Centre for General and Extracurricular Education
Established in 2000, the Centre for General and Extracurricular Education is engaged in a vast scope of basic research, applied developments and advisory support to underpin more robust, evidence-centric agendas for the development of secondary general and extracurricular education in Russia and beyond.
The Centre pursues multi-faceted research and liaison with various stakeholders to foster education equality across communities, promote appropriate teaching, ensure adequate financing and governance, and enhance learning outcomes.
The Centre’s academic and advisory expertise spans the following key areas:
- Devising and drafting programmes to foster basic schooling and extracurricular education in various Russian regions, with a particular focus on socio-economically underprivileged communities
- Developing tools to better evaluate school performance and learning outcomes
- Assessing and reviewing transparency and disclosure policies in place with school governance functions and community regulators
- Developing tools for independent ranking of educational institutions.
Key Projects
TALIS Evaluations in Russia. Inspired and run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey) is among the most authoritative and representative international monitoring and assessment initiatives aimed at comprehensive benchmarking of teaching staff skills and administration performance. In 2014, it was the IOE Centre for Socioeconomic Development of Schooling who conducted the first full-scale TALIS evaluation in Russia, supported by OECD, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), and the Russian Ministry of Education and Science.
Economic Monitoring in Education. As part of HSE’s major project in socioeconomic monitoring of education, since 2014, the Centre has been running a series of analytical surveys addressing Russian secondary education leadership. These social studies aim to track changes in the governance approach and priorities, including organizational, economic, and other administrative domains, such as teacher staffing and qualification matters, parental liaison, upgrading and expanding the fixed asset base, curriculum innovations, etc.
Russian Regional Education Dataset. Since the Russian landscape of general secondary education is largely uneven in terms of the underlying socioeconomic conditions, availability of resources, stakeholder involvement, and other criteria, this project seeks to accumulate a repository of multi-faceted data and analytical tools to better track and understand the specific needs of particular community settings. Ultimately, this country-wide dataset will enable a more feasible and flexible approach to managing and developing regional education environments, based on the availability of more accurate and representative performance indicators.
Transitions and Trends in the Post-Soviet Education Landscape. This large-scale research project is a unique attempt to comprehensively track transformations and developments that have been taking place in the former Soviet States’ education over the past two and a half decades. The study involves analyzing massive qualitative and quantitative data on various aspects of post-Soviet research and training models, enabling meaningful and conclusive evidence about impacts of different factors on education system sustainability, adaptability and scalability, etc.
Supporting School Development in Less Privileged Communities. In line with the national imperative to foster high-quality and equal-opportunity schooling, the Centre has been proactively advising with regional policymakers and institutional leadership on implementing community-tailored roadmaps to spur the development of local secondary education environments at all levels. The project seeks to deliver best-practice upgrades to governance, curricular, and teaching practice at currently underperforming schools, specifically in economically underprivileged communities, to ensure more efficient operational models and enhanced learning outcomes.
Contacts
Manager, email: ptopal@hse.ru