European co-ordination of national education policies from the perspective of the new member countries¹

Gábor Halász

On 16 April 2003, the heads of state of ten countries (Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia) signed the Accession Treaty with the member countries of the European Union in Athens. This act opened the way for the biggest enlargement in the history of the Union. Since that day the former candidate countries have generally been referred to as "new member countries", although full membership still depends on the ratification of the Accession Treaty by the national authorities or parliaments of the member countries (expected to be achieved by mid 2004). In many areas, including education, the new member countries will find a European landscape very different from what they faced when they first started negotiations on accession. One of the new features they face in the education sector is that this is now becoming an area where the community acquires new co-ordination roles and develops new techniques for this role. When the negotiations started, education – in spite of the accelerated pace of integration – was still seen as one of those areas where national sovereignty was intact. The articles on education and training in the Treaty of the Union seemed to give a strong guarantee that this state of affairs would be preserved. However, by the time of accession, the harmonisation process is clearly reaching the educational sector, as well.

New European co-ordination of national education policies

In March 2000 the heads of state of the EU member countries decided to extend the new policy co-ordination technique developed a few years earlier in the employment sector to other sectors – including education. The new technique, named Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) by the European Council at its special meeting in Lisbon, consists of four key elements:

• setting guidelines with specific timetables for achieving the goals
• establishing quantitative and qualitative indicators and benchmarks linked with the goals formulated in the guidelines
• translating the European guidelines into national and regional action strategies, and
• a community evaluation of these national strategies and measures based on the use of common indicators and benchmarks.

This technique, although not yet known as OMC before the Lisbon summit, has been tried out in the area of employment policy since the 1994 Essen European Council, and particularly since the Amsterdam Treaty and the consecutive Luxemburg and Cardiff European Councils in 1997 and 1998 (Goetschy, 1999). Now the European Council issues the common Employment Guidelines annually, the member countries prepare annual National Action Plans (NAP) in employment, which is also a report on what they achieved, and the Commission prepares a Joint Report evaluating these NAPs.

In Lisbon the heads of state adopted an ambitious strategy for acceleration leading Europe into the era of a knowledge based economy, and OMC was defined as a major instrument to achieve this strategic goal. As it was formulated in the Lisbon conclusions: "implementing this strategy will be achieved by improving the existing processes, introducing a new Open Method of Co-ordination at all levels, coupled with a stronger guiding and coordinating role for the European Council to ensure more coherent strategic direction and effective monitoring of progress" (European Council, 2000). The application of this method was envisaged in practically all the sectors that are important for social and economic progress (such as research and technological development, environment and social policy). The decision envisaged a "fully decentralised approach" which meant – among others factors – that the concrete form of OMC could be different in the different sectors. The intention to involve the candidate countries in the OMC processes appeared in a number of documents.

The term "open" in OMC deserves particular attention. According to Telo (2001) it bears several meanings.

• It means that the diversity of the national practices and competencies of the participating countries has to be respected, that is the co-ordination process cannot result in imposing specific models upon them. If constraints appear, this is purely symbolic: countries are confronted with their weaknesses and strengths, and with successful practices from other countries, which puts a pressure on them to identify and correct their mistakes and follow the successful members of the community. The process they enter strongly resembles what is called benchmarking in the business world.
• Openness also means that not only governments are invited to take part in the co-ordination process but social partners as well.
• The whole process has to be transparent, and visible for the larger society, it cannot remain a business of national elites.
• Openness refers to the process of European integration itself. It can be a further step towards a closer union, although it can also become a substitute for real integration.

Benchmarking is a key element of OMC. This process has been imported into policy co-ordination from the business sector. According to Sisson et al. (2002) benchmarking started life in multinational companies as a management tool to increase competitive performance. This encompasses the simplest comparison of performance data to complex strategic exercises aiming at examining how the world's best companies are run. It can take three forms of varying complexity:

• performance benchmarking, which involves quantitative comparisons of input and/or output measures
• process benchmarking, which covers a detailed scrutiny of the efficiency of particular business processes and activities, using focus groups and surveys, plus arrangements such as quality standards accreditation
• strategic benchmarking, which involves comparing the driving forces behind successful organisations, looking at such things as leadership and the management of change to identify possible alternative strategies and ways of improving performance.

Sisson et al. quotes the former Secretary General of the European Roundtable of Industrialist who said that the Luxemburg, Cardiff and Cologne processes were "nothing more than glorified benchmarking exercises to deal with macro-economics, employment and structural reforms respectively, all tied together in to a coherent package at Lisbon" (p. 5.) It is particularly important to stress that what was started after Lisbon in the education sector does not mean the harmonisation of the systems of education, that is, the content of teaching or the organisation of schooling. As already emphasised, the Treaty forbids this. What happens is the harmonisation of policies directed to the systems of education. The difference between harmonising policies and harmonising systems is a fundamental one. If policy harmonisation takes place through benchmarking – that is through communication and "policy learning" – no legal objections can be made. It also has to be stressed that in the education sector benchmarking has been related much more to the quality of the educational service than to the quality of education policy (we shall come back to this question later). However, it has to be kept in mind that improving the quality of education is only one of the major policy goals. Therefore the evaluation of the quality of education policy cannot be restricted to the evaluation of the results of quality policy. Moreover, the quality of education is something that can be improved only in the long run by measures that go beyond policy cycles. This means that the quality of education at a given time may say more about the policies of one or two past decades than about the current ones. As a consequence, the measurement of the current quality of the system cannot always be used to evaluate the quality of the current education policy.

