OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education: Albania
How can assessment and evaluation policies work together more effectively to improve student outcomes in primary and secondary schools? The country reports in this series analyse major issues facing evaluation and assessment policy to identify improvements that can be made to enhance the quality, equity and efficiency of school education.
Albania has made improvements in access to education and in raising learning outcomes over the last two decades, moving from one of the lowest performers in the Western Balkans to one of the fastest improvers. However, a large share of students in Albania continue to leave school without mastering basic competencies needed for work and life and disparities persist across population groups. This review, developed in co-operation with UNICEF, provides Albania with recommendations to help strengthen its evaluation and assessment system to focus on support for student learning. It will be of interest to Albania, as well as other countries looking to make more effective use of their evaluation and assessment system to improve quality and equity, and result in better outcomes for all students.
Supporting school evaluation for improvement
This chapter looks at how Albania can make better use of school evaluation to improve teaching and learning practices. Albania has central procedures for conducting external school evaluations, but very few have been undertaken in recent years. A recent re-organisation of the country’s school evaluation system aims to increase capacity to conduct evaluations and also provide more support to schools. However, some changes may compromise the quality of evaluations. These include the spreading of responsibility for external school evaluations across multiple bodies. In addition, ongoing systemic challenges in Albania limit schools’ ability to meaningfully respond to external evaluations and their annual self‑evaluations. In particular, schools are underfunded and have minimal to no autonomy to make budgetary decisions. Schools are also hindered by a lack of strong school leadership. Albania is addressing this challenge through the establishment of a new School of Directors to train and certify principals. Albania also needs to consolidate responsibility for external school evaluation and provide greater technical and financial support to schools to act upon external and internal evaluation findings.