Francesc Pedró

Since September 1998, Francesc Pedró has been a professor of educational policy in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona), a position to which he has returned after twenty years at the OECD and UNESCO (2005-2025).

He was Director of the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNESCO IESALC) between 2019 and 2025. Previously, he led the education policy advisory service, including national policy reviews and international comparative studies in the education sector at UNESCO in Paris (France) since 2010. Before that, he worked at the OECD's Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), where, as a senior policy analyst, he was responsible for projects such as the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) and the New Millennium Learners Project. He also led reviews of educational research in OECD countries and the Systemic Innovation in Education project. 
He graduated in education from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and obtained a doctorate with a thesis on comparative education from the UNED (Madrid). He subsequently undertook postdoctoral studies in Comparative Public Policy at the Institute of Education, University of London (United Kingdom). 
He taught at the UNED (Madrid), the Ramon Llull University (Barcelona), and the Open University of Catalonia (Barcelona), the first European public university to offer its courses exclusively online, where he was vice-chancellor from its founding in 1994 until 1998. He became the vice-rector for teaching quality at UPF until 2005, when he moved to the OECD.

His most recent books are: Working out Change: Systemic Innovation in Education and Training (2009), Are the New Millennium Learners Making the Grade? Technology Use and Educational Performance in PISA (2010), Inspired by Technology, Driven by Pedagogy (2010), Tecnología y Educación: lo que funciona y por qué (2011), Connected Minds: Technology and Today’s Learners (2012), Le numérique: une chance pour l'école (2013), Tecnologías para la transformación de la educación (2017), Promising Education Policy Levers. Govenance, leadership, and assessment (2018) and Guidelines for Education Policy Reviews (2020).