Indicators of Quality in Education

The article concerns the problem of the design and exploitation of indicators of education quality in the Czech school sys-tem. First it defines the meaning of the term indicator of education quality on the basis of an analysis of a range of Czech and foreign literary sources. In this section it presents different approaches to the concept of indicator of education quality and uses examples to illustrate the different meanings in which it has been used in this country and abroad. The article then summarises the rules for the design of indicators of education quality and for the creations of systems of these indicators. It enumerates the desirable attributes of an objective and reliable indicator of education quality and the features of such an indicator relative to the target group of respondents for whom it is designed. Last but not least it analyses situations for which it is useful to create indicators of quality of education. One section of the article is then devoted to rules for the design of systems of indicators that enable us to obtain more objective and reliable data than do indicators without mutual links, i.e. mutually isolated indicators.
Another important part of the article is a section on the problems of indicators of education quality in the context of the cur-ricular reforms currently taking place in the Czech Republic. It indicates where in this situation indicators of education quality can be exploited in the framework of the national educational system. It is hoped that this section might initiate an important discussion among the professional educational public on what kind of quality indicators to create, how to get beyond what has hitherto been a markedly intuitive rather than scientific approach to creating them, how to use them effectively in the evaluation of various aspects of the national educational system and who should design them.