1. Welcome and Introduction

Policy Context and Introduction

(Chair: István Vilmos Kovács)

István Vilmos Kovács: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen on this chilly winter in December. I am quite sure that it is better to enjoy Budapest from inside today rather than outside and to have an intellectual excursion in education policy here in this warm building.

I would like to say a few words about the goal of this conference. The two major challenges for us for these two days are, first, to disseminate good practices throughout different countries, which has been the major goal of the What works programme, as well as to deepen and widen the thinking about innovation and moving from the school approach towards educational policy. The third goal of this meeting is to let us introduce our Hungarian experiences and results in the field of innovation.

The logic of the programme is divided into three sessions: the first deals with the micro-institutional approach concentrating on learning: creating and sustaining a high-quality learning environment. The second session deals with micro-institutional approaches, managing schools for complexity and change, and the third session will deal with the macro policy dimension of the day’s issues. We around this table come from different areas of education: invited experts, national delegates and active Hungarian actors in the education sector. There will be also Hungarian colleagues coming to follow our discussion from the audience. To start the programme, I would like to ask Mr. József Pálinkás, Minister of Education of the Republic of Hungary, to deliver his opening speech.

József Pálinkás: Thank you very much. I would like to welcome all of you here in Budapest and thank you very much for coming to this seminar, and I hope that the discussion with my colleagues will be mutually beneficial – beneficial for my colleagues and for the Hungarian educational system.

On this field of management and education, I will not speak in great detail about school management or the school management system in Hungary. I leave it to my colleagues, with whom you will have the possibility to discuss that, but I would like to raise a few things which I think are the most important questions of the Hungarian public education system. I am doing that with the hope that this will initiate some discussion in this distinguished group and, hopefully, the comments on these issues will help my colleagues to finalise those programmes which are still on the drawing-table or in a planning phase, and also can improve those programmes which are already in practice. If I am properly informed, this is our fourth event this autumn or in this year here in Hungary, OECD-related activities and OECD-related education activities, and that certainly shows that we give a certain priority to those working groups which OECD set up and in which groups OECD works and discusses educational matters. Hungarian involvement in these groups and in these works is beneficial, and it was beneficial for the Hungarian educational system, but I also do hope that our Hungarian colleagues can contribute to the common thinking about the education system and about reasonable harmonisation of the educational system in Europe.

Now, what are the main issues in the Hungarian public education that I would like to raise? I would like to mention five things. One is what we call a frame curriculum. The new curriculum in Hungary which we introduced this year from September in the first, fifth and ninth grades in the Hungarian school system. This is our national curriculum, but it leaves a certain freedom, of course, for the individual schools and actually the local authorities because as probably most of you know, in Hungary the education system is decentralised in the sense that the schools are run by the local authorities or the local government. At the same time, financing comes mainly from the central government, depending, of course, on the possibilities or the capabilities of the local government. This funding is somewhere between 60% and in the extreme case, of course, 100% coming from the central government, and 0% to 40% from the local government.

Now, the decision-making is mainly with the local government level. They can decide about the schools. Of course, the Public Education Act clearly describes what their duties are in public education, but the local government certainly has considerable freedom in school matters. This national curriculum, or national frame curriculum, which we introduced in these three grades (first, fifth and ninth), in four years will be compulsory in the Hungarian schools. I would say in most Hungarian schools because in Hungary there is a possibility that a school will operate according to a different curriculum, but that has to be authorised, and the Ministry has the right to decide whether it allows the school to use a different curriculum or not.

So far, if I remember correctly, we have authorised only eight schools to use a different curriculum. That shows me that the frame curriculum gives enough freedom for the individual schools to design their teaching according to the local needs. Later I will mention or will try to tell you a few words about the differences which exist in Hungary in the different regions as far as school quality is concerned. Actually it is, I would say, a serious problem in Hungary that the level of or the quality of the schools differ if you go from very small settlements to large towns.

The second important issue in public education is the measure of assessment. It is the first year when we have a national assessment test, in the fifth and the ninth grade in the Hungarian schools, and this assessment test is on mathematical skills, reading and understanding, or literacy if I want to use the word OECD uses. To get reliable data on the Hungarian educational system, we need a few years until this assessment system builds up. We are very anxious to see the first results of that newly introduced national assessment system.