The impetus behind harmonising national education policies

Most of the motives that lead to the need for policy harmonisation in education can be found outside the sector. There are a few internal constraints, as well, but these seem to be much weaker than the external ones. The Lisbon decision is, in fact, a marvellous example for the neo-functionalist theory of European integration: the progress of integration in one sector automatically creates the need for stronger integration in the other. Economic integration, for instance, necessarily creates the need for stronger social integration, and the growing integration in one social area triggers similar processes in other sectors. If there is a common understanding of fundamental human rights, these have to be respected in every sector of the community, including education. That is, if there is a collision between national educational traditions and common human rights, the latter should prevail. If workers have similar rights within the community, these are also valid if these workers are teachers. If free movement is accepted as a basic community right, education cannot block this by its national traditions of awarding qualifications and diplomas.

The strongest force that leads to policy harmonisation in education is, even if this sector resists this, that it is not possible to draw sharp borderlines between the different sectors. If human resources are developed within a policy of regional development, no one speaks about education policy, however, new training programmes often with general education components are created, new institutions with education and training tasks may be set up, and new general rules regulating learning may be established. When, in the framework of labour policies, new "active measures" are taken, aiming at leading inactive persons back to the labour market through developing their general competencies and social skills, or schools are contracted by labour administrations to develop new training modules, education policy is at work here even if education ministers are not directly involved. If, in the framework of social policy, poverty is fought by distributing cheap school meals or textbooks to children of poor families, by strengthening home-school linkages or by defining education priority zones, it is not easy to make a clear distinction between social and education policies.

Those who do not follow closely what happens in the European Union outside the narrower education sector may miss the fact that the community co-ordination of education policies had already started before Lisbon, without the direct involvement of ministers of education. It is enough to have a look at the structural policy of the European Union and analyse the reforms achieved through this in countries like Ireland or Portugal to see that important fractions of education policy may come under community control even within the framework set by the Treaty. This is not surprising at all. Since in these countries, education and training reforms were realised in the framework of European development (structural) policy with resources coming from the taxpayers of other countries, it was natural that the community had to take a strong responsibility on how these resources were used.

The best example of how vague the borderlines between different sectors are can be found in employment policy. Since the Delors report on Growth, Competitiveness and Employment in 1993 (European Commission, 1993), not only has employment become a key element of the common European economic policy, but its nature has also changed. There was a clear shift from employment policy seen as a tool of social solidarity to one seen as that of developing human adaptability. The common European employment policy, as it emerged from the above mentioned Luxemburg and Cardiff processes, was in fact a policy to increase the adaptation potential of European people through, among others, lifelong learning. None of the four pillars of the European employment strategy – employability, entrepreneurship, adaptability and equal opportunities – can fully be achieved without direct education and training measures.

This is one of the reasons why lifelong learning has become a major transnational goal of European employment policy. It also has to be stressed that the by the late nineties the meaning of lifelong learning had been broadened and now includes all levels and sectors of education, including even pre-school education and the development of foundation skills during initial schooling. This is how it appears in the Memorandum on Lifelong Learning put to public debate by the Commission in 2000 (European Commission, 2000), and even more in the policy document that emerged from this debate, entitled Making a European Area of Lifelong Learning a Reality (European Commission, 2001). This latter document – used as a reference point when the community evaluates the lifelong learning components of national employment policies as part of the joint employment reports – formulates very specific education policy goals for initial education. For example it defines the key competencies that have to be developed through initial education, and also suggests specific pedagogical technologies that should be applied if this objective is to be achieved. The change in the nature of employment policy, particularly the growing stress on the development of human potential and adaptability through learning, has naturally created a challenge for education policy.

The first reaction of education ministers was the adoption of a decision in 1999 to keep certain policy issues permanently on the agenda of the Education Council, and the first of them was "education in employment policy". This was the so-called "rolling agenda" which can be seen as a precursor of OMC in education (Hingel, 2001).

In the year following the Lisbon summit the Education Council adopted another resolution on the role of education and training in employment-related policies which clarified the role of education ministers not only in the formulation of common European employment policy guidelines but also in the preparation of National Action Plans for Employment and their common evaluation in the Joint Employment Reports. It is in this process that the Education Directorate of the Commission created for the first time a specific report on education and training in employment policies based on the analysis of the 2000 National Action Plans for Employment (European Commission, 2001d). By this time it became clear for education ministers that if they remained aloof from the rapidly developing policy co-ordination process and if the education sector did not develop its own procedure for this, co-ordination of policies in their sectors will be done by others.

Policy co-ordination in the wider context of governance reform

It is not possible to think about policy co-ordination in education without linking it to the wider context of national, European and global governance reform. If this is not done, or if our reflection is a captive of our narrow sectoral perspective, we shall not understand what is at stake when education joins other areas in the policy co-ordination process. The term "governance" has been gaining a growing importance for the last decades in the western world. Looking at one of its definitions we can immediately see why this term is used more and more frequently: the reason is that it expresses our post-modern way of thinking about society and power. According to a definition quoted by Paquet, (2001) governance refers to three elements:

• how individuals and institutions (public, private and civic) manage their collective affairs
• how the diverse interests accommodate and resolve their differences
• these many actors and organisations are involved in a continuing process of formal and informal competition, cooperation and learning.

Governance in this sense means the management of collective affairs, while accepting and taking into consideration the existence of diverging interests, and also the dynamism and the openness of the process. From our perspective it is of prime importance that governance is linked to learning in this definition. In our modern (post-modern) democracies it is this openness and dynamism based on competition, cooperation and learning that increasingly characterises the governance of nations. The whole scene is characterised by the overlapping of different responsibilities, competencies and interests of various public, private and civil institutions, all of which try to assert their own interests, to adapt their behaviour to that of others and to solve various problems through cooperation or competition. It is natural that the scene becomes even more open and dynamic if we shift from the national to the European or the global level.

