Competencies for Today- Improving education and training systems to boost competitiveness in ECA

1. Competencies for Today- Improving education and training systems to boost competitiveness in ECA Forthcoming regional flagship report Early draft : June 7, 2009 Commments welcome but please don’t circulate as yet!

2. Outline of the presentation • Do ECA’s education and training systems meet the needs of the region’s economies? • If not, how do they need to change? • Diverse region, 4 country sub-groupings- • New member states (EU-11) • South East Europe • Middle-income CIS • Low-income CIS • Evidence is still being assembled and story-line tentative….

3. ECA’s education and training systems – many core strengths • High primary and secondary enrollment rates (especially relative to GDP) • Relatively equal access at least till upper secondary • Mature “systems”

4. ECA Education and training systems –responsive to the growing demand for tertiary education

5. But changing labor markets are challenging education and training systems • Growing demand for skills – more educated but also better educated workers • Greater unpredictability in course of future demand – adaptable workers

6. ECA’s workers are in need of multi-faceted competencies

7. ECA education systems do poorly on delivering these competencies – lower secondary • Learning outcomes of 15-year olds far behind OECD • Systems are strong on content but weak on building cognitive skills such as problem solving Source: PISA 2000-2006

8. Functional illiteracy is a common problem for the region’s 15- year olds Source: PISA 2006

9. Beyond lower secondary many worrying signals on quality • Large share of upper secondary students in unreformed VET streams • Polish evidence points to deteriorating skills of 16- and 17-year olds who go to VET • Massive expansion of tertiary through entry of private providers while quality assurance system is still being built. • Little or no information (e.g. tracer studies) on which students, parents can base choice • Few high quality universities in international rankings

10. Quality of quality assurance in tertiary education is weak

11. Adult training systems are of varying importance across ECA

12. Access to adult training (continuous vocational education) is highly uneven. Quality unknown. Source: World Bank-EBRD Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys, 2005-9

13. Outline of the presentation • Do ECA’s education and training systems meet the needs of the region’s economies? • No! • ECA’s education and training systems are very good at enrolling and graduating most of their young people… • …but many of these graduates don’t have the competencies demanded by today’s labor markets • Adult training opportunities uneven • If not, how do they need to change?

14. ECA education and training systems face 3 constraints in meeting labor market challenges • Lack of commonly agreed goal between Ministry of Education and providers (local authorities, schools, private employers) • Constrained decision making driven by little autonomy and inflexible financing • Poor accountability framework

15. Constraints vary by sub-sector - examples

16. Two consequences of these constraints in primary and secondary education • Available resources have increasingly become poorly utilized, leaving very little room to innovate and respond to new challenges. • The teaching career – the most important input in the education sector – has become a part-time, poorly paid, low-prestige job.

17. Resources are increasingly used to finance more teachers relative to students Cheaper More expensive Source: World Bank Edstats and ECA Country Data

18. Too many teachers has meant part-time work, low pay, and a growing wage-gap Teacher salaries as a ratio of average economy-wide salaries (1999 and 2006) Source: Author’s based on OECD 2008, Eurostat and CIS Statistical Committee

19. As a result teaching has ceased to be an attractive profession • Marked ageing of the profession • Marked feminization of the profession • New teachers are far from being amongst the highest performing high school graduates • Failure of the profession to renew itself

20. More sophisticated partnerships are needed if ECA education and training systems are to meet labor market challenges Ministries of Education and Ministries of Labor and Training will need to • leverage the knowledge, ingenuity and entrepreneurship of everyone involved in providing education and training • create new and different partnerships with providers (public and private), industry representatives, teachers unions, other ministries, and students and their parents.

21. Three intrinsically linked instruments to steer outcomes

22. More details on instruments • Standards and quality assurance • Information • Choice • Consequences • Decision making authority • Flexibility to innovate • Output and outcome oriented funding • Incentives for efficiency, innovation

23. The challenge is to balance them

24. Too much control impedes innovation The situation in primary and secondary!

25. Conversely autonomy without accountability can be problematic as well The situation with the private tertiary sector!

26. Defining the goal matters…. If the objective is to get providers to act in a financially responsible way then balance of instruments may be okay….

27. But if objective is to get providers to deliver higher quality education efficiently? No room for innovation and experiment and adapting to local circumstances

28. Want more information on how this framework illuminates policy choices in the three sectors? http://go.worldbank.org/WGT3SDCRJ0

29. Thank you!