The third important issue is the introduction of a standard exam system at the end of the 12^th year of education. We have an exam after 12 years of school, but I would not say that it is standardised, and it differs from school to school. My ambition, which is also our government’s ambition, is to make this a nationally standard exam, and we would like to have it as an exam that entitles the students or pupils to enter the university without further entrance exams. For that, and this is very important, there has to be a nationally standardised exam. I think that it will occur in 2005. We started to work out these rules and procedures and, of course, it also requires quite different management of the system because previously these exams were organised differently in the different schools.

Now we have to organise it nationally, and we have to have a national office which will organise that exam, of course with the help of the teachers, otherwise it would not be possible. So if I want to phrase it very simply, it will mean that teachers from one school will give the exam in the other school, and this national office will organise the whole process. From that I expect two things. First, it will give public education back its autonomy. This may surprise you, but right now in Hungary the public education system, especially at the secondary school level, is somehow a system in which many people feel only functions to prepare the pupils for higher education, and I am strongly opposed to that. Secondary schools have their own educational and development role, but they are influenced by what is on the higher education institution exams. The Hungarian public education in many respects distorts the schools and in many respects distorts the work of the schools because they do not concentrate enough on developing competences, or on showing that schools and education are an open-ended process, a process which does not stop after school is completed. It has to open up the students and to prepare them to further their studies, not just to enable them to know a few bits of data and be able to tell these facts and data on an entrance exam to the university.

Now, the fourth, and I think the most important priority or issue in the Hungarian education system right now, is the new career-model for the teachers, and this I would like to spend a few minutes with. If you look at the Hungarian education system there are quite a few organisational questions which we have to address, but there are two major problems. One is, of course, the low salaries of teachers. This has to be changed. The only way I see to get more funding for the schools and more funding for the teachers is if we introduce a career-model, where not only the increase of funding is made obvious, but also the requirements on the teacher’s profession are made clear, and we harmonise somehow the requirement with the funding.

The other side of that problem is that society somehow looks at the teachers as a workforce without any differences. Society does not really see what teachers are doing. Society does not really understand how much or how many things and how many duties are put on the teachers which were not there before. So their work, and I would say duties, increased considerably in the last 10-20 years. Many things which were taught in the family, in the local community, in the normal course of life now have to be taught in school. We have to make that clear, and we have to somehow put it into a normative financing scheme. We also have to make it appear in this teacher’s career model.

One thing which is very apparent in this teacher’s career model is that we would like to introduce different steps, different levels in the teacher’s profession, somewhat similar to what we have in the system of higher education where you get in as an assistant and then you have a career possibility, and those who work more and those whose results are better and higher, get more rewards, they have a career possibility, a career model where they have different rates or different steps in their career. We would like to put financing accordingly to the different levels in the teacher’s profession. It will create quite a debate whether we can make a difference between two teachers based on the merit of their educational work, whether it has to be result-oriented or whether it has to be education-oriented, but this is the only way I see out of the present “blocked” system, where society looks at the teacher as a mass without a face and they can not show their real achievements to the society.

The teacher’s career model is, therefore, designed primarily to show society how many things teachers have to do in a school and how important their work is, and it will introduce a certain competition into the teaching profession. I hope that my colleagues will have the possibility to discuss that in detail with you. We worked out this programme and sent it to every school in Hungary, and there is a debate now going on about that model. I would be very glad if an OECD conference or discussion could be organised on that because I think that this kind of problem exists in nearly every country.

The fifth thing I want to mention is what I call a programme for schools of the 21^st century. This programme is connected somehow to the frame curriculum and the teacher’s career model. We would like to start a programme in Hungary in which we rebuild our schools, rebuild not only in physical sense – some of them need rebuilding in a physical sense because many schools in Hungary were built at the beginning of the 20^th century and therefore physical rebuilding of the school is needed – but we also have to rebuild the schools so that they will be properly equipped for the challenges of the 21^st century. This means not only technical facilities, not only computers, but we have to rethink how a school is actually built physically, what kind of classrooms and what kind of facilities you need in a school to make schools more effective and also to empower them to meet the new challenges. And among these challenges I certainly have to mention the problem that in Hungary there are regions which are economically and also educationally far below the Hungarian average. Somehow we have to help and have to organise the education of these regions.

One thing we are working on is to design a financing system for those regions requiring special attention education-wise. In these regions we would like to raise the normative financing of the schools, and using that vehicle to give more opportunity to those students who, for different reasons, did not get that opportunity from their families.

