Foreword

This book is a shortened version of a report on school education published by the National Institute of Public Education (OKI) in November 2003 on the request of the Ministry of Education (OM). ‘Education in Hungary’ was first published in 1996, following the review of Hungarian education policy by the OECD. The idea of producing a comprehensive analysis of the development of education at regular intervals was originally motivated by the impact of this review process on education policy debates in Hungary. This was also part of the OECD examiners’ recommendations, who suggested that an analytical public report based on statistical data and research results on the state of education would contribute to the enlightenment of public debates, and to the development of the knowledge basis of education policy. The three earlier publications (in the years 1996, 1998 and 2000) have proved that the availability of a thorough and regular professional analysis may have a favourable influence on the public discourse on education, as it encourages evidence-based approaches and higher professional standards. These reports have certainly contributed to the predictability, rationality and quality of the education policy process, and the feedback provided by it may have had a favourable influence also on the quality of education. The regular documentation of education policy events in the period of transition from authoritarianism to democracy, characterized by radical changes and by the emergence of new political cleavages, has certainly contributed to continuity and to balance between change and stability.

‘Education in Hungary’ focuses on schools, that is, on what is often referred to as K12 education. Tertiary and adult education, as well as vocational training is cited insofar as they have relevance to primary and secondary education. The report is addressed to a large audience: those who, at national or local level, make education policy decisions or have an influence on them, teachers who have an interest in the development of the broader system of education, graduate or post-graduate students in education, including teachers taking part in in-service training courses, researchers who need data or background information for their research, and last but not least, the well informed citizen who simply wants to know more about what happens in a public policy area. The aim of this abridged English version, its volume being about one fifth of the original one, is naturally different. It aims at helping the foreign reader to get access to the basic information on the Hungarian education system and on main recent trends characterising its development.

The original version of ‘Education in Hungary’ is the outcome of the work of a larger community. Fifteen authors, on the basis of more than forty background studies, wrote its nine chapters.¹ The writing of the original version had been preceded by a series of professional debates on the themes of the nine chapters, which brought many inputs from various interested partners, and directly influenced the thinking of the authors. An editing board composed of recognised researchers and education policy experts decided upon the detailed outline of the report, determining the themes that should become independent chapters and the key contents that had to appear in them. This shorter English version, which is based on the text of the original, six-hundred-page-long publication, was compiled by one author. Although it contains the same chapters as the original report, it naturally does not cover most of the topics treated in the Hungarian version. On the other hand, the English version has been supplemented with some extra information that may be useful for the international reader in their attempt to understand the processes taking place in our education system. It is important to stress that the report was prepared by independent researchers, therefore it does not intend to express official views and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of national authorities.

The structure of the volume is similar to the original Hungarian version. The first of its nine chapters offers an overview of the most important features of the social, economic and political context of educational development. The two chapters that follow present and analyse the changes of the system of governance, administration and financing. The next part discusses the structural characteristics of the education system, together with the problems of student flows and that of the connection of school education with other sub-systems, such as tertiary education or the labour market. One separate chapter covers the theme of curricula and the content of learning, and another one the internal world of schools, including the problems of management and organization. A further chapter discusses the issue of teachers, including teacher training and professional development. Among the various horizontal themes, which had been qualified by the editors as requiring special attention, two were organized into separate chapters: that of quality and effectiveness, on the one hand, and equity, on the other. Other important horizontal themes, such as the EU accession, regional differences or the aspects of life-long learning, for example, appear when appropriate, in the various chapters listed above.

While our last report, published in 2000, attempted to provide an overview of trends over the whole decade of the 1990s, the present publication focuses on the developments of three years between 1999 and the first half of 2003. However, where possible, and appropriate, time series of data go back to a longer period. Comparative data were drawn mainly from the flagship publication of OECD indicators (Education at a Glance) and that of the European Commission (Key Data on Education).

This report is also available on the web: it can be downloaded from the OKI website (http://www.oki.hu/english/). We would appreciate if the readers were kindly sending their comments to Judit Lannert (lannertj@oki.hu) at the Research Centre of OKI.