European governance is often described as "multilevel governance". According to Kaiser and Prange (2002) this term specifies a mechanism of governing characterized by three features:

• decision-making competencies are shared by actors at different levels (i.e. a "dynamic" dispersion of authority)
• actors and arenas are not ordered hierarchically as in traditional inter-governmental relationships (i.e. non-hierarchical institutional design)
• consensual or non-majority decision-making among states, which requires a continuous wide-ranging negotiation process (i.e. non-majority negotiation system).

The OMC itself is, in fact, an instrument of multilevel governance. It can also be seen as a specific answer to the challenges that European governance faces in our time, such as increasing global exposure, growing diversity and complexity, the widening of the political agenda or the threats to social cohesion (Monar, 2000). The new European governance is emerging in an era characterized by growing "problem interdependence": since no single actor has sufficient potential for action or enough power to solve problems alone, they have to rely on each other. The potential to create solutions promotes the willingness to come to agreements and creates incentives to cooperate (Héritier, 2001).

The growing complexity of governance makes it necessary that new and more sophisticated policy instruments be created. The White Paper of the European Commission on European Governance (European Commission, 2001a), which emerged from a long and substantial collective reflective process and which was published in 2001, places strong stress on the need to enrich the repertoire of policy instruments. In this document OMC is mentioned as an important new item of this repertoire and its application is encouraged in different areas, including education. The White Paper stresses that OMC may take different forms in different sectors. It also points to some risks of applying such a very soft, open and flexible instrument: OMC should not replace the necessary harder instruments, and it should not lead to getting round the institutions of representative democracy (see below). From the perspective of the new member countries it is important to note that this White Paper invites them to take part in the OMC process before they fully join the community.

The EU White Paper on Governance and the Open Method of Co-ordination
"Community action may be complemented or reinforced by the use of the so-called "Open Method of Co-ordination", which can already involve the applicant countries in some cases.
The Open Method of Co-ordination is used on a case-by-case basis. It is a way of encouraging co-operation, the exchange of best practice and agreeing common targets and guidelines for member states, sometimes backed up by national action plans as in the case of employment and social exclusion. It relies on regular monitoring of progress to meet those targets, allowing member states to compare their efforts and learn from the experience of others.

In some areas, such as employment, social policy or immigration policy, it sits alongside the programme-based and legislative approach; in others, it adds value at a European level where there is little scope for legislative solutions. This is the case, for example, with work at a European level defining future objectives for national education systems.

The Commission plays an active co-ordinating role already and is prepared to do so in the future, but the use of the method must not upset the institutional balance nor dilute the achievement of common objectives in the Treaty. In particular, it should not exclude the European Parliament from a European policy process. The Open Method of Co-ordination should be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, Community action." (Source: European Commission, 2001a)

As stressed above, mutual learning is a key element of modern (or post-modern) thinking on governance. If policy answers have to be given to the questions of a widening political agenda in an environment characterized by growing diversity and complexity, as well as by the presence of an increasing number of cooperating or competing actors with overlapping responsibilities, communication and mutual learning necessarily become the crucial elements of both policy shaping and implementation. This has been formulated very lucidly in a study on European governance by Lebessis and Paterson (2000), since
"none can claim to have an unquestionable understanding of problems, objectives and means, it seems immediately apparent that reform must seek to increase opportunities for collective learning. (..) [These opportunities] would need to encourage an acceptance of the necessarily incomplete and provisional nature of any perspective brought to a given interaction and seek to facilitate a mutual critique of those perspectives by the various stakeholders whether expert or lay. This might take the form of obliging stakeholders not only to formulate their position explicitly, but also to explain the effects of that position on other stakeholders and on other aspects of the problem that they bring to light. (..) in other words [they would], be required to demonstrate the coherence of their constructions, not only in terms of their initial position but also in terms of the positions of others which have emerged as part of the process of collective learning."

The term "obliging" is worth stressing here: its justification is given by our growing mutual dependence on each other. Global and particularly European interdependence is the factor that forces all nations to establish formal guarantees for being informed in time by the others about all their actions that may have an impact on the life of the other.

When we speak about a "learning society" we may mean various things. In this context one specific meaning of this notion should receive attention. In the current global context characterized by rapid changes and by societies being forced to improve their adaptive capacity, social learning becomes a vital process. A learning society may do what learning individuals or learning organisations do: it analyses its environment, elaborates new responses, tries them out, and if needed, corrects its behaviour on the basis of the feedbacks it receives. OMC as a new European policy instrument, through enhancing policy communication, contributes to the creation of the learning society in this sense. It helps the emergence of what Sabel (2001) calls democratic experimentalism, which is a polity based on political learning that helps societies to solve their complex problems. Contributing to the creation of the learning society, as defined above, is also a major mission of education.

There is no other sector, which could do more to enhance the learning capacities of societies, or which could bear greater responsibility for it than education. One would expect that the educational sector would show a particular susceptibility for a governance reform that emphasises communication and mutual learning. Surprisingly other sectors are much more open to join the common European efforts to institutionalise international policy discussion and for this purpose borrow the instrument of benchmarking from the business world. If learning becomes a crucial factor of governance, it is natural that a sector whose main function is the management of learning cannot remain neutral in a discussion about governance reform. If OMC is a key element of governance reform in Europe, its application in the education sector cannot be seen only though narrow sectoral glasses. If education is to play a key role in the broader social and political reform process that tends to put more stress on communication and mutual learning in governance and policy implementation, there also may appear a need that this sector contribute more constructively to this process.

Moreover, our sector also has its own specific problems of governance, many of them requiring answers that cannot be created within narrow national frameworks. For instance, the changing relationship between the education and the labour market system demands new regulatory tools that are different from those applied in the rather closed traditional school system. The question of applying OMC in the education sector could be seen, therefore, not only as a question of how far we go with the Europeanisation of our national education policies, but also as one that can help us renew our national ways of governing our own education systems. The fact that "OMC is designed not only to deliver new policy outcomes but also to act as a process for improving policy formation" (Hodson and Maher, 2001) should not be forgotten in our discussion about this new policy instrument.