These were the main things I wanted to tell you, to raise these questions and put them on the agenda for the discussions to come in the next few hours. I know that you have a tight and designed schedule, but I hope that during this discussion you will have the opportunity to comment on some of the issues I have raised. Otherwise, thank you very much again for coming, and I hope you will have a fruitful discussion here. I hope that the outcome of the meeting will help all of us to improve those programmes which we run in our countries and those programmes which we develop to improve education in every country and in the European Union. Thank you very much for your attention.

István Vilmos Kovács: Now I would like to give the floor to Mr. George Papadopoulos, former Deputy Director for Education, OECD.

George Papadopoulos: Minister, ladies and gentlemen. I am very pleased to be here as a representative of OECD, though I no longer work within the organisation. It is an organisation which I had a very intimate relationship with over a period of 30 to 35 years, and I therefore feel both competent and entitled to speak for it. I would like in the first place, Minister, to thank you for all the effort that you and your colleagues have made in preparing this meeting and in making its organisation possible. I am sure we will all be grateful to you for the hopefully constructive work to result from this meeting. I remember, if I may be allowed a personal reminiscence for a while, the first time I was in Budapest was about 10 years ago, just about 10 years ago, at the time of the demise of the communist regime. And the occasion was a meeting which had been initiated by the teacher organisations in Hungary in cooperation with the Federation of the European Teacher Organisations.

The subject of that meeting was decentralisation, and I remember I was asked to introduce the meeting. I remember the excitement with which Hungarian teachers, for the first time, were hearing the experience of their Western colleagues over the previous 30 to 40 years in these matters. It was new to them. But I think they were rather disappointed to hear that decentralisation does not always lead to what they thought was the outcome, namely complete freedom for schools and teachers to do whatever they like, that there are some forms of decentralisation which accentuate centralisation rather than the other way around. Anyhow, this is enough reminiscence.

Our subject today – governance, management, decision-making, leadership in schooling – is, of course, of fundamental importance to the development of future national policies for education. I say national policies because I do believe that education policies remain, or have always been, par excellence national policies. And they are so dependent on national cultures and national traditions that international comparisons become extremely difficult in matters which affect the “cultural ethos” of an educational system. That is why in the areas that we are concerned with today it is very difficult to establish comparisons between countries, although such comparisons may be possible in another areas. The value of exchanges of the kind we are experiencing now therefore lies mostly in drawing on each other’s experience and learning from each other rather than trying to emulate each other’s situation. Stepping in this direction, in this particular area has already taken place in the form of the work which has been done in the series under the What works project, leading to the publication of New School Management Approaches, which will be introduced to you more specifically by Dr. Shuttleworth later on in the discussions.

I make this point to start with because we should bear in mind that we are not trying to copy each other’s systems, but are instead trying to understand how these systems develop and what their objectives are. After all, we all have the same objectives in education. The way we can see them and the means we use are different. That is the catalysing factor in these discussions.

I mentioned that the subject of this conference is fundamentally important to the development of future education systems. I wish to stress that the major issues in education are more or less perennial. The same issues come up time and time again. And this is in line with the objectives of education and its clients. What changes? What makes the difference? Are they, from time to time, different contextual issues which weigh on education and to which education has to either respond or define. Mostly it is forced to respond. And in my remarks that follow I would like to concentrate mostly on the impact of these changing contextual issues in education, because it is important that we see these together with the specific changes that can be taken and that are taking place in education.

The first of these contextual issues, new contextual issues, is the priority which has been given to lifelong learning now in all our countries. It is in the title of our conference itself, so I do not need to apologise. Lifelong learning has, by now, received almost a holy consecration as the guiding principle for the development of national policies both at the level of individual countries and at the level of international organisations. A unique phenomenon in OECD, for example, is that the strategies for lifelong learning have been endorsed not only by ministers of education but also by ministers of social affairs, manpower and employment, and, even more important, by ministers of finance themselves.

It is a unique happening within the OECD to have such a confluence of agreement among different levels reaching up to the highest levels of political interest. The Commission of the European Union, which has also adopted lifelong learning policies as its guiding principle for its work has recently, very recently – a fortnight ago – published a new and very important memorandum called Making a European area of lifelong learning a reality. It is a communication from the Commission to the European Council for decisions about a vast future programme in which lifelong learning strategies will be both encouraged and financially facilitated, as well as organisationally facilitated, so it is to produce a common area within which lifelong learning can be developed in Europe. It is worth reading, and it is not a final document yet. When it at last gets to its final stages, it will be an important document.

