Long abstract

Publications & Documents

Education systems vary widely between countries, so how can we compare them? The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) is an instrument designed to transform data collected under different educational structures into a comparable international framework. First implemented by UNESCO in the mid-1970s, this framework has allowed the development of internationally comparable indicators of educational performance. ISCED has recently been revised in order to reflect the dramatic changes that education has experienced over the last 25 years. The new version, ISCED-97, is a multi-dimensional framework which has the potential to greatly improve the comparability of education statistics. For a classification framework to be effective for producing comparable information, it must offer clear instructions and precise classification criteria. This manual gives clear guidance to OECD Member countries for the implementation of ISCED-97 in international data collections and contains detailed proposals for the allocation of specific national educational programmes to the revised ISCED framework. This document will be useful for those collecting and reporting international data, as well as for policy makers and researchers interested in better understanding the data reported in OECD publications on education.