LEGAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF THE IQMS
4.10 Education Policy in the European Union
The European Union has established a Council to deal exclusively with matters relating to education and who report directly to the European Parliament to whom motions are presented for adoption.
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The council establishes sub committees who establish commissions which report to Council who are then answerable to parliament. Many commissions relating to the improvement of the quality of teacher education in Europe have been established, some of which are referred to in the following section.
The European Education Commission works closely with other organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and from time to time presents joint reports with this body. The Commission also uses information gathered by the OECD, such as its triennial PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment surveys and relies on reports presented by the OECD such as the report “Teachers Matter: Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers”
(2005).
Europe as a developed region is experiencing a growing awareness that the quality of the teacher is a key element in raising the quality of education. In their fast changing technologically based society it is necessary that teachers engage in constant development: meeting needs and challenges in society and translating those needs to adequate learning strategies and activities for pupils and students.
The teachers are therefore required to be agents of change – a role which places a heavy responsibility on teachers with respect to their professional quality and performance and requires them to take responsibility for their own continuous professional development.
Governments within the European Union have therefore decided that in order to promote teacher development as a means to quality education, the development of an explicit teacher policy is necessary. This awareness has led to a wide variety of initiatives both on a national level and on an international/European level focusing on the description and use of explicit indicators for teacher quality.
These initiatives include:
- Explicit indicators for teacher quality being developed and implemented, with competences, standards, key qualifications or learning goals being specified.
- One of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) recommendations in ‘Teachers matters’ aims at defining clear teacher profiles.
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The European Commission has developed a common European framework for teacher competences and qualifications and started a peer learning cluster on teacher and trainer quality. Various Council sittings of member states have adopted a number of resolutions some of which include the following:
The Lisbon European Council in March 2000 stressed that people are Europe’s main asset and that
“investing in people … will be crucial both to Europe's place in the knowledge economy and for ensuring that the emergence of this new economy does not compound the existing social problems."
The Barcelona Council in March 2002 adopted concrete objectives for improving the education and training systems for Member States, including improving the professional development and training for teachers and trainers.
In 2006, The EU Education Council recognised that the critical elements in expanding the Union’s competitive level within the global market was the reform of the education and training systems, turning them into high performing, efficient and fair instruments which would assist them to achieve the long term goal of being market leaders. (EU Education Council;2006)
The same Council also agreed that progress has been insufficient towards goals such as reducing the number of early school leavers, expanding the share of young people who finish upper-secondary school, or reducing the number of 15-year-olds with poor reading skills.
The findings of the commission place a firm responsibility on teachers to rectify the situation. It states that:
“The quality of teaching is one key factor in determining whether the European Union can increase its competitiveness in the globalised world. Research shows that teacher quality is significantly and positively correlated with pupil attainment. The quality of teaching is one key factor in determining whether the European Union can increase its competitiveness in the globalised world.
Research shows that teacher quality is significantly and positively correlated with pupil attainment and that it is the most important within-school aspect explaining student performance (its effects are much larger than the effects of school organisation, leadership or financial conditions). Furthermore, other studies have found positive relationships between in-
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service teacher training and student achievement and ‘suggest that an in-service training program … raised children's achievement …(and) suggest that teacher training may provide a less costly means of increasing test scores than reducing class size or adding school hours”.
(EU Education Council;2006)
The significance of the finding here is that European countries recognise the importance of the teacher as a critical factor in the delivery of quality education and identify this as a key element in their competitiveness in the globalised world.
In order to be able to identify whether teaching is effective or not, these countries necessarily need to put effective performance management and evaluation/development policies and systems into place as briefly explored in the following section.
4.10.1 Teacher development in the European Union
The European Union (EU) members agree that high-quality teaching is a prerequisite for high-quality education and training, which is in turn a powerful determinant of Europe’s long-term competitiveness and capacity to create more jobs and growth. They also agree that the EU requires a highly-educated workforce to face up to the pressures of the 21st century.
Two important elements in the process of performance management in the education sector are crucial in the teacher development process and need to be balanced in order to be most effective. These two are:
- Governmental responsibility for safeguarding the quality of teachers and;
- The professional responsibility of teachers for their own personal and professional quality and development.
According to a report released by the Commission of the EU in Brussels, August 2007, the following aspects in teacher quality assessment need to be addressed:
- Balance between stakeholders – addressing each role players needs
- Congruency between professional attributes expected of teachers and the relevant national or EU policies reflecting those attributes and values
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- Balance between the governmental responsibility for setting of teaching standards and the necessity to create ownership and professional autonomy for teachers
- How to include aspects of teacher quality which are difficult to measure such as personality, personal traits etc.