This report summarises the outcomes of the first (micro) phase of the thematic country reviews (TCRs) on upskilling pathways in France, which reflect the points of view of both the beneficiaries of the outreach and guidance schemes and services under investigation, and the professionals involved in their implementation. The TCR on upskilling…

This paper aims to survey the current landscape of education policy evaluation across OECD countries and economies by examining recent trends and contextual factors that can promote more robust education policy evaluation, as well as identifying key challenges. It takes a view of policy evaluation as an activity that takes place throughout the…

This report projects Northern Ireland's skills base through to 2030 and compares this to a number of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The report shows that on current trends Northern Ireland will continue to lag many other countries on a number of measures of learning and skills in 2030. These shortfalls can…

Purpose: This article focuses on recent developments in the domain of civic education in the French education system, the new programme on "Enseignement moral et civique" (EMC), and the debate about the relevance of the basic values of the Republic which came up after the terror attacks in January 2015. Method: The study is based on a…

This paper examines the expansive-restrictive continuum of apprenticeship learning in the context of different education and training systems. It compares the English state-funded apprenticeship programme for young people with the Finnish and the French programmes with a specific focus on access to learning through the programmes. These three…

This handbook, first published in 2014, aims at helping policy makers and social partners understand some of the ways in which learning in the workplace can be encouraged and how its quality can be improved. It is also intended to help them understand some of the ways that such learning can be organised in a structured manner so that it benefits…

The author analyzes the growth and nature of internal evaluation from the 1960s to the present and suggests that internal evaluation has been on the increase because of its perceived importance. Although the 1960s were characterized by a rich intellectual development of evaluation theory and practice, the fiscal conservatism of the 1980s ushered…

Smaller universities may produce research which is on a par with larger, elite establishments. This is confirmed by a recently developed mathematical model, supported by data from British and French higher education research-evaluation exercises. The detailed nature of the UK system, in particular, allows quantification of the notion of critical…

Environment and sustainable development show how policies are becoming ever more complex and ambiguous. This trend calls for new evaluation approaches. They need to be more clearly focused on specific, explicit concerns. They must be driven by a strategic concept of use to overcome the vulnerability to manipulation of many integrative, essentially…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to question the appropriateness of a proposal for a new European Qualifications Framework. The framework has three perspectives: historical; analytical; and national. Design/methodology/approach: The approaches are diverse since the first insists on the institutional and decision-making processes at European…

The research literature on parenting support typically focuses on English-speaking countries, such as England, the United States and Australia. This article draws on a review, commissioned by the English government, which examined policies and services to support parenting in five European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the…

We provide an assessment of the French ZEP (Zones d'Education Prioritaire), a program started in 1982 that channels additional resources to schools in disadvantaged areas and encourages the development of new teaching projects. Focusing on middle-schools, we first evaluate the impact of the ZEP status on resources, their utilization (teacher…

Reports on how a centralized curriculum is created and disseminated in France, and what those at the receiving end think about the system. (Editor)

In both Britain and France, evaluation has been seen as one element of national strategies to internationalise higher education (HE), with the spread of evaluation indicating policy convergence. However, there are dangers in describing the cross-national adoption of evaluation as an instance of policy transfer in higher education. This article…

This article presents seven reports on the interviews about reception and use of international indicators among respondents from Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain and United Kingdom. The first report is based on interviews with 5 respondents occupied with different aspects of the macro level of the Flemish educational system.…