The European Commission’s Eurydice website, a useful resources for information on educational systems in Europe, has a “Facts and Figures” page that provides valuable data for calibrating information to make accurate comparisons between countries. The page includes data such as. the structure of compulsory and voluntary educational levels, academic calendars for all school levels, and the number of recommended hours of instruction for individual grades and subjects. This type of data is often somewhat difficult to find but can be crucial to drawing meaningful inferences when comparing national education systems.
One of the interesting things that I’ve found when skimming through the data is that ICT and Technology are not treated as individual subjects in most Northern and Central EU and affiliated countries. They are, however, still included as subjects in their own rights in many of the new EU countries (such as the newly joined Eastern European countries) and Southern EU countries. This may be an indication that ICT is more integrated in the curriculum in the former than the latter.
I did find one problem in the report “Recommended annual taught time in full-time compulsory education in Europe 2009/10”. It seems that several of the graphs that are intended to show cross-country comparisons of recommended teaching time per subject (Part II) were not reproduced in the PDF document that is available for download. However, these comparisons can be gleaned from the per country data in the following section (Part III).
