By Dirk Van Damme, Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress division, Directorate for Education and Skills. Education systems, for the greatest part funded by the public purse, have a symbiotic relationship with economic tides: they blossom in booming years, they suffer in recessions. Educational needs however behave exactly in the opposite way: they expand when the economy shrinks. The recent recession, probably the biggest many of us have seen in our lifetimes, again provides ample evidence for this. And the relationship is now even more pronounced than ever before. Education and skills have moved into the centre of economic life, as economies become increasingly knowledge- and skills-based. Unemployment clearly separates the educational haves and have-nots, with the unskilled paying the price for the recession. As a result, people want to invest more in education, stay longer in schools, and postpone their entry into the labour market, because work doesn’t offer much of an alternative. Also governments promote education and training as a strategy to drive people out of unemployment.
Thus demand increases, but do schools receive the public resources to meet this demand? The latest issue of Education Indicators in Focus builds on the available evidence on public expenditure in education for the first three years of the crisis (2008, 2009 and 2010) to shed light on spending trends and the first clear signs of widespread cuts. More...
24 décembre 2013
Cutting education expenditure
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