Measuring educational institutional diversity: tracking, vocational orientation and standardisation

Educational systems differ in at least three dimensions: the timing and form of tracking students, the extent to which a system provides vocationally specific skills, and the extent to which an educational system is standardised nationwide. Existing conceptualisations of these three dimensions are rather fragmented, and in this chapter we develop new indicators for a large number of countries, based on various sources of data (OECD, UNESCO, TIMSS, PISA and Eurydice). With our new indicators we examine how educational systems affect four core functions of schooling: equality of opportunity, the optimisation of student skills, the allocation of students to the labour market, and the preparation for active participation in society at large.