The new European policy co-ordination approach and the education sector

The future of the community co-ordination of education policies will probably be shaped in a multidimensional field of forces peopled with various actors. In this field the various actors may form various types of alliances, and may enter into various types of conflicts, and the change of power relationships may transform the attitudes of the actors. It may happen, as it already has happened many times, that the fiercest defenders of national sovereignty give up their positions and take a strong standpoint in favour of supranational policy co-ordination. As far as the education sector is concerned – in the light of the developments of the past few years – one can identify two major dimensions in this field of forces: one opposing those who are within and outside the education sector (e.g. employment and social affairs), and the other opposing the national and the supranational actors (see Figure 1).

In this field of forces four different groups of players can be distinguished:

• EU level sectoral players (e.g. the Education Directorate of the Commission)
• EU level non-sectoral players (e.g. the Employment and Social Affairs Directorate of the Commission)
• member state level sectoral players (e.g. national education ministries or teacher organisation)
• member state level non-sectoral players (e.g. national employment ministries or employer organisations).

Figure 1. The field of forces of the development of community level policy co-ordination

If the non-education sector players (2 and 4) are successful – as was the case in the past few years – in pushing up education policy issues to the community level, the national education sector players (3) may be also be constrained to conduct discussions at this level. If they do not do this, it may happen that decisions on issues that are relevant for the sectoral policy are taken without them.

Since the middle of the nineties the non-education sector players have been successful both in extending the scope of employment policy to issues that traditionally have belonged to the jurisdiction of the education sector and in pushing these issues up to community level. As a consequence, not only the community level sectoral players (1) but also those at the national level (3) could have the feeling that an increasing number of education policy issues are dealt with in the framework of the common employment policy.

This was clearly demonstrated by an analysis by the Commission of education and training in the National Action Plans for Employment in 2000, stating that "the (employment) guidelines, which were originally based more on employment and labour market reform policies, are focusing increasingly on the education and training dimension" (European Commission, 2001b). The resolution on "the role of education and training in employment related policies", adopted in 2001 by the Education Council, can also be seen as a sign of sectoral players recognising the importance of asserting education sector interests in community level employment policy-making (Council Resolution 2001/C 204/01).

The future of OMC in the education sector may also depend on the role and weight of the different sectoral professional groups in the policy co-ordination process. Since indicator-based evaluation and measurement of processes are key elements of OMC, it is quite probable that evaluation professionals may play a crucial role. This can be facilitated by the fact that evaluation is one of the most internationalised professional areas in the education sector, symbolised by such prestigious international associations as IEA or EARLI. The scope and success of some EU quality evaluation programmes (e.g. European Commission, 1999) also demonstrates this, as well as the fact that professional internationalisation in this area has reached circles that belong more to the administrational than to the academic sphere, as demonstrated by the European network of policy makers for the evaluation of education systems or by the Standing International Conference of General Inspectorates of Education (SICI). These professional and administrative circles may feel that the Europeanisation of education policy contributes to upgrading their recognition and competencies, especially if OMC places stress on the use of measurable indicators and on modern quality approaches.

The question of what specific form OMC will take in the education sector has not yet been fully answered. As Hingel (2001) described very clearly, not all the member states have the same view on this. For example while some member states are in favour of introducing the component of producing a regular national report to be subjected to community evaluation, others want to follow up the Lisbon process without direct engagements to such reporting. Exposing their national policies to a regular and open evaluation by the European Council – as it happens in the employment or, more recently, in inclusion policy – is not a way that is easily acceptable for each country, the sensitivity of many of them being particularly high in the field of education. This sector will have to develop its own particular techniques for applying OMC, which is, in fact, a general paradigm for all sectors. Doing this, the European employment strategy could be considered as a reference, but it is important to stress that the method does not have the same strong basis of legitimacy in education.

Another obstacle is that education misses the highly developed culture of follow-up and policy evaluation characterising the employment sector and some other areas. We have already stressed that when thinking about the potential role of OMC in the education sector it is not enough to reflect on how OMC could influence the sector, but one also has to think about the possible role of education in shaping the emerging new European governance model. As we saw earlier OMC is an importan t component of this model, and the form it will take, as well as the influence it will have depends much on how the different sectors apply it.

Our argument is that for various reasons the educational sector has a particular responsibility in this respect. For example, because of the nature of the new European governance model, focusing on mutual learning, communication and social experimentation – that is on human activities that are highly relevant for education. If society is conceived of as a learning entity, capable of continuously adapting its behaviour to the challenges of the environment, a social subsystem created for learning – which is what the education system is – cannot stay away from this process. A great part of the learning of the society is enhanced and coordinated by the education system. The learning models applied and developed by and within the education system have far-reaching impacts on the learning models applied by the whole society. If societies want to change themselves into more adaptive entities that are capable of learning from each other, to adapt the best practices of others and to use the evaluative feedbacks of others for the improvement of their own learning process, education has to contribute to the development of these capacities.

If international communication becomes a key factor of social development, the education sector cannot remain a closed entity. It is not surprising therefore that one of the three basic clusters of objectives of the common education policy presented in the "Detailed Work Programme" is "opening education and training systems to the wider world" which means both opening towards the domestic social and economic, and the broader European environment. Isolated national education systems rejecting external influences and guided exclusively by their own historical traditions could undermine the broader goal of developing societies into learning entities using international exchanges for their own development.

