Marcela Veselkova

Education and Social Protection Policies in OECD Countries: Social Stratification and Policy Intervention

We examine the relationship between education and social protection policies across OECD countries and thereby contribute to the growing political and academic discussion on how social investment and social protection are interrelated. We focus on how government policy in two policy domains (education, social protection) affects social stratification. The paper is based on a principal methodological innovation, which lies in disaggregating the ways in which policy-makers influence stratification into two distinct dimensions: one is concerned with how much the state intervenes in the provision of education/social protection and how much it leaves to individual, family and market, and the second is concerned with the bias towards equality or stratification found in the state system itself. We find that countries can be grouped into a distinct number of education–social protection typologies, which differ from traditional clusterings and could indicate the need for multi-faceted pan-European education policies that take into account the longstanding differences in stratification as opposed to one-size-fits-all policy initiatives.

Education Policy and Welfare Regimes in OECD Countries: Social Stratification and Equal Opportunity in Education

This Working Document looks at which OECD countries deliberately attempt to reproduce social stratification through educational policies, and which countries put greater emphasis on intervening in the stratification process. The research findings challenge a one-policy-fits-all approach that advocates education policy reforms designed to increase equal opportunities in education. The authors argue that the context of each country needs to be considered before the implementation of such policies.

Lessons from the Expansion of the Upper Secondary Education for the Expansion of the Tertiary Education

In this paper, we present the historical time series of enrollment rates in upper secondary schooling in five European countries. The presented data were examined in light of reform attempts aimed at expansions of schooling with the aim to derive lessons for the expansion of the tertiary sector. We were particularly interested in the speed and the differentiation of the expansion. We find that the expansion happened at different speed. It took 9 to 26 years for a country to massify its upper secondary education and further 11 to 41 years to universalize it, with gross enrollment rates reaching 80%. The expansion was slower in the leaders of expansion, such as the United Kingdom or Sweden. In contrast, laggards were able to catch up relatively fast, once the limiting conditions of expansion were removed. Although there has been a general trend towards expansion of the general upper secondary education, the popularity of vocational tracks has been diverse across examined countries.