming a flourishing human being, not sufficient ones.
Three further chapters address implementation. Goh and Tan argue for learning environments that respect disciplinary knowledge, make epistemic reasoning visible, preserve the genuine risks involved in cultivating autonomy, and treat students as democratic equals rather than objects of accountability. Hannon proposes competency frameworks for leaders and teachers oriented to purpose, ecosystems, equity and agency. The final chapter takes up system design, drawing on van Damme’s account of equity as the combination of fairness and social inclusion, and on Scharmer’s Theory U as a model of transformation through attention and personal change.
3. Points of Convergence
3.1 A shared objection to instrumental schooling
The framework’s central move is to deny that preparation for employment can carry the weight of educational purpose. This is the argument Catholic education has made since the Second Vatican Council, and it is made in the Church’s own documents with a directness the OECD has now matched. The Catholic School insists that the institution exists for the integral formation of the person rather than for the production of economic units (Congregation for Catholic Education, 1977) and Educating to Fraternal Humanism restates the point by reference to integral human development (Congregation for Catholic Education, 2017). Grace (2002) documented the difficulty English Catholic school leaders experienced in holding that commitment against the pressures of quasi-market accountability, and Arthur (2013) traced the resulting attrition of distinctiveness in curriculum terms.
Biesta’s (2009) account of the same problem is the one policymakers are most likely to recognise. His distinction between qualification, socialisation and subjectification identifies precisely the function that measurement regimes fail to register, and his argument that the question of purpose had disappeared from educational discussion anticipates the OECD’s own admission. The framework does not cite Biesta at the level of purpose, but its structure vindicates him.
For schools with a religious character, the practical consequence is that a long-standing minority position has acquired mainstream support. Arguments about the formation of the whole person that have been treated as sectarian special pleading can now be made in terms that inspectorates, trustees and governing bodies will accept.
3.2 The neo-Aristotelian turn
The framework’s decision to build on Aristotle rather than on liberal or self-determination accounts is consequential, and it runs in the direction of the Catholic intellectual tradition rather than away from it. Aristotle is chosen, the report explains, because he says most about what people should learn in order to flourish, and therefore opens up curriculum, pedagogy and assessment together. Thomistic moral theology is a development of exactly that tradition. The report’s own account of ethical reasoning acknowledges Aquinas’s natural law theory as one of the intermediate positions between Aristotelian and Kantian models, and the Tartu chapter’s treatment of practical reasoning could sit without alteration in a Catholic philosophy of education course.
The Singapore chapter goes further in a direction schools with a religious character should welcome. Its recovery of the distinction between episteme, techne and phronesis, and its insistence that formal schooling has privileged the first two at the expense of practical wisdom, is an argument about the moral formation of judgement. Schools that conduct retreats, that run chaplaincy and service programmes, and that expect pupils to deliberate about how to act rather than merely to know what is the case, have infrastructure for phronesis that most secular schools do not.
Kristjánsson’s presence in the framework is worth dwelling on. His book argues that the good life to which education contributes must involve engagement with self-transcendent ideals, and that education should ignite awe-filled enchantment (Kristjánsson, 2020). His earlier critical review of the flourishing literature had already pressed the question of meaning and of the teacher’s role in relation to it (Kristjánsson, 2017). The OECD has taken the enchantment and the self-transcendent ideals into its account of appreciating the world. What it has not taken is any view about what those ideals might be ideals of. That omission is discussed in section 4.2; here it is enough to note that the architecture is hospitable to a theological completion that the report itself does not supply.
3.3 Obligation to others and the common good
The chapter on what we owe to others is among the strongest in the report. Drawing on Kristjánsson’s comparative work, it argues that Ubuntu, Confucian and Buddhist accounts of flourishing are relational and other-entwined and are therefore compatible with a neo-Aristotelian position. The planetary crisis is then used to extend the obligation to other species and, following MacAskill, to lives not yet lived.
Catholic social teaching arrives at a structurally similar position by a different route and has a more developed technical vocabulary. The common good, solidarity and subsidiarity name the relations the report is reaching for, and the late Pope’s seminal Laudato si’ supplies the integral ecology that connects obligations to the poor with obligations to creation (Francis, 2015). Francis (2020) framed the Global Compact on Education in almost the same terms the OECD now uses, calling for an educational covenant that forms people capable of repairing the fabric of human relationships. The convergence is close enough to be useful. Where the OECD says that individual flourishing and collective flourishing must be held together, and van Damme argues that inclusion means connecting students to the collective good rather than segregating them into personalised provision, the Catholic tradition can supply both a warrant and a century of applied reasoning.