You will be disappointed to hear that questions of management, governance, leadership, and so on, in schooling are not included among the priorities put forward by the European Commission. As it is not yet a final document there is still a chance to influence final decisions, which I thought would be interesting for you to know.

Now, there is no doubt that lifelong learning is a good thing, like motherhood is a good thing. The problem is how to pass now from the rhetoric of lifelong learning to the application of it. The history of education in the last 50 years is replete with proposals and major schemes for change accepted by governments but in the end leading to no fundamental change from the existing system. Within the OECD you experience it during the 1970s with our current, recurrent education project, which advocated new thinking about the distribution of educational opportunities over life, in order for it to enable people to move in and out of education at different points of their life, rather than have a continuous education within their youth.

In the case of lifelong learning, the projects were formally adopted by governments and endorsed. Then five years later we did a review of what had happened and discovered that apart from minor changes in the area of participation in adult learning, no significant changes have taken place. Well, this is dangerous maybe in the same situation as lifelong learning: that the governments pay lip service to it, but in the end they fail to do anything about it in terms of a strategic approach to the problem. At most there are various separate pieces of action which have been taken, and they are put under the umbrella of lifelong learning simply to justify acceptance of the proposal. But the strategy of a new lifelong learning system nowhere seems to have materialised. We have discussed it in terms of a political commitment by governments. The result has been not fundamental change in the system, but rather an attempt to graft onto an existing system parts of new approaches that contribute to lifelong learning. The best example of this is probably England, where there has been a major commitment to leading towards a learning society. Major resources have been allocated and institutional arrangements have been set up. I do not know how far they have gone, but it would be interesting for someone to do a review of what progress has been achieved in England on the basis of their much-publicised new approaches to lifelong learning.

Then, one is to forget that lifelong learning as a present doctrine may have some points of warning that have to be noted. First of all, it identifies learning with education. As we all know, although learning is a very important part of education, it is not the whole of education. Education is also, for instance, ‘Bildung’ as the German call the concept of the training aspect of education. And this is emphasised even more by the fact that most of the projects that have been advocated focus on the learning of skills rather than learning in its more educative sense. Moreover, most of the problems have to do with training, training in new skills rather than in general education. These are precautions to be borne in mind.

It so happens that in many countries the concept of lifelong learning, because of its political appeal, has also been hijacked by individual lobbies, like adult education lobbies, in order to further their own interests and re-enforce their own positions. That, again, has to be borne in mind. Be that as it may, I think we all admit that in lifelong learning policies, schooling occupies a central role: reform of basic schooling. And that has been emphasised time and time again. It is sad to think that although the importance is recognised, if we look at what is happening with lifelong learning policies, the schooling sector seems to be neglected. Obviously, there are a lot of changes taking place, but there are no changes which have been specifically designed to give basic schooling a new place in the total system, or new directions that help the development of the new system.

I will not go into the implications of that, for what may or what should happen is basic schooling, I mean in terms of redefinition of the objectives of schooling at that level, of the pedagogical methods and the organisation of schooling, which would be discussed later on.

We want education to be reformed so that it provides the vast majority if not all of its population with equal level of skills to enable them to launch onto subsequent careers on the basis of equality it or will have failed this main object.

In the OECD we have always advocated these things in terms of high quality education for all, lifelong learning policies for all, and the “all” was very important, recognising that if we do not manage to include this in the initial stages, we neglect those people who face failure in school. We will continue to offer a system in which those who benefit from subsequent education are already those who have had good education. And this has been proved to be an iron law of education: that participation in further education is very dependent on the actual levels of education.

Let me say a few words about some of the broader contextual issues, having dealt with lifelong learning. As we all know, education is a massive enterprise. Education is probably the biggest national enterprise or industry that exists, if we take into account all the people involved both on the receiving end, on the giving side and the administration. So, in a system of that kind, of such massive dimensions, with so many actors involved, change becomes very difficult to organise. Change is best when it takes place against the background of growing interest in democratic and citizenship values, and therefore has to involve the populations - the people concerned. And this is obviously a result of the legacy of what happened in the latter half of the previous century, where as a result of a massive expansion of education in the post-war period, education came to occupy a central political place. It did influence changes in social and definitely economic and political structures, the importance of which has not yet been properly evaluated.

