Regional Conference: Policy development and monitoring for quality and equity in education | ERI SEE

The ERI SEE Regional conference “Policy development and monitoring for quality and equity in education” was held from 6-7 December 2011 in Belgrade, Serbia.

The Conference gathered the representatives of the ministries responsible for education, the representatives from the state institutions in charge of education development, assessments and statistics, the representatives from the teacher associations and teacher/education faculties, the representatives of the education research community as well as the representatives of international organizations and non-governmental organizations. In addition to the local participants from Serbia, the Conference gathered the participants from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Moldova as well as the participants from the Delegation of the European Union to the Republic of Serbia, European Training Foundation – ETF, KulturKontakt Austria, World Bank, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Fund for an Open Society.

One of the main goals of ERI SEE is to initiate regional exchange of policies and practices in the area of equity and access to education as well to jointly work on increase of quality of outcomes of the educational systems in the region. This policy challenge is especially difficult in the context of transitional societies of Southeast Europe.

While the countries of the South East Europe share the experience of the communism rule and some of the challenges of the transition process, they also differ greatly between each other and have since the 1990’s had vastly different experiences. Nevertheless, all of the countries have recognized education as one of the key elements of change.

Ambitious modernization agendas for education have been emerging across the region; however they have often been hindered by ambiguous legislation, resistance from conservative education and academic communities, or political turmoil. While the countries in South Eastern Europe meet particular challenges of transition societies, countries in “the West” have also not always met national or European modernization agendas in education. As Pavel Zgaga points out “Like all European states, countries in the region need ‘an increased momentum and commitment beyond 2010’. “

The leading principles of the conference was firstly that issues of equity and quality of education have to be addressed having in mind the overall education systems and not separately for each level of education. In fact, the main policy challenges for quality and equity in education represent transitions between levels of education, and therefore it is important to have holistic approach in development of educational policies and strategies. The second leading principle was that processes of policy development, policy implementation and especially policy monitoring and evaluation have to be based on evidence and that robust evidence base for education policy needs to be developed and utilised. The importance of these principles in the context of the Southeast Europe and the educational systems became even higher in the process or European integrations.

The main topics of the conference were:

• evidence based policy development for quality and equity in education as well as
• development of evidence based monitoring and evaluation approaches in education.

The outcome of the conference was to set joint regional priorities and focal areas for intermediate policy intervention as well to discuss the possibility of future regional cooperation in area (joint initiatives, projects etc.)

The conference was organized by the Centre for Education Policy acting as the interim Secretariat of ERI SEE.

• Agenda
• List of participants
• General Report