Education in Lithuania
Lithuania has achieved steady expansion of participation in education, substantially widening access to early childhood education and care and tertiary education, coupling this with nearly universal participation in secondary education. However, if Lithuania’s education system is to help the nation respond effectively to economic opportunities and demographic challenges, improvements in the performance of its schools and its higher education institutions are needed. Improved performance requires that Lithuania clarify and raise expectations of performance, align resources in support of raised performance expectations, strengthen performance monitoring and the assurance of quality, and build institutional capacity to achieve high performance. This orientation to improvement should be carried across each sector of its education system.
This report assesses Lithuania’s policies and practices against best practice in education from across the OECD and other countries in the region. It analyses its education system’s major strengths and the challenges it faces, from early childhood education and care to tertiary education. It offers recommendations on how Lithuania can improve quality and equity to support strong, sustainable and inclusive growth. This report will be of interest in Lithuania and other countries looking to raise the quality, equity and efficiency of their education systems.
Also available in: Lithuanian
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Early childhood education and care in Lithuania
The importance of early childhood education and care (ECEC) is well recognised in Lithuania. Its professional community shares a tradition of concern with the structural dimensions of ECEC quality – ensuring adequate space, group sizes, staffing, facilities, and hygiene – and it has developed a widely shared understanding of the essential cognitive, emotional and social skills that children need to develop in their early years. Levels of participation in ECEC are high, especially in urban areas. However, participation in ECEC lags in the nation’s rural areas, where the incidence of poverty and ill health are highest, and young children might benefit most from access to high quality ECEC. Responsibility for monitoring the quality of ECEC rests with municipal education departments, who lack ministerial guidance which would permit them to easily and routinely monitor the quality of ECEC provision. This chapter examines how Lithuania might address gaps in participation, and put in place a comprehensive system of quality monitoring.
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