The way the education sector will react to the challenge of the emerging new European method of policy co-ordination depends much on how it conceives its own geopolitical dimensions. This is largely determined by how we see the content and the meaning of education policy. If this is a policy of running national systems of educational provision (a supply oriented approach), the potential benefits of the new process of European policy co-ordination based on mutual learning will remain limited. But if this is conceived in a broader way as a policy of human learning, the geopolitical dimensions appear immediately in a different light. Educational provision (school buildings, teacher workforce, curricula and textbooks) is national by nature, but learning as a general human activity is universal. For a policy of human learning, focusing on the individual learner – that is on exploring his/her potential or on making his/her learning more relevant and efficient – the national boundaries are less important. Since human learning can take place anywhere and anytime, for such a policy the national state as the natural territorial framework of education becomes less important. From this respect it is highly relevant, that the OECD scenarios on the future of schooling (presented at the ministerial level meeting of the Education Committee of this organisation in 2001) take the geopolitical dimension as one of the five key factors, which seem to determine the future of schooling (OECD, 2001).

The attitude of the actors of the educational sector towards OMC may depend also on the similarity of the community policy co-ordination techniques with those applied within the national context. If the regulation techniques of OMC – based on communicative pressures through measurable indicators and mutual learning through benchmarking – are similar to those that are applied domestically, the domestic players may feel more familiar with the community method. They may also think that the OMC method learnt at co mmunity level will help them manage their own national systems. Those internal professional groups who think that the community level policy co-ordination may modify the internal field of forces in their countries and give them new "opportunity windows" in domestic politics (Laffan et al., 2000) will probably support the building of strong OMC practice in education, while those who feel threatened by this development will probably reject this development.

What is the debate about?

When discussing the potential role of the European Union in the co-ordination of national education policies, the reaction of many people is characterised by anxieties regarding the shift in the balance of power between the Union and the member states. The discussion is often dominated by the question whether the national sovereignty of the member states is not infringed, and whether the community is not going too far in interfering into matters traditionally belonging to the jurisdiction of the nations. But the question of how to make education better is probably more urgent and pertinent than the question of how to safeguard national sovereignty in this field.

National sovereignty is an instrument to make things better and not an aim in itself: we are in favour of it, because we think that too much supranational power may do harm to the problem-solving capacity of societies, and not because we think it is an absolute goal. We simply cannot say: "we do not want to shift power from one actor to another one". We also have to have good arguments and good criteria for judging what is better. Problem-solving capacity is a key criterion. If policy is conceived as a collective problem-solving instrument (Laffan et al., 2000, Sabel, 2001), and not as an instrument to assert power, the question of who solves the problem becomes less important than the question whether the problem is solved or not. This has to redirect our thinking about the role of the community in education policy. If it can be proved that daily education policy problems (e.g. combating school failure, elaborating efficient quality assurance frameworks, making education systems more cost-effective or improving the linkages between education and the world of work) can be solved more efficiently and more easily with a stronger and more active community role than without it, then efforts to block the strengthening of community influence cannot be justified.

The way we see the problem-solving capacity of the different (sub-national, national and supranational) actors depends on the way we define education policy problems. The education policy agenda of the different actors may differ substantially: what is a policy problem for one may not be one for another. The different actors have a natural tendency to define the policy agenda – that is to select between problems and non-problems – according to their specific positions and interests.

The EU as a supranational actor itself also has a specific agenda: for instance it tends to focus on the aspects of the educational world that are the most accessible for its action (e.g. such less discovered areas as lifelong learning). This is reinforced also by the national actors who select between the themes that are relevant or non relevant for community action according to what they think could bring a "European added value". The "thematisation" of education policy by the EU, its focus on international competitiveness and the related threats and challenges for the last decades (Field, 1998) offer strong evidence of this.

The risks and dangers in shifting power from national to supranational actors are undeniable. Any supranational power is naturally inclined to reduce national and local diversity, which may lead not only to threatening some fundamental values, but also to the reduction of problem-solving capacities. An authority can always turn the power that was allocated to it for problem-solving into a power having an end in itself. But this can be prevented by various guarantees. If the role of the supranational actor is based on a problem-solving mission, that is if its power is defined and circumscribed so that it can be used only for this purpose, then everybody can gain. One way to do this is when instead of regulating power, analytical and communicative power is assigned to the supranational actor, so that its role becomes one of co-ordinating the action of national problem-solving rather than that of solving the problems directly. This is what the new Open Method of Co-ordination offers, and this can be applied in the education sector.

In the education sector one of the most debated elements of OMC is related to the use of indicators. The debate is sometimes coloured – as we have already stated before – by the confusion between evaluating policies and evaluating systems. Education is a sector characterized by a strong tradition and also by a sophisticated and highly elaborated technology of evaluation. Evaluating the achievements of pupils, schools or the entire system has been an important policy goal for many years in a number of education systems. International organisations like IEA have been doing such exercises for more than four decades. IEA surveys have long been used to evaluate national education systems, and others, like OECD, have also taken over the technology developed by this organisation.

When the European education ministers – including those of the candidate countries - decided at their Prague meeting in 1998 to develop European quality indicators they did not mean the quality of their policies but that of their systems. The communiqué of the meeting reported about the proposal of countries to "establish a small number of key indicators or benchmarks to assist national evaluation systems" (Partners in Europe, 1998).

When following this meeting the national delegates and the Commission started working on selecting and developing quality indicators it was evident that these indicators had to be "policy relevant", but it was less so, whether this meant "important for policy" or "to be used for evaluating policies". The title of the report emerging from this exercise was "European Report on Quality of School Education" (European Commission, 2000b), but some of the sixteen indicators selected had nothing to do with what we traditionally mean by the term "quality of school education". For example "participation in pre-primary education" or "educational expenditure per student" – which are two of the sixteen "quality indicators" – do not say much about the quality of education: the first can be taken as an equity and the second as an efficiency indicator. It is not clear why these indicators were presented as indicating the quality of education but one reason may be that while improving the quality of education came to be seen by ministers as a legitimate community goal, improving national policies would not yet have been seen as such.