But we live with that legacy of educational expansion to the present day, and therefore the political implications of educational decision-making or planning have to be borne in mind. Education has become politicised, not only because of the place it occupies in the total public of society but particularly because of the change in the economic background within which it operates now, where resources are more limited than they used to be and where the setting of priorities becomes important. And these priorities are now settled on political consideration rather than on educational or pedagogic considerations. And I think this is important to bear in mind.

Traditionally, education has been seen, at least in the Western world, as a public service largely publicly financed – the service in which it was allowed by and large to develop under its own dynamics, a situation which enabled education, at least during the period of expansion, to meet all its objectives, the variety of objectives that it has. When we reached the stage of financial stringencies we had at the beginning of the late 1970s and continuing today, we find that the debate about priorities has become a political issue. So much so that in certain cases it is politics which decides not only a curriculum but also the contents of the curriculum in some cases. I remember, for example, in England local actors decided what sort of history, parts of the English history, were to be included in the history syllabus, and that sort of things.

Now, in addition to that, you have a definition of objectives in education which are necessarily, which are very much influenced by what the economic and social environment demands of any particular time. So much so that a trend now is in most countries to establish more firm, central control over the setting of the objectives and the use of instruments by which the achievement of these objectives could be measured. While, at the same time, parallel to a general trend in public management issues, there is an equally prominent trend towards decentralisation, towards devolution of responsibilities to local institutions, local power, local institutions. But the reverse of this coin of devolution is a growing demand for accountability. And let’s face it, England has never had a tradition of accountability culture in education. And it is also a kind of accountability which must be different from what one applies to other enterprises, including public service. Accountability is very much based on the setting of objectives, discussing inputs and considering outputs.

Now, the difficulty in education is that the input and the output are practically identical because they are the pupils, the young people. So what is it that accountability can measure? There are some quantifiable elements in terms of achievement, but essentially those ignore the quality of the process through which education goes. And it is rather ensuring to notice that the latest OECD report, the PISA report takes into account not only achievement in certain subjects but also procedures and processes which result or which go together with these results. One could make a long story of these parameters, in terms of higher education, which has been the area mostly subject to increase, but these forces are coming down to the school-level as well. The systems countries are developing now as far as education is concerned, are based on new forms of central control: steering from a distance. Distant steering of educational systems is becoming the new mode of educational control. The changes between the central and the periphery are much more settled than they appear on paper.

In connection to all these matters one should also mention the fact that education is increasingly being influenced by the incursion of private initiatives, which again are practically new, at least as far as schools are concerned. I remember in the OECD up to the 1980s-90s we at the Secretariat were not allowed to mention private sector initiatives in education. “Particularly the Scandinavians would interfere”, they said. Nowadays, everybody talks about the partnership between the public and private sector. But the consequences of these things have to be measured carefully and we have to see what influences these various factors can have on the educational development itself.

I have not mentioned statistics which have resulted from the pressures on accountability and that is an area where significant progress has been made and OECD has led the way. The Education at a Glance publication has become a very useful source of reference to see what educational systems in different countries do.

The PISA report takes these one stage further. The unfortunate thing about these reports is that they have been used politically by governments to influence their public opinion, or by the public to criticise governments. But it does not invalidate the academic merit and accountability of these reports and I am sure that Donald Hirsch, who has been involved in the PISA report very closely, might be able to say more about this issue in the discussions.

But I think I had better stop there, Chairman, because I could go on forever. But I would like to leave with you perhaps three short ideas, on which you might reflect during the discussion. The first one is that from what we know about the process of social innovation in education, there can be no progress or success in the establishment of such innovation unless two requirements are met. Firstly, additional money, additional resources, or the re-allocation of the existing resources, if that is possible. And secondly, a shift in the distribution of power in these areas. And that I think would be an interesting reflection to bear in mind.

The second idea is by Richard, the famous educationist who was asked: What is the value of education? How do you value it? And he said that the value of education and the effect of education are what remains after we have forgotten everything we have learned in school.

And the third one is a famous comment by Winston Churchill who, as you know, was a failure at school. When asked why he failed he said: “Well, the problem was that my teachers wanted to examine me on things I didn’t know rather than on things I knew.” Thank you, Chairman.