Abstract:

The assessment of the progress of education systems over time is at the top of the agenda of governments and educational authorities worldwide. This requires the collection of outcome indicators for different educational stages and resources/funding available. Frontier methods enable us to obtain an overall picture of the efficiency and effectiveness of educational systems. The European Commission monitors the performance of education systems in Member States according to the strategic framework 'Education and Training 2020' (ET2020). However, studies dedicated to the assessment of the performance of education systems at country level based on panel data are very scarce. The framework used to evaluate European education systems is based on constructing a composite indicator adopting a ``benefit-of-the-doubt´´ approach. The evaluation of performance change over time is done using a global circular Malmquist index. The index is estimated for triennial periods within the time window 2009-2018 to understand trends in more detail for 29 European countries analysing the ET2020 indicators. Sigma and beta convergence of EU countries are also explored using non-parametric frontier techniques. The results revealed a trend of improvement in the performance of education systems in most European countries during the analysed period. Although most European countries moved closer to the European best practice frontier over time, as confirmed by the values of sigma-convergence, a few countries are still lagging considerably below their peers, as revealed by the existence of divergence in beta. Detailed results presented at the conference are published in [1].

Acknowledgements. This research is funded by the European Social Fund according to the activity ‘Improvement of researchers’ qualification by implementing world-class R&D projects’ of Measure No. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712. The project DOTSUT-39 (09.3.3-LMT-K-712-01-0018) / LSS-250000-57.

References:
[1] A.S. Camanho, D. Stumbriene, F. Barbosa, A. Jakaitiene. The assessment of performance trends and convergence in education and training systems of European countries. European Journal of Operational Research. 2023 Feb 16;305(1):356-72.

Keywords:

Trend, education systems, convergence, composite indicator, Malmquist index.