In any case, the lack of distinction between the indicators of education and those of education policy led to much confusion. Education is much more exposed to this type of confusion than other sectors. In employment policy no one thinks that the main task of a minister of labour would be to improve the "quality of work" or the "quality of the labour market". In the field of social policy it is even less probable that the quality of policy is confused with the quality of social care services. A good pension policy cannot be measured through indicators measuring the "quality of pensions". Those who are worrying about the quality of education, and think that the community actions should aim at improving it, do not understand why such indicators as "parent participation" or "education and training of teachers" are used to measure quality.

On the other hand, those who want to check whether governments are doing a good job do not see why this should be done through looking at pupil achievements in mathematics. It may happen that the government of a country which has the worst maths test scores in international comparison is conceiving and implementing the most creative and most efficient policy to change this situation, while in another one, which has excellent test results, the government may not be doing anything to preserve or improve the standards.

The tendency in education to confuse the quality of policy with that of the service was not stopped even after Lisbon, when policy co-ordination became a legitimate term. However, the situation has clearly improved. In the document which sets down the common policy goals – the "concrete objectives" adopted by the Stockholm summit in 2001 – "quality of education" appears not just as one of the goals, but also as part of a broader cluster together with others, like efficiency or ICT access (Council of the European Union, 2001). Most of the indicators that were connected to the common objectives in the "Detailed Work Programme" by the Barcelona Summit in 2002 have nothing to do with the quality of education in the traditional sense of the world. For example the "percentage of adults with less than upper secondary education who have participated in any form of adult education or training, by age group" is not an indicator of the quality of education but it can be used well to measure the effectiveness of the policy of a government which introduced tax incentives to encourage adults to engage in learning.

It is essential that we make a clear distinction between the indicators of educational quality and the indicators of the quality of education policy when discussing the role of indicators in OMC in education. Certainly, this distinction is not always easy. Since maintaining and improving the quality of education is one of the most important goals of education policy, it is natural that people want to measure the effectiveness of education policy through measuring the quality of education. But doing this one has to keep in mind a number of factors.

The first is that, even if this is the most important one, quality is only one of the many policy goals. Other typical public policy goals – such as equity, financial efficiency, transparency, predictability or adaptability – are also important and the effectiveness of policy in achieving them has to be measured also. It is possible that, in certain circumstances, we expect that policy sacrifice quality for other goals, although it is much more typical that in such cases the content of quality is redefined.

This leads us to a second important factor. The notion of quality is a social construction: its content depends on conventions accepted by peoples. The question whether it is possible to create a common European quality notion in spite of the huge diversity in the national interpretations of this term came into the focus particularly strongly when in 1996 EU education ministers decided to launch a common project on quality evaluation, and – based on this – to adopt a Council Resolution. The project was accomplished by 1998 (European Commission, 1999), and three years later the Education Council and the European Parliament adopted a recommendation on quality evaluation in school education. The European recommendation is an excellent example that shows the contextual meaning of quality. When the Council and the Parliament recommended that every country should support or establish "transparent quality evaluation systems", they also added a list of concrete aims that such a system should serve (see below). The success of this exercise shows that it is possible to create a common European understanding of educational quality, although it has to be stressed that this process was focusing on the evaluation of schools and not on the evaluation of pupil achievements.

The aims of quality evaluation systems as recommended by the Education Council and the European Parliament

• To secure quality education, whilst promoting social inclusion, and equal opportunities for girls and boys
• to safeguard quality of school education as a basis for lifelong learning
• to encourage school self-evaluation as a method of creating learning and improving schools, within a balanced framework of school self-evaluation and any external evaluations
• to use techniques aimed at improving quality as a means of adapting more successfully to the requirements of a world in rapid and constant change
• to clarify the purpose and the conditions for school self-evaluation
• and to ensure that the approach to self-evaluation is consistent with other forms of regulation
• to develop external evaluation in order to provide methodological support for school self-evaluation and to provide an outside view of the school encouraging a process of continuous improvement and taking care that this is not restricted to purely administrative checks.

A third factor to be considered is that it is very difficult to establish casual linkages between measurable quality changes in education and concrete policy measures. Following the political transformation the quality of education deteriorated in most post-communist countries (The World Bank, 2001), but no one could establish what the role of the overall economic and social crisis, and that of the sectoral policy of the governments was in this. If the economy collapses and the financial resources for paying teacher salaries and heating schools disappear, the quality of education will deteriorate even if the quality of the education policy of the government is the highest possible. The impact of policy on quality has to be evaluated in a very broad context of many variables. Furthermore, this impact has to be evaluated on a long-term basis. It may happen, for instance, that the government of a society that is not satisfied with the quality of its education system introduces a radical decentralisation policy, giving more autonomy to schools and their clientele to diagnose their own difficulties and to define their own educational goals. Such policies may result in the deterioration of quality in the short term, while local and institutional actors learn how to use their new autonomy. Evaluators of education policy using short-term measurement of quality indicators may come to the conclusion in such a country that the government should stop its policy of decentralisation, and the opportunity to improve quality on the longer term would be missed.

Finally, there is a fourth factor that has to be kept in mind. Even if one accepts that maintaining and improving the quality of education is the first and most important goal of education policy, even if there is a commonly accepted understanding of what quality means, and even if quality changes can be firmly linked to concrete policy changes, still measuring educational quality cannot be used directly to measure the quality of education policy. As we have already stated, countries with bad educational quality scores may lead excellent policies and, therefore, need a positive feedback from the international community, and other countries with excellent educational quality scores may need a warning signal. Similarly to what happens in many countries when it comes to the evaluation of schools through test scores, the notion of "added value" has to be introduced here. A government which is determined to improve the measurable quality of its education system, or to make schools produce better results than one would expect on the basis of its social and economic conditions, probably applies a better policy than another one, which cannot do this, even if the measurable achievement of its system is lower.

