people and planet

21
depends on stable international working arrangements’
(OECD, 2009b). The INES oversight and coordination
bodies determine the NESLI work plan following
strategic direction by the OECD Education Policy
Committee, which is responsible for the organization’s
work on education.
NESLI collects information such as indicators on teacher
remuneration and instruction time, using annual, cyclical
or ad hoc surveys. Much of the information is published
in the annual OECD Education at a Glance reports.
Extensive annexes to the reports describe sources of
information by country. In recent years, information on
non-member countries has been included (Box 21.1).
BOX 21.1
Engaging in multiple initiatives to diagnose
education systems – the case of Brazil
In recent years, the OECD has increasingly extended its diagnostic
assessments of education systems to cover non-member countries.
For example, it has carried out reviews of national education
policies in the Dominican Republic, Indonesia and Tajikistan. For
some reviews, such as in Malaysia and Thailand, it has collaborated
with UNESCO. NESLI has also sought to engage OECD candidate
countries, such as Colombia and Lithuania, and non-member
countries, such as Brazil and the Russian Federation.
Brazil joined the network after participating in the World Education
Indicators project, a joint effort of the OECD, UIS and World Bank.
Brazil has benefited from exchanging information with other countries
through NESLI but also from improved domestic coordination
between government departments, which was necessary to collect
the information. But since it is not an OECD member, Brazil cannot
influence NESLI’s agenda toward its areas of interest. And as a
federal country with a large degree of decentralization, it has also
found it difficult to report national-level information.
Brazil is also a member of two regional groupings that promote
exchange of information on education systems: the Organization
of Ibero-American States (OEI), which has a common education
agenda that increasingly looks at qualitative aspects of education
systems; and Mercosur, a customs union and trading bloc, which
considers education as one factor promoting regional integration
and has carried out comparative reviews of member countries’
education systems.
Sources: Mercosur (2008); OEI (2010).
The OECD has carried out systematic country
education policy reviews since the 1970s; INES and
NESLI follow in a long tradition of diagnostic tools
developed by the organization. Policy reviews are
becoming more diversified, focusing on selected areas
or levels of education, such as early childhood or postsecondary
skills acquisition. At the same time, there are
attempts to unify different strands of work, for example
through the Education GPS database, which links
information on system indicators with other sources,
and the Education Policy Outlook series (OECD, 2015c).
An excellent example of such efforts, albeit in a different
context, is the OEI education strategy known as Metas
Educativas 2021 (‘Education Goals 2021’), agreed by Latin
American education ministers in 2008. A specialized
body, the Institute of Monitoring and Evaluation, was
established to review progress on 11 targets and 39
indicators, at least one of which explicitly refers to
the functioning of education systems (OEI, 2014). At
the 2015 meeting of the OEI Governing Council, viceministers
requested the development of more qualitative
indicators to capture aspects of targets on equity and
teacher professional development (OEI, 2015).
Other regional organizations have analysed systems and
policies, although usually in relation to particular aspects
of education. For example, the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations and the South-east Asian Ministers of
Education Organization are taking steps to harmonize
regional higher education systems to facilitate mobility
of students, faculty and researchers for better regional
economic integration. This analysis has led to work
that compares, links and coordinates higher education
systems in areas such as quality assurance (Niedermeier
and Pohlenz, 2016; Ratanawijitrasin, 2015).
A final example of high quality education system
diagnostic assessment is the long-standing
Country Status Report series of the UNESCO
International Institute for Educational Planning
(IIEP) in sub-Saharan Africa (IIEP et al., 2014). This
initiative seeks to build national decision-makers’
capacity for sector analysis and facilitate domestic
policy dialogue. Attempts to compare countries – for
example through the IIEP Pôle de Dakar database –
focus almost exclusively on quantitative indicators.
A coordinated effort would be needed to improve the
basis for comparing systems and policies, which would
generate sustained regional dialogue.
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CHAPTER 21 | EDUCATION SYSTEMS