There is also a caution to offer. The report grounds the obligation to others in a set of cultural traditions treated as mutually corroborating. That is a comparative rather than a foundational argument: it establishes that many traditions agree, not why the obligation binds. Faith-based education grounds the obligation in the dignity of the person as created and can therefore explain why it is not negotiable when interests conflict. This is a point on which the tradition strengthens rather than merely parallels the framework.
3.4 Appreciating the world and the sacramental imagination
Vincent-Lancrin’s chapter on aesthetic appreciation makes beauty an educational competency in its own right, defensible on holistic, meaning-making, political, sociological and economic grounds. It observes that much of the world’s art has celebrated religious figures or served religious purposes, and it invokes Scarry’s linking of beauty with the sacred. The report elsewhere describes the student who reflects on beauty in art and in nature as placing the self in a spiritual setting.
This is territory faith-based education knows well. A sacramental imagination, which reads the material world as capable of disclosing what exceeds it, is not an optional devotional extra but a theory of perception with direct pedagogical consequences. It is why Catholic schools maintain choral traditions, why liturgical art is treated as formative rather than decorative, and why the natural world is presented as gift rather than resource. The framework’s category of appreciating the world is, in effect, an invitation for such schools to explain what they have been doing.
The invitation has limits, which section 4.2 examines. But the practical convergence is real, and it arrives at a moment when arts and music provision in many state systems is under pressure. Schools with religious character that have protected these subjects on formational grounds now have an international policy framework that supports them on flourishing grounds.
3.5 Acting in the world, purpose and vocation
Acting in the world is the framework’s keystone competency, and it is built on Leadbeater’s triad of identity, intent and action: knowing who one is and what matters, deciding what change to bring about, and making that change demonstrable. The report makes clear that this extends well beyond paid work, encompassing art, making, music, sport, service and volunteering, and that it depends on creativity, collaboration, self-efficacy and self-actualisation.
Faith traditions have a word for this settled form, and it is vocation. Purpose, as the report uses it, is something a young person identifies and then pursues; the agency is entirely the student’s own. Vocation describes a purpose that is received as much as chosen, discerned in dialogue with a community and answerable to something beyond the self. That difference matters practically as well as theologically. A purpose that is wholly self-generated is fragile: it can be revised when it becomes costly, and it offers no account of obligations one did not choose. Schools that teach discernment, and that expect young people to test their sense of direction against the judgement of others, are addressing a weakness the framework does not name.
There is empirical support for taking this seriously. Analysis of the first wave of the Global Flourishing Study, covering more than 200,000 respondents in 22 countries, found that regular religious service attendance in childhood was among the childhood factors associated with higher purpose and meaning in adulthood, alongside good health, stable family relationships and economic security (Kim et al., 2025). The study profile paper reports religious service attendance as one of the factors most strongly associated with composite flourishing, including in highly secular countries (VanderWeele et al., 2025). Neither finding settles questions of causation, and both vary considerably by country, but they indicate that the formational practices of religious communities are doing measurable work on precisely the outcome the framework identifies as most at risk.
3.6 Ecosystems, formation and the workforce
The final chapter argues that the learning ecosystem should be more than a component of the education system and might in time subsume it, integrating formal and non-formal learning and deepening the quality of relationships within it. Hannon’s chapter argues that teachers and leaders must themselves possess some practical wisdom about how to live, and must, to some degree, model the competencies they are asked to develop. For Pope Paul VI, witness is the key to a renewed presence in the modern world. In his Apostolic Exhortation from 1975 Evangelii Nuntiandi, taken up again by Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium, he writes: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (Paul VI 1975)
Denominational schooling has run on precisely this model for two centuries. The parish, the family, the religious congregation and the school form a single formational ecology, with the school as one node rather than the whole. Teacher formation in that tradition has never been reducible to technical competence: the expectation that the adult exemplifies what is taught is the sector’s oldest commitment, and it survives in the requirement that leaders in Catholic schools be spiritual as well as professional leaders (Groome, 2021). Grace’s (2002) analysis of spiritual capital named the resource that religious congregations contributed to English Catholic schooling and asked what would replace it as those congregations withdrew. Hicks’s (2025) study of women educated in Mercy schools offers some evidence about what survives the withdrawal, tracing the influence of a congregational charism on spiritual growth and self-efficacy into adult life.
