The International Standard Classification of Education ISCED: the standard from Sevrès or Satan’s trick?

The aim of the ISCED classification was to compare educational resources in different countries. One of the reasons why the classification fails is that it does not reflect the specific characteristics of educational systems in individual countries and as a result creates an oversimplified image of the role of education in contemporary societies. In Poland, the national classification provides a better tool than the ISCED for specifying the role of education, which is demonstrated by the results of the 2010 European Social Survey. The advantage of national classification over the ISCED follows from the fact that it takes changes and reforms in the Polish educational system into consideration. These empirical results speak for supplementing standards with national classifications for education which allow specific characteristics of education systems to be taken into account in inter-country comparison. This would be a step towards functional harmonisation, a concept abandoned after the year 2000 which was replaced with methodological rigor. In the discussion possible reasons are outlined for why researchers find using the ISCED more appropriate for their countries than constructing their own instruments.

http://www.edukacja.ibe.edu.pl/images/numery/2013/6-8-sawinski-isced.pdf