ABSTRACT
The signifi cance of international tests and benchmarks in the formulation and evaluation of education policy in the Republic of Ireland is particularly well illustrated in the 2015 publication by the Department of Education and Skills of its plan for “service delivery and reform.” Setting out the vision and mission for the department and some key statistics for the education and training sector in Ireland, the report then notes that “national and international assessments show that Ireland is performing well in a number of areas” (Department of Education and Skills, 2015b, p. 7). The report continues by presenting summaries of Ireland’s performance in international tests and benchmarking exercises, as well as of the progress of students in national sample assessments in reading and mathematics. This foregrounding of performance data, not only from the PIRLS and TIMSS 2011 and PISA 2012, but also from the Eurostat Labour Force Surveys and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) 2014 Education at a Glance, in any government-produced education report would be noteworthy of itself. What makes it particularly so in the case of Ireland is that it stands in marked contrast to the observation in a government white paper 20 years earlier that there was a need to “focus more sharply on outcomes and associated measures of performance” (Department of Education, 1995, p. 193), and to move beyond evaluations that focused on the effi ciency of service delivery to greater scrutiny of eff ectiveness and impact. The 1995 white paper also observed that such a move would be challenging given the absence of what it called “valid internationally acceptable comparators” (p. 193) and the relatively poor resourcing of research that could be deployed in the evaluation of specifi c programs and initiatives, as well as more complex system goals.
