Libro Blanco Vol I en Ingles

TOWARDS A NATIONAL INNOVATION STRATEGY FOR COMPETITIVENESSVOLUME 1Coverage and quality, in any case, are intimately related. Both, in turn, are related to the funding factor.Given that the school system has already reached over 99% coverage in primary education and 92% insecondary education 17 , the way to substantially improve schooling is to increase coverage of third leveleducation (technical, university and adult), an aspect in which the country, despite its recent advances, asindicated earlier, is not advancing sufficiently quickly. Firstly, because there are young people, with thenecessary skills, who cannot enter higher education due to funding problems. Secondly, because to dramaticallyincrease third level enrolment the problems of quality that persist in our primary and secondary education mustbe tackled: increasing the number of young people entering third level education will only be effective andefficient if they have the basic competences to take full advantage of that opportunity, and in turn they willprovide the country with a real leap forward in productivity-enhancing human capital.This quality deficit has two lines of solution.The first depends on a significant management-level improvement that increases the efficiency of the useof resources. This requires: i) an adequate level of governability for the system, through a correct organizationof the Government, which is the mandator for most of the primary, secondary and third level educationinstitutions of the country ii) a clear relationship and the accountability of the educational agents to theirmandator, both in the use of resources as well as in the results, and iii) a solution to the failures of informationthat, apart from the relationship of the mandator with the educational agent, allow for an effective control bythe users of the system (which are on occasion joint-mandators, when there is shared funding, or a singlemandator, as in the case of private non-subsidized education) 18 .The second corresponds to the need for greater resources. In fact, the OECD indicates that differences inthe accumulated spending per student account for 54% of the variation in the average performance amongcountries in the PISA test. Let’s see how Chile fares comparatively concerning funding.17 According to the 2003 CASEN survey.18 All these aspects lie at the centre of the discussion in Chapter 3 and are applicable both to the problems of education and to othermarkets. Highlighting these three aspects does not imply ignoring, for example, that the content provided by the educational systemneeds to be more pertinent in its later stages to the reality of the world of work; or the urgency of improving teacher training systems.35