ISCED 2011 Operational Manual : Guidelines for classifying national education programmes and related qualifications

Abstract

This operational manual is designed to assist in the classification and mapping of national education systems according to ISCED 2011. It provides guidelines and explanatory notes for the interpretation of the revised classification, and includes country examples of programmes and qualifications that have been classified to ISCED 2011. This ISCED 2011 Operational Manual: Guidelines for classifying national education programmes and related qualifications has been prepared jointly by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, OECD and Eurostat. It is the product of an intense collaboration between international organisations, as well as multiple consultations on the mapping of ISCED 2011 to national education systems. The operational manual has two parts. The first part gives a general introduction of the ISCED 2011 revision and an overview of the revised classification. The second part provides detailed descriptions of each ISCED 2011 level. Each Levels chapter contains a general description related to the characteristics of the level, as well as detailed guidelines on the allocation of programmes and related recognised qualifications to ISCED 2011, based on some specific criteria. National examples are provided in order to illustrate the classification. Each chapter also includes details on the correspondence between the respective ISCED 2011 level and ISCED 1997.