2016 EEAG Report
Tuning Secondary Education
Torben M. Andersen, Giuseppe Bertola, John Driffill, Harold James, Hans-Werner Sinn, Jan-Egbert Sturm and Branko Uroševic
In every country two issues are at the forefront of debates on how best to organise secondary education. One issue is whether students should be channelled towards more practical programmes at a relatively early age. The other is the extent to which schools and teachers should be controlled and managed by public authorities, and/or be chosen by families. Recent reforms in Italy, France, Finland and other countries have been deeply controversial, and debates have focused on cross-country comparisons of educational system configuration and performance.
Policy issues
Governments should indeed worry about education for a variety of reasons, which call for different policy interventions and can be differently relevant across countries and education levels. Secondary education prepares young people for further studies or for work. It is almost always publicly-funded because poor families cannot borrow to pay for their bright children's schooling, and employers normally only train workers in firm-specific skills, rather than in the general ones that individuals can use in further education or in the labour market and that bring flexibility to the latter. Moreover, each individual's education has benefits for society as a whole, and schooling is an essentially collective activity. Educating young people separately and individually would not only be exceedingly costly, but would also forego a key opportunity to ensure that they learn to coexist and cooperate. For all of these reasons the curriculum and organisation of schools are a matter of policy, rather than just private market provision.
Further problems stem from the fact that it is hard for students and their families to judge the quality of education, which depends on the characteristics and behaviour of fellow students as much as on those of teachers. Regulation of educational systems is needed to pursue two goals. The first goal is to maintain education quality, monitoring and mandating the educational standards of all schools as well as the performance of public school personnel. The second is to prevent a polarised quality distribution of schools, whereby good students hoard into schools that are perceived to be good only because they are populated by good students, inefficiently relegating disadvantaged students to bad schools.
Can one school fit all?
Academic secondary schools that prepare students for tertiary education coexist with vocational secondary education institutions that combine public education with practical skill transmission. In most European countries, with the notable exception of German-speaking ones, reforms started in the 1960s to delay the age at which students are sorted between academic and vocational "tracks" and continued until recently.
Keeping all students together in "comprehensive" secondary schools seemed advisable both because a more complex and fluid economy required more advanced general skills for all workers than those provided by primary schools, and because tracked schooling tends to perpetuate and extend socio-economic inequality. However in practice, and again with the exception of German-speaking countries, demotion of vocational tracks does not always result in the socio-economic promotion of disadvantaged students. Family background has a major influence on achievement, even in very comprehensive systems such as the French one. And in systems that force students to test their academic skills, as at the English A-level, it needs not be good for those hailing from culturally poor families to have tried and failed if this means seeking employment without any certified skills.
Education organisation and quality assurance
Reforms can be partly motivated by fiscal problems or by the political appeal of additional spending, but how resources are used is much more important than their scope. Theory and empirical evidence indicate that teachers and schools perform better when they are autonomous but externally evaluated, by means of standardised tests or through competition from a privately-run school sector. The organisation of such aspects need not be configured so as to suit the public interest, because policy can be influenced by special interests: there is a danger that public schools end up being run for the benefit of staff, rather than students.
The assignment of school funding and administration powers to national, regional, or local government levels has a varying impact on this issue across countries, and it is useful to analyse the European Union's role in monitoring and coordinating education. Currently, the EU promotes and funds exchanges between member states' educational systems, and documents the evolution of school systems providing valuable data for international comparisons. Further coordination of educational systems across the EU would obviously be beneficial if and when an EU-wide labour market develops.
Guidelines for European education
The considerations above suggest that European countries should make an effort to create dual educational tracks offering practical education, in cooperation with private industry, to youths for whom this is more suitable. Education programmes should also be tailored to local labour demand, and adapt to structural change. Countries with dual educational systems performed particularly well in the recent crisis, and such systems are appealing to impoverished countries that no longer feel they can afford the relative luxury of social inclusion.
Current debates, however, do not always adopt the long-term perspective that is appropriate for reforms that take years to implement and produce effects; and might backtrack towards school configurations that appear obsolete in cases where reforms privilege more flexible and less specialised training. School systems should continue to pursue the social and economic benefits of comprehensive education, and prevent family background from being the main determinant of track choice or of segregated schooling.
To this end, schools should be properly administered, particularly by ensuring that teachers can and do help students from underprivileged backgrounds. As means to this end, it may be helpful to standardise performance tests and to allow families to choose from public and private publicly-funded schools subject to suitable constraints and quality control. The European Union's monitoring and coordination efforts in the education policy field should continue, be adjusted to reflect the policy guidelines above, and receive more attention from national policymakers and public opinion.