Magazine / Culture / School in Europe / Debate | 19/12/2007

What kind of schools does Europe need?

International studies of educational achievement like Pisa or Pirls have made it possible to compare the performance of school pupils all over Europe. This has not only fanned rivalry about who has the best education system but also raised fundamental questions.

French children start pre-school – the école maternelle – at the age of three, English children go to primary school at the age of five. German children are six when they start school, while the Poles wait until they are seven. In Finland everyone is taught together up to the age of seventeen, while in Austria children are sent to different types of schools immediately after completing primary school at the age of ten.

Photo: Photocase

The EU has twenty-seven member-states and even more different kinds of school system. What is taught and how is historically determined and in some countries even varies considerably from one part of the country to another – in Germany, for example, where education comes under the jurisdiction of the federal states or Länder; or in Britain, where the local education authorities are given a lot of leeway to decide what happens in schools.

Education for a global labour market

Schools should prepare their pupils for life, including for a labour market that ceased to be a purely national one some time ago. People who go to school in one country may well later work in another. In order to put the principle of "freedom of movement" into practice in the field of education, Europe's universities have just standardised their degrees. Should there be a Bologna process (as this was called) for schools as well, as Erich Witzmann advocated in the Austrian Die Presse on 4. December 2007? And if so, which school system should be used as a benchmark?

International studies of educational achievement have led to rivalry between countries over who has the best school system, sparking off an exemplary European debate. The most well known of these studies is the Pisa study conducted by the OECD, in which the performance of fifteen-year-olds in three key areas of competence – reading comprehension, mathematics and science – is tested every three years, with the focus on a different area each time. The reading test Pirls looks at reading ability and enjoyment of reading among children in their final year at primary school.

Germany: uncertainty following the Pisa shock

The response to these studies has varied considerably between European countries. In many, people began comparing school systems and wondering what their neighbours were doing better. In France, however, the first Pisa findings were ignored when they were published six years ago. This could change with the latest study, Catherine Rollot and Marie de Vergès predicted in Le Monde on 4 December 2007. The primary school reading study also received more attention this year than previously.

In Germany, by contrast, the first Pisa shock of 2001, in which Germany scored below average, caused a media sensation. The Germans began to compare their education system with that of Finland, which came out top of the league table, and to challenge their three-tier school system of Gymnasium (grammar school), Realschule (vocational secondary school) and Hauptschule (secondary modern) for the first time. There were demands for more all-day schools, and school reforms were launched.

This year, on the other hand, when German pupils for the first time moved up from the middle to the top group in science, commentators began to think out loud about "leaving Pisa". "One wonders what education policy has to gain from messing around with league tables every three years," Torsten Harmsen wrote in the Berliner Zeitung on 3 December 2007.

Poland: the new Pisa model country

In Eastern Europe the trend seems to be going in two different directions. Estonia landed fifth place in science in this year's Pisa study. And Poland has also improved its position since the 1999 school reform. In the Pisa study's test of the reading ability of fifteen-year-olds, Poland has moved from a below-average position into the top group.

The Polish system is now being praised as a model by other countries, for in Poland everyone is taught together at the Gimnazjum until the age of sixteen. Austria, which divides its pupils from an early age, could only learn from the Polish example, Alexandra Föderl-Schmidt declared in the Austrian Standard of 5 December 2007: "The Finnish model is well known, now we should study the Polish way – and copy it wherever that makes sense."

The German Pisa coordinator Andreas Schleicher had already praised the school system of the EU newcomer three years ago and recommended that Germany use it as a model for its education policy.

Romanian and Bulgarian teachers paid a pittance

School pupils in Bulgaria and Romania have rather different problems. No-one was surprised when they ended up at the bottom of the Pisa table. School buildings are in a state of disrepair, and essential equipment is lacking. In Romania the education budget was cut again recently. Melania Mandas Vergu considered on 20 November 2007 what could have been bought with the money: "Each school would have been able to buy new blackboards, lockers for sports equipment, maps and materials for chemistry and physics lessons, microscopes, CDs or other necessary materials. But these little things – which account for the quality of lessons in other European countries – are dismissed as frivolities and luxuries here in Romania."

Bulgarian pupils had four weeks of enforced holidays at the beginning of the last school year because the teachers were on strike. They were demanding that their wages be doubled from the present 170 euros, a sum it is impossible to live on in Bulgaria. Georgi Gospodinov voiced support for the teachers' demands in the Bulgarian newspaper Dnevnik on 12 October 2007: "At a time when governments all over the world are investing in knowledge, the Bulgarian state is keeping its teachers at arm's length."

Equal opportunities

In many countries people are asking the fundamental question of how fair their school system is. Equal opportunities is a fundamental European value – yet there are still big discrepancies in Europe's schools. Children from immigrant families have worse chances at school almost everywhere in Europe. In Germany and Austria, for example, social background has a decisive effect on a child's school career, as Tanjev Schulz commented in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 4 December 2007: "The greatest flaw is still the major difference in achievement between good and bad pupils and the strong link between success at school and social background."

Finland, the leader of the Pisa league table, has different conditions to start with. It is a small country and ethnically relatively homogenous. Writing in Hufvudstadsbladet on 5 December 2007, Johanna Westman said Finland should not be complacent about its good showing. She wondered what would happen if immigration rose to the levels of Finland's Scandinavian neighbours Sweden and Denmark. "If primary schools are unprepared, Finland's performance could suffer dramatically," she wrote.

Internationalisation

These commentaries show how difficult it is to draw comparisons between countries as different as Germany and Finland. For this reason the findings of comparative studies are increasingly being challenged. The British newspaper The Guardian, for example, warned on 6 December 2007 against seeing the results of such studies in absolute terms: "The only definitive league tables are in sports, not science."

And even the "success models” of one country cannot be simply transferred to another, as the discussions about non-denominational schools in Germany and Austria but also in Britain show. The different educational traditions in Europe mean that any "harmonisation” of European education systems will remain wishful thinking. Nevertheless, schools in other countries have become an important reference point in national debates over education.

These international comparative studies have provided an important impetus for the internationalisation of education policy. "Even if a country wanted to it could no longer escape international competition – or the Pisa," the Bremen political scientists Kerstin Martens and Stephan Leibfried wrote in Die Zeit on 30 November 2007. "The times of nation state-oriented policy are coming to an end, and no one is more aware of this than the closely interwoven EU member states."

Nina Diezemann

Nina Diezemann was an editor of euro|topics. She studied German philology and history, graduated from the Deutsche Journalistenschule in Munich, and then worked as a ...
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