That question is now the OECD’s question too, asked in secular terms. Faith-based systems have both a working model and a long record of its difficulties and are unusually well placed to contribute to this part of the framework’s development.
4. Points of Friction
4.1 Religion as a superseded cultural code
The most significant difficulty lies in the competency of understanding the world, which the report constructs around Andersen’s (2019) account of four cultural codes: indigenous, pre-modern, modern and post-modern. The report reproduces Andersen’s table of the essential ideas and values characterising each. Religion appears in the pre-modern column, alongside the descriptors patriarchal, hierarchical and dogmatic, with faith set against science, truth set against facts, and the theological claim rendered as gods interfering with the world and with human life. Secularism, doubt, science and facts belong to the modern column. The framework proposes that students should examine global and intercultural issues through the lens of these four codes and synthesise them.
Three objections follow.
The first is empirical. Andersen’s schema is stadial: it orders the codes by historical epoch and, notwithstanding the claim that all remain prevalent, treats them as stages in a developmental sequence whose synthesis lies ahead. The demographic record does not support the implied trajectory. Pew Research Centre’s analysis of more than 2,700 censuses and surveys found that approximately three-quarters of the world’s population was religiously affiliated in 2020, with the unaffiliated at 24.2 per cent, and that Muslims grew faster than any other group over the preceding decade (Hackett et al., 2025). A framework built for a global assessment regime cannot coherently treat the belief system of most of the world’s families as a pre-modern residue.
The second is conceptual. The table’s assignments are contestable as descriptions of religion. Dogma is not the opposite of doubt in any developed theology; the Thomistic tradition proceeds by objection and response, and the report’s own summary of ethical reasoning concedes that Aquinas belongs among the serious intermediate positions. Nor is the opposition of faith to science historically sustainable. The placement is not analysis, but the secularisation thesis rendered as a matrix, and the sociology of religion has spent three decades qualifying that thesis. Taylor’s (2007) account of the immanent frame is a more serious description of what modernity did to belief: not its supersession, but its reconstitution as one option among others held within conditions that make all options contestable. That is a far more useful starting point for understanding the world than a developmental ladder.
The third is pedagogical, and it matters most to schools. A pupil in a Catholic, Muslim or Jewish school who is taught to examine intercultural issues through these four lenses is being taught that the tradition their family practises is the one the framework has classified as hierarchical and dogmatic. The invitation to synthesis is extended from a position that has already ranked the material. This is not a marginal defect in an appendix; the table is presented as the frame for the knowledge component of a competency the OECD intends to assess.
The remedy is not to remove worldview analysis from the curriculum. Teaching young people to understand belief systems other than their own is among the more valuable things schools do, and the report is right that the loss of stable moorings is implicated in the loss of meaning. The remedy is to replace a schema that grades traditions developmentally with one that describes them on their own terms. Established models exist for exactly this in the religious education literature, and the framework would be strengthened by drawing on them.
4.2 An immanent telos
The framework adopts Kristjánsson’s third component, awe-struck enchantment, and speaks of the sublime, the transcendent and the mysterious. It stops there. Awe is presented as a mode of perception that yields insight into life and self, elicits compassion and illuminates other worldviews. What awe might be awe of is not addressed.
This is a coherent position, and it is the position of a naturalistic eudaimonism: the human end is immanent, realised within a life, and the sublime functions as an experience with beneficial effects. It is not the position of any of the traditions that run schools with a religious character. In Thomistic terms, natural happiness is real, genuinely good, and incomplete; the perfect beatitude to which the person is ordered exceeds what nature can secure. On that account, an education that develops every capacity the framework names and leaves the question of ultimate end unasked has done something valuable and has not finished.
The framework is unusually candid on this point, and the candour is worth acknowledging. It states that possession of the competencies does not make a person flourishing, and that the competencies are necessary rather than sufficient conditions. It also concedes that flourishing is a compelling purpose but not the only possible one. Read carefully, the report does not claim to have given a complete account of the human end. It describes an architecture and declines to specify the building’s orientation.
That creates room for a properly collaborative relationship. Faith-based schools can adopt the framework’s competencies without accepting that they exhaust the matter and can be explicit that they are supplying the account of ultimate end the framework leaves open. The alternative, which is to treat the framework as a rival anthropology to be resisted, misreads what has actually been published.
4.3 Synthesis, truth and the risk of levelling
The report asks students to understand, appreciate and synthesise competing worldviews, and follows Andersen in picturing an archipelago of understanding linked by bridges rather than a single unified code. The intent is irenic, and the educational value is considerable. But synthesis is doing ambiguous work.
