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Chapter 5 THE DEFINITION AND CLASSIFICATION OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMES: THE PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF ISCED The Definition and Classification of Educational Programmes CHAPTER 5 5.1 Introduction This chapter covers the conceptual, definitional and classification issues concerning educational programmes. It is organised in three parts. The first part begins with an overview of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED-97) which provides the foundation for internationally comparative education statistics and goes on to set out the definitions and classifications that apply to educational programmes within it. The second part then sets out in detail how educational programmes are allocated within each ISCED level, considering the criteria that define the boundaries between educational levels. The final part shows how ISCED-97 is operationalised by detailing how each OECD countries’ national educational programmes are in practice mapped to the ISCED-97 classification. These mappings are reviewed on an ongoing basis and so may have been revised since publication of this book; the up to date mappings can be found on the OECD website at www.oecd.org/edu. 5.2 Overview of ISCED-97 ISCED is at the heart of international statistics on education and has been since it was first designed by UNESCO in the early 1970s to serve as ‘an instrument suitable for assembling, compiling and presenting statistics of education both within individual countries and internationally’. The first ISCED (hereafter referred to as ISCED-76) became operational from 1976. The increasing complexity of education systems over the next 20 years, often reflecting more choice between types of programmes and modes of attendance, imposed new difficulties for the international comparability of education statistics and many of these changes could no longer be adequately reflected in data collected under ISCED-76. The case for a revised ISCED was clear. Following a collaborative effort involving UNESCO, OECD and Eurostat, ISCED-97 was adopted as the replacement for ISCED-76 by the UNESCO General Conference in 1997, and the UNESCO ISCED-97 Manual was published in November of that year (UNESCO 1997). ISCED-97 is designed to provide an integrated and consistent statistical framework for the collection and reporting of internationally comparable education statistics. It is a programme-based taxonomy which seeks to reduce complex national educational structures along certain classification criteria into defined international categories. It thus provides the basis for transforming detailed national education statistics, which were compiled on the basis of national concepts and definitions, into aggregate categories that are deemed to be internationally comparable and that can be meaningfully interpreted. The coverage of ISCED-97 extends to all organised and sustained learning opportunities for children, youth and adults, including those with special educational needs, irrespective of the institutions or organisations providing them or the form in which they are delivered. This does not mean, of course, that all data collection based on ISCED need necessarily to have that coverage. Indeed, as set out in Chapter 3, the coverage of the OECD education statistics takes a slightly more narrow focus excluding, for instance, solely work-based education and training and learning which is primarily for leisure or recreational purposes. The educational programme (defined in the next section) is the basic unit of classification in ISCED-97. Each programme should be allocated to a particular level of education on the basis of its educational content, which in practice is determined by applying classification criteria such as typical starting ages, entrance qualifications, and type of qualification awarded. The introduction of these multi-dimensional criteria in ISCED-97 was necessary to capture the complexities of modern education systems and represented a major shift from the uni-dimension ladder system on which ISCED-76 was based. The allocation of national programmes to ISCED levels on a consistent basis across countries is fundamental to ensuring the meaningfulness of the statistics and indicators that are compiled from the data. For that © OECD 2004 79 CHAPTER 5 OECD Handbook for Internationally Comparative Education Statistics reason, to accompany the UNESCO ISCED Manual, OECD published “Classifying educational programmes: Manual for the implementation of ISCED-97 in OECD countries” (OECD, 1999). The guide aimed to provide clear guidance to OECD countries on how to implement the ISCED-97 framework in international data collections and crucially included proposed allocations of national educational programmes to ISCED-97 for OECD countries (see Section 5.5). ISCED-97 was first integrated into the joint OECD, Eurostat and UNESCO UOE data collection for the school year 1998, the indicators from which were published in the 2000 edition of OECD’s Education at a Glance. 5.3 Definition and classification of educational programmes The educational programme is the basic unit of classification within ISCED-97 and as such is the main building block for international statistical comparisons in education. This section first of all provides a definition of an educational programme and then describes the various ways in which such programmes can be classified: by level, field of education, vocational/general orientation, school based or combined school and work-based programmes. 5.3.1 Definition of an educational programme An educational programme is defined as a collection of educational activities which are organised to accomplish a pre-determined objective or the completion of a specified set of educational tasks. The term educational activities has a broader meaning than for instance the terms “course” or “class”. Educational activities can be courses (e.g. the study of individual subjects) organised into programmes as well as free- standing courses. They can also include a variety of components not normally characterised as courses, for example interludes of work experience in enterprises, research projects, and preparation of dissertations. Objectives can, for instance, be the preparation for more advanced study, the achievement of a qualification, preparation for an occupation or range of occupations, or simply for an increase in knowledge and understanding. So, an educational programme could simply be the study of a single subject leading to a recognised qualification or it can be the study of a collection of subjects, along with perhaps a period of work experience, all of which contribute towards the same qualification aim. When a national programme has programme options or paths of study that differ with respect to one or more of the criteria that are used to classify educational programmes within ISCED (see Section 5.3.2.1), then it should be broken apart and reported as separate programmes under ISCED-97. For example, if it takes four years to train a teacher and seven years to train a medical doctor in a country, then the corresponding activities should be reported as separate programmes under ISCED-97, even though they may be considered as one single type of programme from a national perspective (e.g. university education). 80 © OECD 2004 The Definition and Classification of Educational Programmes CHAPTER 5 5.3.2 Classification of educational programmes by level In summary, the levels to which programmes are assigned within ISCED-97, are as follows: ISCED-97 Level Description 0 Pre-primary level of education 1 Primary level of education 2 Lower-secondary level of education (sub-categories 2A, 2B and 2C *) 3 Upper secondary level of education (sub-categories 3A, 3B and 3C*) 4 Post-secondary, non-tertiary education (sub-categories 4A, 4B and 4C*) 5 First stage of tertiary education : not leading directly to an advanced research qualification (sub-categories 5A and 5B*) 6 Second stage of tertiary education : leading to an advanced research qualification * Distinguishing between the destinations that the programmes are theoretically designed to prepare students for. A detailed description of each of these levels is given in Section 5.4. It is worth noting that in the original ISCED-97 framework approved by UNESCO, Level 4 was divided into two sub-categories only: 4A and 4B. However, in order to maintain a parallel structure to the three- way split of educational and labour market destinations of Level 3, Level 4 was split into three categories in the implementation of ISCED (see also Section 5.4.5). In ISCED-97, a ‘level’ of education is broadly defined as the gradations of learning experiences and the competencies built into the design of an educational programme. Broadly speaking, the level is related to the degree of complexity of the content of the programme. This does not, however, imply that levels of education constitute a ladder, where access of prospective participants to each level necessarily depends on the successful completion of the previous level, though such progression is more likely between the lower ISCED levels. It also does not preclude the possibility that some participants in educational programmes at a given level – most probably at post-compulsory levels - may have previously successfully completed programmes at a higher level. In summary, the level of an educational programme should be determined by its educational content. It is very difficult, however, to directly assess and compare the content of the educational programmes in an international

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