EU investment for education and youth employability pays off, OECD report confirms
On 25 June 2013 the OECD report Education at a Glance 2013 was launched. This is an annual report analysing the education systems of the 34 OECD member countries, including 21 EU member states (Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Romania are not part of the OECD and therefore not included in the report).
The report demonstrates that expenditure on education per student is on a downward trend in most EU countries. This is a very worrying development, and also the EU's own data on government expenditure in education as a percentage of GDP show that five EU countries (Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Romania and Slovakia) combine both a low level of investment in absolute terms and a decreasing trend in expenditure since 2008/09. The report also shows that a very diverse situation exists among the member states.
Following the launch of the OECD report Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth said:" Investing in education always pays off in the long run and Member States cannot afford to forget this when it comes to allocating public budgets. As the report confirms, cutting back on education spending in general, and on teachers' salaries in particular, can hinder our objective of providing efficient and high quality education systems. We must be ready to implement reforms so that our education systems are a match for the world's best – and that means we have to invest.”
On average, teachers in EU countries earn between 77% and 89% of similarly educated full-time workers. Their salaries have decreased by around 4% between 2009 and 2011 in real terms. If this trend continues, it might endanger the recruitment of a new generation of motivated teachers to replace an ageing workforce which will go into retirement in the near future