On a weak reading, synthesis means the capacity to see which framework illuminates which situation, and to move between them with understanding. That is intellectual hospitality, and no faith tradition need object. On a strong reading, synthesis means assembling a personal outlook from elements of several traditions, in which case the traditions are being treated as resources rather than as claims. The report does not distinguish the readings, and its treatment of religion as one code among four pushes towards the strong one.
The difficulty is that traditions with realist metaphysical commitments cannot be synthesised in the strong sense without ceasing to be what they are. The Catholic position, articulated most recently in The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue, is that genuine dialogue requires a secure identity on the part of those conducting it, and that a school with no determinate commitments has nothing to bring to the encounter (Congregation for Catholic Education, 2022). This is not a defensive claim. It is an argument that pluralism is better served by institutions that are distinctively something than by institutions that have dissolved their distinctiveness in advance. In my own school, parents of children with differing faiths often say that the school’s confident assertion of a faith reassures them that faith itself is valued, rather than tolerated or ‘included’ in a somewhat secularist-patrician sense.
Schools in the sector should therefore engage the competency rather than avoid it, while insisting on the weak reading and teaching explicitly that understanding a position is not the same as holding it. Handled well, this is an area in which faith schools can outperform: pupils formed within a tradition and taught to give a serious account of others’ traditions tend to be better at the exercise than pupils with no tradition to reason from.
4.4 The measurement question
Schleicher’s foreword states that the framework is designed to shape the metrics of educational success, and the report describes all five competencies as believed to be malleable and assessable, with work under way on how to measure them. The instrument is PISA, which is to say a triennial, sampled, standardised assessment.
The concern is not that these things are hard to measure. It is Biesta’s (2009) concern: that the measurable proxy displaces the good it was intended to represent, and that systems come to value what they measure rather than measuring what they value. The framework itself contains the warning. Hannon observes that education for human flourishing involves head, heart and hand, and that evidencing this is considerably harder than standardised testing. Goh and Tan argue for trust rather than enforced accountability, and for treating education as something done with young people rather than to them. These positions sit uneasily with a metrological programme, and the report does not reconcile them.
The risk for faith-based education is specific. If ethical competence, appreciation of beauty and purposefulness become PISA constructs, schools will be judged against operationalisations of goods they understand differently. A psychometric index of ethical reasoning cannot register conscience; an index of aesthetic appreciation cannot register worship. Where the indicator and the good diverge, accountability pressure will favour the indicator.
There is a constructive response available. The sector has practical experience of evaluating formation through means other than testing, in the form of denominational inspection frameworks that use observation, interview, documentary evidence and the testimony of pupils and parents to reach qualitative judgements about a school’s formational life. These instruments have their own well-documented weaknesses, but they represent decades of applied work on the evaluation of goods that resist scoring. Offering that experience to the OECD’s measurement workstream would be more useful than objecting to measurement in principle.
4.5 Autonomy, formation and the liberal settlement
Goh and Tan take the promotion of student autonomy as the goal of schooling, on the ground that a life lived wholly under another’s direction is unlikely to be a flourishing one. They immediately qualify it: autonomy is never absolute; it is bounded by nature and by the existence of others, and it requires the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and of the sociocultural rules governing moral behaviour. The chapter is notably honest about the risks, arguing that they should be preserved rather than managed away.
Even so, the framing reopens the oldest dispute in the philosophy of faith schooling: whether formation in a determinate tradition is compatible with the development of autonomous judgement. The standard objection holds that it is not, and that confessional schooling forecloses options the child should be left free to weigh. The standard reply, which the evidence tends to support, is that autonomy is not exercised in a vacuum: reasoning requires a substantive starting point, and a young person formed in a tradition and taught to interrogate it is better equipped to evaluate competing claims than one presented with a neutral survey of options. Curren and colleagues (2024), in an unusually broad attempt at consensus across philosophical and psychological accounts of well-being in education, conclude that formation and autonomy are compatible, provided the formation is open to examination.
What the framework needs, and does not have, is an account of how the competencies are acquired. Ethical competence is not learned by encountering ethical theories; it is learned by practice within a community that exemplifies it. Appreciation of beauty is not learned from the aesthetics literature. Purpose is not identified by an exercise in self-reflection. Each is acquired through participation in a form of life, and the framework’s silence on that point is the gap that faith-based education is best equipped to fill.
