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The following OECD assessment and recommendations summarise Chapter 4 of the Economic Survey of Poland 2006 published on 28 June 2006.
Contents
How can further education reform improve labour market performance and human capital development?
Important changes in many aspects of education were made in the 1990s. As far as compulsory education is concerned, performance (as measured by the PISA study) improved between 2000, when Polish performance appeared very poor relative to nearly all OECD countries, and 2003, when Poland moved into the group of middle ranking countries. This improvement can be at least partially ascribed to the effects of the reforms, notably the introduction of common national examinations and the change in the role of so-called basic vocational schools. A key motivation was to decentralise schooling to local government; this new system should be further consolidated, with the emphasis on establishing clear lines of responsibility for the different agencies involved.
Educational attainment by age
Population that has attained at least upper secondary education
Percentage, by age group, 2003
1. Data for Poland do not include students who completed only basic vocational schools (Szko a zasadnicza dia m odzie y), classified as ISCED 3C programmes.
Source: OECD (2005), Education at a Glance.
An important component of successful education systems seems to be an appropriate balance between giving sufficient autonomy and responsibility to school principals and ensuring that they are pursuing the aims of national education policy. Thus, principals should be given more administrative and financial autonomy to find ways to improve their schools’ results, monitored by an independent, national, quality-control agency. Because not enough is known about what kind of education produces the best results in particular circumstances, there should continue to be room for experimental approaches. Measures of “value added” in individual schools should be calculated so that those responsible can assess the results of their policies.
Primary education currently starts at age 7, with one year of pre primary education only recently made compulsory. In view of the increasing international evidence of the importance of early childhood education for social development and educational attainment, priority should be given to increasing participation in pre-school education at even earlier ages; this would also help to raise female labour supply. For children over 15, vocational schools have become less popular, at the same time as employers continue to feel that many young adults finish school with insufficient skills. Both the general and the vocational streams must improve their responses to their graduates’ perceived difficulties on the labour market.
Further improving the education system requires flexibility: some schools need to close, and some subjects or age groups need more teachers, others less. Falling student numbers should theoretically free up teaching resources that can be re-allocated. The Teachers Charter, as modified in 2000, improved the career structure for teachers, but employment security aspects of the Charter should not be allowed to obstruct restructuring. Also, the government should ensure that schools have sufficient flexibility to vary teachers’ salaries according to teaching performance and recruitment needs.
How can tertiary education and adult training be improved?
In 1991 there were about 400 000 tertiary students in under 90 higher education institutions (HEIs), all of which were in the public sector, but by 2005 there were 1.9 million students in over 400 HEIs, most of which are private. All private-sector students and part-time students in the public sector pay tuition fees, while the constitution prevents public HEIs from charging fees to full-time students. This asymmetry, especially in a period of budgetary stringency, makes it difficult for resources to be directed to where there is a need for public provision, and is a source of vertical and horizontal inequity. Many studies show that, although there are important social returns to tertiary education, the main benefits accrue to students themselves in the form of higher earnings. Hence, an advisable reform would allow public HEIs to charge cost-related fees (not necessarily full-cost recovery) for all students, at the same time increasing the provision of grants to maintain accessibility. The student loan scheme should also be expanded, to be managed by commercial banks, but with the credit underwritten by the government and income-contingent repayment made through the income tax system.
The growth in the number of private HEIs also left a gap in the accreditation and quality-control system. While the University Accreditation Commission concentrates on a relatively small number of elite institutions, the more recently established State Accreditation Committee (SAC) covers the rest. The SAC attempts to do more than simply verify compliance with technical requirements. Where a HEI receives direct budgetary support, SAC quality assessment is important; for wholly private-sector institutions there may be less need for much more than certification of basic standards. SAC assessments should be widely publicised and kept up to date to help potential students in their choice of course of study.
Maintaining and improving teaching quality relies on adequately motivated teachers. In many public-sector HEIs career structures are opaque and do not depend closely on either teaching ability or research output. This is self-defeating for the institutions concerned and may also discourage the young and able from choosing this career or remaining in Poland. Career structures in tertiary education should be based on open competition and transparent promotion criteria. To encourage high-quality researchers, commercial links between HEIs and companies should be facilitated, including permitting flexible intellectual property rights arrangements.
Polish companies do less training activity than those in most OECD countries, and a high proportion of it is financed by the employees themselves. This may be because, with the high level of unemployment, firms find they can generally recruit people with additional skills, or perhaps they do not appreciate the benefits of employee training for the company itself. Furthermore, a very high proportion of training is of people who are young and highly educated, suggesting a cleavage between a relatively small group of motivated people and the rest. Many international studies show that training leads to improved labour market outcomes. Hence, public awareness campaigns to increase the take-up of training would be useful, although public subsidy or other incentives to train the employed in general may not be justified. Companies in Poland have nevertheless recently been given a small tax incentive to set up training funds for their workers, but this legislation is too recent for its impact to be assessed.
However, where Poland really stands out is in its meagre provision of training for the unemployed, this is one aspect of its more general under-use of active labour market policies (ALMPs). Appropriately targeted training is an effective way to increase employability. Training programmes for the unemployed should be enriched. Many unemployed – those over the age of about 40 and with few skills or skills for which the demand has fallen drastically (in mining and steel, for example) – are vulnerable, because their low level of general education makes retraining more difficult and the economic return from training harder to demonstrate. However, in order to try to minimise the extent to which a “lost generation” is created, more effort should be devoted to looking for ways to help these people develop skills that will allow them to re enter the labour market. This will depend in particular on stimulating local labour offices, who are responsible for training of the unemployed, to look for such solutions. Pilot training projects should be encouraged and carefully assessed for their impact.
How to obtain this publication
The Policy Brief (pdf format) can be downloaded. It contains the OECD assessment and recommendations, but not all of the charts included on the above pages.
The complete edition of the Economic Survey of the Poland 2006 is available from:
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SourceOECD for subscribing institutions and many libraries
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OLISnet, under "Publication Locator", for government officials with accounts (suscribe)
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Additional information
For further information please contact the Poland Desk at the OECD Economics Department at webmaster@oecd.org. The OECD Secretariat's report was prepared by Paul O'Brien and Stéphanie Jamet under the supervision of Peter Jarrett.
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