International indicators and strategies for education

The issue of education indicators and their relationship in education policies is certainly very complex. We will try, in the available space, to provide an orientative overview on the evolution of the OECD system of indicators, also considering the contribution of international surveys on education, and the use of indicators for the definition of European Community strategies for education and training. The first editions of Education at a Glance, years later, showed the enormous progress made in recent years in the collection and elaboration of indicators. The data presented were relatively up to date and refer at best to two years before the date of publication, another sign that many countries, as data providers, were progressively equipping themselves for their collection in different national realities, respecting the standards of quality defined by INES. Immediately after the publication of the first edition of Education at a Glance, the OECD was faced with a problem of availability and updating of data regarding the result indicators. Without seeing into the details of the results of the IALS survey, we see how these were immediately put (from the 1996 edition of Education at a Glance) into the indicator system. Concurrently with the implementation of IALS, the OECD began to design a specific survey for students, analyzing the problems encountered in the study of adults (for example the staggered participation of countries) and trying to solve the problems detected for IEA surveys. Hence PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) was born, with a completely original framework. The OECD's hope to see the indicators used by countries to define education policies has been fully implemented in European strategies over the last 20 years. The outcomes of ET 2020 will soon be assessed, but the two European strategies show that the indicators can become an important source of information to inspire and assist the choices of policy makers about education, providing the public with control mechanisms to verify effectiveness of the actions taken to achieve the results.