CERI Eye: Fostering and Building Human Capital for Sustainable Knowledge Societies in South Eastern Europe

Tracey Burns reports back from

The international conference on “Fostering and Building Human Capital for Sustainable Knowledge Societies in South Eastern Europe” which took place on 6-7 March 2009 in Bucharest.

OECD was invited to host a workshop on “Effective Policies for Building Human Capital; Using Evidence and Trends” at the international conference on “Fostering and Building Human Capital for Sustainable Knowledge Societies in South Eastern Europe”. The conference was organised by Austria, Romania and Croatia as chairs of the Task Force Building Human Capital of the Regional Co-operation Council (RCC, a regional Stability Pact successor).

The conference convened over 120 representatives from International Organisations and European institutions, from the Ministries of Education, Science and Research, Labour and Social Affairs of the SEE countries, from NGOs active in the field of human capital building, as well as education experts, researchers, the RCC and international donors and media.

In other parallel workshops the meeting focused also on the contribution of human capital in South Eastern Europe to: regional development, labour market needs and competitiveness, sustainable development, VET and HE modernization. The co-ordinating institutions of these workshops were, respectively, the Task Force, the European Training Foundation, the Romanian National Centre for Sustainable Development, and the Romanian National Centre for TVET Development.

The conference conclusions were built upon the outcomes of the workshops.

CERI presented its projects on:
Evidence Based Policy Research: 

In its presentation the OECD made a strong case for the use of evidence in policy making and stressed the importance of well functioning links between policy makers, practitioners and researchers as a first step to changing the system. The discussion moved around the questions of how these links are functioning in the individual countries of the region, whether there is use of evidence in policy making, and what is necessary to make policy making evidence informed.  After a rich discussion, the workshops participants concluded that:

• Use, misuse or non-use of evidence does matter in policy making in the region.
• Efforts are already underway to use data in taking policy decisions in some countries, notably Serbia, yet there are substantial deficits in capacity to absorb and use information, as well as weak links between policy makers, practitioners and researchers.
•  In order to support effective evidence based policy making it is necessary to create a change in the current policy making culture and dialogue. This change should be introduced through a gradual, informed and transparent process involving all stakeholders and incorporating appropriate capacity building measures.
• The key role of brokerage agencies in guiding and sustaining this change should be highlighted and pursued.
• Strong research does not automatically lead to good policies. The process should therefore be accompanied by appropriate measures like:
  • Strengthening the currently weak link between research and policy making, in particular by enabling the “translation” of research evidence into feasible policy recommendations, and vice versa make policy choices accessible to scientific evaluation.
  • Capacity building (empowerment) for practitioners (teachers, etc.) on how to use and better understand evidence. This could help improve the quality of teaching and learning, increase ownership for reforms, and stimulate the innovative potential of schools.
  • Possibly introduction of neutral brokerage institutions to guarantee the quality of data and counterbalance attempts to misuse research evidence (ethical use of evidence).
  • Raising the academic attractiveness of policy research as a field of scientific research and promoting funding for policy relevant research.

Trends Shaping Education:
Policies shaping the future depend on a number of trends. OECD presented some of these in the workshop (demographic trends, ongoing changes in the balance of economic powers in the world, impact of ICT and accessibility of information) and invited the discussants to share their experience and views about the futures thinking in their own countries. After a broad, yet focused exchange of opinions, the workshop concluded that:

• The trends outlined in the OECD study affect the countries of the region to the same or in some cases even larger extent than the OECD members.
• In general the workshop identified the capacity of education systems to handle change as main policy issue in the context of addressing the need for futures thinking. Strengthening the capacity of the education system to handle and possibly even foresee change should therefore be an overarching policy goal, to be addressed along the following lines:
  • Carry on with reforms towards changing information based instruction to skills (output) oriented teaching.
  • However, while it is relatively easy to introduce changes in curricula, the influencing, assessing and foreseeing of quality on the output side is much more difficult, partly because it seems that there is no clear answer as to what skills will be needed in the longer run.
  • The training of teachers and building their capacity and interest in/for lifelong learning is crucial. This is one of the main factors which could contribute to the responsiveness of the education system to external changes.
  • Further priority should be to ensure that in the process of collecting data > providing information > generating knowledge, the knowledge is ultimately delivered to the individuals, empowering them to learn how to learn, and to learn from each other. Capacity for response to changes must become part of the education process itself.