Keeping all these factors in mind the current discussion on the indicators of the Detailed Work Programme may be brought into a new light. If the distinction between evaluating national education systems and evaluating national education policies is made, it is also possible to distinguish between indicators that are good for giving indications on the effectiveness of government policies and those that give messages on the effectiveness of education systems. It may happen that an indicator, which the educational community refuses as one measuring the quality of education, becomes acceptable if it is understood that it measures policy effectiveness.

However, related to this, one more factor has to be underlined: indicators in policy evaluation are used in a particular way, which is different from the way they are used in academic discussions.

Policy evaluation is an extremely complex activity, which is different from research, although it uses similar techniques. It has, for instance, not only a stronger utilitarian aspect, but it is also more strongly linked with judgments, actions, role conflicts and publicity (Weiss, 1988). The function of using indicators in this activity is not only to assure the reliability of the evaluative statements in the scientific sense of the word, but also to rationalise the political communication.

Indicators are instruments that help the participants of political discussion to build up common references, and to avoid interest-led or emotional based actions. Political communication is by nature loaded with non-rational elements: people and societies prefer solutions not only because they are effective but also because they serve their interests. This is one of the reasons why it is important that they agree upon the use of some well-defined indicators. OMC as an instrument of political communication within the European community naturally uses indicators in the way they are used in policy evaluation as opposed to academic research. Our judgement about specific indicators cannot be done exclusively on the basis of their capacity to measure different social processes objectively. Their potential role in the community level political communication also has to be judged.

OMC, as defined earlier, is a form of mutual policy learning, the function of which is more than just giving a feedback to national governments whether they are doing a good job or not. It aims at developing the policy making and policy problem-solving capacities of these governments through meaningful comparisons and through bringing them into a continuous self-evaluation process. The selection and the definition of the indicators that are used in this process have to have sound scientific foundations, but this is not enough. It may happen that a scientifically well-founded indicator blocks political communication, while another one, which is the object of some scientific objections enhances it. This is why, as certain indicators show, serious differences may appear between the views of the researchers who are invited to take part in the indicator development process (who naturally do not want to make concessions to their academic standards) and the Commission, whose agenda is not an academic one (see, for example, Demeuse & Blondin, 2001).

It is important to note that the development of indicators for OMC in the educational sector was not left exclusively to the actors of this sector. While the delegates of the national education ministries were working on the elaboration of new lifelong learning indicators under the co-ordination of the Educational Directorate of the European Commission, and produced a report presented to the ministers in summer 2002 in Bratislava (European Commission, 2002), another higher level working group was also engaged in this activity. Parallel with the Lisbon Summit Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Union set up an interdisciplinary task force with the aim of defining and selecting the indicators that make possible the evaluation of lifelong learning policies in the framework of the employment policy co-ordination process (see below). A particular mission of this task force was to shift data collection and analysis from the "provider" to the "consumer" that is to the individual learner using the outcomes of, for instance, labour market surveys, household panels or adult literacy surveys.

Task Force on Measuring Lifelong Learning – TFMLL "In February 2000, the European Commission created a Task Force on measuring lifelong learning (TFMLLL). Representatives from different Directorates General (Education and Culture, Employment and Social Affairs, Research, Eurostat), from five members states (Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Finland, UK), from the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP), the European Unit of the Eurydice network of Ministries of Education, the Advisory Committee on Statistics in the Economic and Social Spheres (CEIES), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), the International Labour Office (ILO) as well as two experts in the field from Denmark and Switzerland (see list at the end of the document) have participated in the work of the TF. The ultimate goal for Eurostat is to create an integrated European Statistical Information System on education and learning. This should make it possible to combine information coming from different sources so as to shed light on different aspects of LLL. This statistical information should also be complemented by contextual information."

(Source: Statistical Office of the European Communities, 2001)

The fact that the creation of educational indicators is being done not only by commissions of experts delegated by the national education ministries and led by the Educational Directorate of the European Commission, but also within this higher level Task Force whose aims is to create "an integrated European Statistical Information System on education and learning" is particularly important. It shows that not only the co-ordination of national education and training policies is worked out in great part in the framework of the employment and social policy co-ordination process, but also its technical instruments are developed partly there. It also bears a warning: the discussion of educational experts on indicators should not be isolated from discussions on the same topic elsewhere.

The perspective of the new member countries

This paper is about the European co-ordination of national education policies from the perspective of the new member countries. The first question to be raised in this perspective is whether there is any particular point of view that is relevant especially for this group of countries. The answer is definitely yes. Thirteen years ago most of these countries belonged to the former Soviet bloc. The greatest reward which political transformation brought to them was national independence and the opportunity to recreate their own national culture on the basis of historical traditions. Education played a key role in this process. Although their education systems had to face a number of challenges that are common with other countries – like those related with scarce resources, youth unemployment, social discrimination and exclusion, financial inefficiency or weaknesses of management and administration – education policy was, in most of them, subordinated to the general task of nation-building and cultural renewal. These policy objectives are fully meaningful only in the national context and require the strengthening of sovereignty. Although the post-communist countries that belonged to the Council of Mutual Economic Aid (COMECON) had experienced some kind of supranational policy co-ordination, this was seen as a repugnant part of the communist past and the potential benefits of it were rapidly forgotten.

