Assessing Performance and Standards in Education and Training: a British view in comparative perspective
contribution of human capital to the productivity and competitiveness of national economies in a global environment, where flexibility and rapid response to markets are at a premium. This relatively new emphasis on human capital contrasts with the accepted wisdom of the neo-classical model which emphasised the investment in fixed capital equipment and largely ignored human capital. This increased interest has led economists to widen their studies of education beyond traditional 'rate of return' studies to examining how education systems themselves function. Inevitably, they brought to the study of education systems the paradigms and conceptual framework which had been developed within their own discipline to study the performance of economic systems. The application of these simple but powerful analytical tools-for example the quantification of output based upon standard measures of performance as a prior condition of input/output analysis-has given rise to some disquiet in educational disciplines which stress the humanistic-and essentially unquantifiable-contribution of education to human civilisation. Britain,* like any other advanced industrialised nation, has no alternative but to seek to remain competitive in the global market place in order to generate the resources necessary to preserve its own essential standards and values. In the same way, the smaller microcosm of education must accept and come to terms with its role as a prime contributor to economic success if the resources necessary to maintain a humane and civilising education system are to be generated. Nor should this coming-to-terms simply imply an uneasy co-existence of the humanist and the scientific tradition of educational enquiry. Social scientists from the discipline of economics must be aware of the necessary limits of measurement and quantification; 'humanists' must realise that educational aims and ideals can and should be questioned on grounds of efficiency and competitiveness in the same way that any other allocation of scarce resources is normally scrutinised. In 1981, a study published by the independent National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) identified low levels of skill in the British labour force as the factor which could most convincingly explain the failure of Britain to match German productivity levels in industrial manufacturing (Prais, 1981a). That study laid the founda