The country reports have a special thematic focus each year and the focus for the 2007 reports is on Digital Literacy and New Learning Environments. Science education and Internet safety were topics in 2005 and 2006.

The questionnaire gathers information in a variety of areas from the national coordinator, ranging from ICT policies to ICT based content and services for schools, from teacher education provisions to ICT practices in schools. Each country reports begins with a key section on trends in education and ICT covering educational developments in primary, secondary and vocational education, success stories and ICT and education reform. Less attention is given to infrastructure statistics in this year´s update as the Eurobarometer Benchmarking report from the European Commission provided this data by country in 2006. However, countries are asked to point us to the latest infrastructure surveys.

With regards to ICT-related spending, the questionnaire concentrates on less specific categories this year, but asks for data which will allow for better overall comparison between countries, e.g. the overall budget for education as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product and the total ICT budget for education as a percentage of the total education budget of the Ministry of Education.

Information in key areas will allow us to make cross country comparisons on topics such as new learning environments and new learning arrangements (physical as well as virtual), initiatives to promote digital literacy or new technologies and services for schools. They will be fed into Insight briefing papers and result in a comprehensive trend and issue paper foreseen for the end of 2007.

The Insight country reports were recently evaluated with an online survey with EUN consortium members and other stakeholders of the reports (e.g. European Commission). The results of this evaluation were also further discussed in the last meeting of EUN´s Policy and Innovation Committee (PIC) under the topic “The relationship between Policy and Practice”.  Results of the evaluation process shows that the reports are mainly used by policy makers to investigate a specific topic or issue, internal briefings or sharing with colleagues. Even if information input is a time consuming task, it helps countries to bring information together from their own country, which otherwise, remains hidden in different departments. Members of the PIC recommended that a one page summary of main ICT priorities in each country together with the latest developments would be beneficial to have each year.

The reports are also an important tool for the peer learning projects coordinated by EUN, such as for the preparation of the policy review visits during the P2P project and the European Commission´s ICT cluster activity in 2005 and 2006. In the framework of the current P2V project reports from Lithuania, France and Spain (Catalonia) will be updated in 2007.

Thanks to a recently established memorandum of understanding between the Consortium for School networking (CoSN) in the US and EUN an international perspective will complement the reports in 2007. Four US states are testing the current framework of the country report questionnaire and will submit data during August. 

The most active and regular contributors to the reports are Norway, Belgium (Flemish Community), The Netherlands, UK, Switzerland, Greece, Finland and France. Information in highly decentralised countries (e.g. Germany, Spain) is more difficult to get and new approaches to receive data from these countries, also on a regional level, will be pursued this year. Moreover, some of the Eastern European Countries, such as the Czech Republic or Poland are less active in the contribution to the reports and efforts will be made to obtain information also in those countries. In a positive outlook we can excpect information from Denmark, Italy, Israel and Austria this year.

The questionnaire for 2007, together with a guidance sheet can be found here:

Questionnaire : http://insight.eun.org/shared/data/pdf/questionnaire_final_2007.pdf
Guidance sheet: http://insight.eun.org/shared/data/pdf/guidance_sheet_questionnaire_2007.pdf
Contact: anja.balanskat@eun.org

Related Links:

Country Reports
http://insight.eun.org/countryreports

P2P Project
http://p2p.eun.org

P2V Project
http://p2v.eun.org

Consortium for School Networking (CoSN)
http://www.cosn.org/