However, international policy advice and evaluation have not disappeared after the political changes. Some international organisations, especially the World Bank, played a very active role in most of the post-communist countries in devising public policy reforms, including those directed to the education sector. World Bank loans, aiming at implementing policies that were designed in co-operation between national administrators and international experts representing the Bank's views on education, were used in such key areas as vocational training and higher education reforms, the development of national evaluation and assessment systems or administrative decentralisation.

Although policy negotiations between the national ministries and the World Bank as a global development agency providing financial resources for reforms was much more directive than anything one could imagine in the framework of OMC, this could be seen as provisional and it was expected that national sovereignty will be fully restored when the reforms financed from international loans were over. The same is true for the various bilateral aid programs: these had a limited scope and were not felt to be an intrusion into the realm of sovereignty.

The reaction of the new member countries to the use of OMC in the education sector will certainly be determined by their different former international experiences. For instance, those who became members of the OECD in the nineties have already experienced being exposed to international scrutiny. Their ministers have been accustomed not only to see the evaluation of their education policies by international expert panels or to read publications containing evaluation of their systems based on the use of international indicators, but also to be exposed to the "friendly criticisms", which is not alien to this organisation.

When the candidate countries submitted their applications for membership to the European Union they expected that education, according to article of the Maastricht Treaty, would remain a fully national affair. However, in the second half of the nineties, when they began to use the resources of the EU funded PHARE programme to support national human resource development, they quickly realised that the community did not provide support without exercising a strong control over the way it was used. They also could see what kind of negotiations had preceded the allocation of community structural funds for education and training reforms within the Union, in the case of the less developed member countries, like Ireland, Portugal, Greece or Spain. No doubt, this was much more visible for the social, labour and territorial development administrations that liased directly with those corresponding directorates of the Commission that supervise the use of EU structural funds than for educational administrators.

In the current discourse about OMC in education not much reference is made to the structural policy of the EU. However, as demonstrated above, some parts of the sectoral policy are already co-ordinated at community level within the framework of the community strategy for employment and social affairs, and a great part of the European Social Fund (ESF) is already being used to support the national implementation of these common policies. An increasing portion of this fund is now being used to finance the lifelong learning objectives of the common employment strategy. In some Central and Eastern European countries education ministers have understood this and set up special units for preparing the reception of ESF money for education sector reforms. They are also encouraging their experts to build conceptual linkages between the traditional lines of national education policy and the modern European concept of lifelong learning. The same ministers are also sending their representatives to the commissions in Brussels who are working on the follow-up of the "Detailed Work Programme" adopted in Barcelona in 2002.

These two lines of actions – one related to overall structural policy and the other related to education specific OMC – cannot remain entirely separated. They will certainly be connected, and will either reinforce one another by creating productive synergies or will, on the contrary, enter into competition. But whichever of these two scenarios is realised, OMC in education and OMC in other sectors will have an impact on each other. If, for instance, the expert commission working on teacher competencies (that is on one of the major topics of the first objective of the "Detailed Work Programme") arrives at a European agreement on what key competencies teachers in Europe should possess, this certainly will have an influence on all other potential European programmes having teacher training components, even if these are part of a general human resource development programme financed from ESF.

The education ministries of the new member countries will soon realise that if the education sector is capable of formulating strong common European objectives, in harmony with the broader goals of overall social and economic development, this will increase the probability for this sector to acquire community structural support for education reforms. They will experience that the more education becomes a common European affair, the more this sector can benefit from EU structural support. This is one of the reasons why the new member countries, which will all be entitled to get support from the structural funds, will probably move from the position of defending national sovereignty to that of supporting greater European cohesion. Since common European policy will influence education and training through structural measures, it is in the interest of these countries that this be done as directly as possible through the channels of a common education policy and not through those employment or social policies which are beyond their control.

This may be the most important factor determining the position of these countries when it comes to the question whether national educational policies should be coordinated at European level or not through a strong OMC process that is targeted specifically to education.

The emergence of a common European education policy is particularly welcome in the new member countries by reformers who want to modernise their educational system, and who are concerned about such non-conventional policy themes as those that appear in the "Detailed Work Programme". They might be delighted by the perspective of peer groups, consisting of international experts, coming to their countries and raising questions about key competencies, quality evaluation, inclusive education or the transformation of schools into "multi-purpose local learning centres accessible to all" (European Council, 2000).

They may even be happy with the use of international indicators that demonstrate that their country is lagging behind others, since they may use these comparisons as efficient arguments in their national policy debates.

However, the opposite may also appear: the feeling of shame by certain national actors looking at tables containing country rank lists and realising the weak "achievement" of their nation may turn against international comparisons and benchmarking.

Policy shaping through communication and mutual learning may also raise problems in some policy circles of the new member countries. Those who were accustomed for decades to live in a system of "democratic centralism", may have difficulties to familiarize with the new mechanisms of "democratic experimentalism" represented by OMC. Some time may be needed to learn how communication and learning can be used as powerful policy regulation instruments.

During the nineties most of the new member countries underwent a fundamental social and political transformation process, and even though they are now stable democracies, their political systems may still be exposed to dramatic shocks following parliamentary elections. This can also shake the education sector and may endanger the implementation of longer-term policies. Political observers in these countries may be happy to see the emergence of a common European educational policy and that of the new "soft instruments" for the enforcement of this policy, because this can help the establishment of longer-term policy planning and higher-level institutional stability at national level. The fact that the community uses mainly symbolic tools, such as setting benchmarks, enhancing communication and mutual learning or giving expert feedback, will probably erase much of the still existing fears from community intrusion into national affairs, and positive expectations may become stronger. Some national actors may salute the formulation of common European educational policy goals because this helps them persuade their hesitating policy-makers to put important but neglected issues on the policy agenda. Financial leniency or openness to the labour market, often rejected by significant national professional educational pressure groups, may be among these issues.

References