La Sierra y los imaginarios de lo maravilloso

An improvement of the quality of education has been the main aim of the reforms of recent years. The concept of quality in education was introduced when the OECD and the EC put the term on the agenda in the early 1980s. Both the target and framework control of the economy and content of the programmes, the strengthening of the management of the institutions and the introduction of school boards as well as the implementation of a more coherent, open and flexible educational struc-ture aim at the promotion of the quality and relevance of the programmes. The most important means to reach this goal has been to create the prerequisites for local freedom of disposal and possibilities of making use of this freedom.

The desire for an improvement of the quality has also been a common denominator behind the comprehensive revision of education acts, orders and curriculum etc., which has taken place in recent years.

In 1987, the Minister of Education took the initiative to set up a "Perspectives Committee" which was given the task to make a survey of the basic knowledge and general values which the school was to give the Danes to prepare them for the 21st century. This committee which consisted of 5 personally appointed members from trade and industry, education and culture submitted its report in the spring of 1988. This report consisted in a comprehensive catalogue of basic knowledge which the school should provide the pupils with.

At the end of 1988, the Minister of Education initiated a "Content and Quality Development Pro-ject" covering all fields of education, which was coordinated and chaired by the director of the Depart-ment of Upper Secondary Education. Under this project, the education system and its qualities were evaluated from three angles: 1) Vertically: assessment of the subjects as they were taught at primary, secondary, and tertiary level with emphasis on the coherence and progression and the transition from one level to another; 2) horizontally: analysis of each level of the system one by one; and 3) institu- tionally: evaluation of individual institutions.

In 1997, the Ministry of Education initiated a new project under the heading: "Quality that can be seen". The aim of this project was to establish and test a system for the assessment of results on the basis of existing quality development projects within the different areas of education. The project comprises the identification of the ministry’s target in terms of quality and the quality concept; a set of indicators and criteria, which can be used transversal to the ministry’s areas of education supple-mented by specific indicators and criteria for the individual areas of education; and areas of special importance to quality. The projects must be seen in the light of the ministry’s target and framework management principles, whereby the central level is to ensure adequate targets and framework for the activities of the institutions, monitor the development and intervene in areas where a need for quality improvement has been found and moreover to carry out continuous assessments of how the quality level in general can be improved.

In 1999, the Danish Evaluation Institute was established as an independent institution under the Ministry of Education. From an international point of view, this institution is quite unique, as it has been given the task to undertake systematic and mandatory evaluations of teaching and learning at all levels of the education system from pre-school to postgraduate level.

In order to develop the quality of teaching and learning and to examine whether the educational sector lives up to the objectives laid down, the Evaluation Institute systematically examines the educa-tion programmes separately as well as the relations between different programmes. The institute also

develops and innovates evaluation techniques and methods and compiles national and international experience with educational evaluation and quality development. For more information about the Dan- ish Evaluation Institute, see 9.2.and 9.4.

9.2. Ongoing Debates and Future Developments

In the near future the purpose of evaluations will continue to be twofold (firstly, the evaluations aimed at providing the evaluated programmes with a contribution to their internal quality development; secondly, the evaluations also have a control function). They will still have to contribute to the quality improvement of the evaluated units in particular, and the evaluated field in general. Furthermore, the evaluations will continue to have a control function, as they inform stakeholders in the broad sense, both in Denmark and abroad, of the quality-status in the evaluated field. The majority of evaluations will still use the objectives formulated at the national, local and institutional level as their starting point. However, due to international developments there will be increased interest in the results of education and in creating a higher degree of transparency of education quality across borders. There will be a need for quality definitions that are understandable and acceptable across borders, and it will be nec- essary to develop other ways of describing quality than in terms of fitness for purpose. One of the means to obtain this higher level of transparency is through pre-defined criteria as the basis for evaluations; another is to focus on output measures, where it is easily identifiable whether expected targets have been met.

Last but not least, there will be an increased focus on competences as another means of mak-ing quality judgements comparable, i.e. what are the pupils or students capable of when they have gone through a particular programme at a certain level of the education system. This changes the fo-cus of evaluation from the structures of education to the curriculum and the teaching methods, and the outcomes of teaching and learning.

There will be continued focus on the procedures set up by the institutions themselves to con-tinuously check and improve the quality of their activities and structures. Consequently, there will be a need for external quality assurance to check the effectiveness and sustainability of these internal mechanisms, and to undertake measures that give an input to the improvement activities initiated by the institutions through audit activities. However, that will not be sufficient, due to the European, or even international, demand for comparable assessment of quality.

Therefore, there will still be a need to initiate evaluation activities at subject or programme level, but with a transnational dimension.

With the increased international dimension in education, educational systems are becoming more and more complex. Therefore, there will also be a future need for broadness in the foci of evaluations, and in the corresponding methodological elements applied to assess these foci.

In 2005 Högskoleverket, a Swedish institution usually evaluating the Swedish higher education sector, assessed the Danish Evaluation Institute’s methods. The assessment’s overall findings was that the Danish Evaluation Institute lives up to the standards formulated by the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA). The assessment, however, draws attention to the fact that the Danish Evaluation Institute’s very broad scope and limited resources to some extent im-pair the focus of the conducted evaluations. Furthermore, Högskoleverket recommends that the evaluations’ results be communicated broader to increase the impact of the Institute’s findings. In the spring of the 2006/2007 academic year, compulsory national tests in primary and lower secondary Folkeskole are introduced. During the nine years of compulsory tuition, ten compulsory national tests will be conducted. The subjects covered by the national tests are Danish, English, mathematics and the natural sciences. A primary aim of the national tests is to en-hance the evaluation culture in the Folkeskole.