Taking glances at education — from different angles

23—25 September 2013 in Gdansk (Poland), the experts of the OECD programme "Indicators of Education Systems" met to refine methodologies, regulations and indicators which serve as a basis for the assessment of the social and economic impact of education on the labour market, given in the annual OECD report "Education at a Glance". Natalia Kovaleva, director of the ISSEK Centre for Statistics and Monitoring of Education represented Russia in the meeting.

About INES

OECD realizes the programme "Indicators of Education Systems” (INES) as part of its statistical work. Within the programme internationally comparable indicators are developed and published, and the evolution of education (from early to continuous) is analyzed. Its data is the basis for the assessment of human resources and financial investment in this sphere, the analysis of the structural characteristics of education systems, economic and social results of their operation.

Expert networks, organised for the implementation of OECD's statistical programme, are engaged in the development of indicators and collection of primary data by conducting large-scale surveys of the education sector. For example, there are special Networks on Labour Market, Economic and Social Outcomes of Learning (INES Networks LSO). They provide indicators of the adult population’s education level and the characteristics of the labour market related to it, as well as of teachers’ wages, their conditions of work and duration of their education. Within another network —the INES Network for the Collection and Adjudication of System-level descriptive Information on Educational Structures, Policies and Practices (NESLI) — a survey of educational structures is conducted, and policy issues and its implementation in the field of education are analysed.

According to the decision of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia, representatives of the HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge take part in the work of the OECD INES programme. In the context of its implementation Russian specialists’ priority task is developing, together with their colleagues, indicators of educational systems and their methodology, which can be based both on the data of educational statistics, and on the results of such surveys as:

• the learning outcomes in higher education (AHELO Feasibility Study / Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes);
• educational achievements of students (Programme for International Student Assessment — PISA);
• adult competencies (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies — PIAAC).

It should be noted that the cooperation of Higher School of Economics with OECD in the field of statistics is not limited to the INES programme, it has a long history, which resulted in an impressive list of completed joint projects.

The focus of the meeting in Gdansk

The expert meeting brought together 56 participants from 28 OECD member countries and two partner countries, five international organisations and three invited experts. They discussed the issues of the implementation of ISCED 2011, formation of the joint database, specific surveys, and future plans.

Natalia Kovaleva, director of the HSE ISSEK Centre for Statistics and Monitoring of Education, commented on the results of the meeting:

— This event has not brought any significant decisions. It was the usual routine work of experts on the refinement of methodologies, regulations, and indicators. But it is this work that determines the high quality of the results of international comparative analysis of educational systems, published annually in the report “Education at a Glance”, and their recognition by the world community. This year the structure and contents of the coming publications for 2014 and 2015 were discussed.

Now our task, as we see it, is to study the informational capacity of the international surveys and use the most informative indicators in the analytical materials, designed to assess the implementation of the Russian state programme "Development of Education" for 2013—2020 and other solutions in this field, as well as in the HSE statistical books.

It is also important to introduce some international methodological solutions into the Monitoring of Education Markets and Organisations (MEMO). For example, we have previously used the methodology from Continuing Vocational Training Survey, conducted by Eurostat, while organising a respective survey of employers within the MEMO. It allowed us not only to improve its informativity, but also to draw international comparisons regarding in-house training.

The ISSEK editorial board