4.6 Artificial intelligence and theological anthropology
The report’s treatment of AI is serious and, in places, stark. Drawing on Bostrom, Harari, and Russell, it argues that AI in the near term threatens human meaning, agency, and security, and that superintelligence may, in the longer term, threaten human survival. Education for human flourishing is offered as a response, on the ground that broadening human capabilities and restoring meaning may be the best available means of retaining control.
The argument is underdetermined, and the reason is anthropological. To claim that AI threatens something distinctively human requires an account of what is distinctively human, and the report does not have one. It has a list of capabilities, which is a different thing, and capability lists are vulnerable to exactly the substitution the report fears: each time a machine acquires a capability, the account of the human loses a component.
A theological anthropology is not vulnerable in that way, because it does not locate human dignity in performance. If the person is constituted as such by having been created and addressed, rather than by what they can do, then the arrival of a system that can outperform them at any given task is a serious practical matter and no threat whatever to their standing. This is not a devotional point. It is the most robust available answer to the question the OECD raises and cannot answer, and the report’s reach for language about meaning, purpose, and the irreducibly human, without a foundation for any of it, is the clearest indication in the document that something has been left out.
5. Implications
5.1 For schools with a religious character and educational systems
First, schools should map their existing provision against the five competencies. Much of what chaplaincy, service learning, liturgy, retreat programmes and the creative arts already deliver maps directly onto ethical competence, appreciating the world and acting in the world. The exercise is not a branding exercise: it produces the evidence base for conversations with inspectorates, trustees and parents, and it usually reveals that the school’s formational provision is less well articulated than its academic provision.
Second, the sector should contest the worldview schema specifically and publicly, at the level of the framework’s development rather than in its own publications. The report explicitly invites comment to inform the next phase of the work. A submission from faith-based education systems that accepts the competency of understanding the world while rejecting Andersen’s stadial ordering would be timely and is likely to find allies among scholars of religious education who have no confessional stake in the matter.
Third, vocation should be offered as a developed alternative to purpose, not as a synonym for it. The distinction between a purpose one generates and a calling one discerns is intelligible outside a religious framework and answers a real weakness in the report’s account of agency.
Fourth, the sector should engage the measurement workstream rather than boycotting it. Denominational inspection has accumulated more applied experience of evaluating formation than any comparable body of practice, and that experience is exactly what the OECD’s assessment developers currently lack.
5.2 For the OECD and participating jurisdictions
Three recommendations follow from the analysis.
The worldview framework should be rebuilt. A model that positions the beliefs of most of the world’s population as a superseded historical code is not fit for a global assessment instrument, and the problem is remediable without abandoning the competency.
The framework should state its anthropological commitments explicitly. The report’s concession that the competencies are necessary rather than sufficient conditions is important and easily missed. Making it prominent would clarify that the framework is compatible with a range of accounts of the human end rather than committed to a naturalistic one, and would make it considerably easier for faith-based systems to adopt.
Religious institutions should be recognised as formational partners. The report names religious settings once, in a citation to VanderWeele (2017), among the settings beyond formal education in which the competencies may develop. Given the evidence now emerging from the Global Flourishing Study on the association between childhood religious participation and adult purpose, meaning and flourishing (Kim et al., 2025; VanderWeele et al., 2025), and given that faith-based providers educate a substantial share of the world’s children, this is a thin acknowledgement of a large body of practice.
6. Conclusion
The OECD has produced a framework that faith-based education should read as an opportunity rather than an encroachment. Its diagnosis of what has gone wrong with educational purpose is one the sector has been making for fifty years, and its constructive proposals, drawn from Aristotle by way of Kristjánsson, run through territory the Catholic tradition has occupied continuously. The recovery of virtue, practical wisdom, beauty, awe and obligation as educational goods is a real gain, and it has been achieved in language that policy audiences will accept.
The difficulties are also real, and the most serious of them is not a matter of emphasis. A framework that treats religious belief as a cultural code belonging to a superseded epoch cannot honestly ask religious communities to help it deliver the meaning it says young people have lost. That is a straightforward incoherence, and it should be named as such.
What is striking, though, is how much the report leaves open. It declines to say that its competencies are sufficient. It concedes that flourishing is one possible purpose among others. It reaches for the transcendent and stops short of describing it. It identifies a crisis of meaning it cannot resolve from its own resources. These are not evasions; they are the honest limits of a framework that has gone as far as a secular international organisation can reasonably go. The question for faith-based education is whether it will treat those limits as a boundary to defend or as an opening to occupy. The tradition has better answers to the questions the OECD has raised than the OECD itself has, and the invitation to offer them is currently open.
Simon Uttley
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