Education systems use a range of tools and indicators based on demographic, administrative and contextual data to monitor, evaluate and ensure quality. Data on student learning outcomes are widely available through national standardised assessments. International benchmarking, specific reviews and stakeholder and longitudinal surveys are also increasingly common. Most countries have developed comprehensive national indicator frameworks and report statistics and indicators in annual publications.
Education evaluation and quality assurance
The growing demands for quality and equity in education has led many countries to introduce a range of measures to evaluate students, teachers, school leaders, schools and education systems. These tools are essential to understand how well students are learning and to improve school management, leadership and teaching practices.
Key messages
Some quality-assurance and improvement arrangements, such as internal evaluations, systematic reporting of data, and written specifications of the school’s curricular profile and educational goals are widely used in almost all education systems. There are however large differences across education systems in the prevalence of other quality-assurance mechanisms. These include seeking written feedback from students, teacher mentoring, and regular consultations with experts.
The heightened emphasis of evaluation and quality assurance in education policy has led to the creation of dedicated agencies, including national monitoring and quality development agencies, national evaluation institutes, specialised research institutes, or regional school review boards. An important aspect for these agencies is to ensure adequate use and interpretation of system evaluation results, including research and the evaluation of educational programmes. This also requires a degree of independence from education authorities to uphold objectivity and credibility.
Context
Three types of school evaluations and improvement actions are widely mandatory
In PISA 2022, three quality assurance and improvement arrangements were mostly reported by school principals: systematic recording of data such as teacher or student attendance, and professional development; systematic recording of students’ test results and graduation rates; internal evaluation/school self-evaluations.
Quality assurance and improvement actions at school (2022)
Quality-assurance mechanisms, autonomy and performance
The top three quality-assurance mechanisms that appear to ensure that greater autonomy is associated with better academic performance in mathematics are: teacher mentoring; monitoring teacher practice by having inspectors observe classes; and systematic recording of students’ test results and graduation rates.
Quality-assurance mechanisms, school autonomy and mathematics performance (2022)
