Education Laws across Europe

This database includes a list of all educational laws in European countries, issued between 1990 and 2024, with the following constraints: • They are “major” regulations, in the sense that they shape the basic principles of the education system and/or refer to its main cycles (preschooling, primary, secondary, vocational, tertiary, adult education). However, the selection excludes regulations essential to the educational system that provide regulations only with respect to very specific factors and drivers of the system, such as teacher training, organizing secondary educational services (e.g., meals in schools), quality assurance, statute of educational buildings, national qualification frameworks, etc. For parsimony, we also excluded the additional ruling, that is the secondary legislation that only specifies the major regulations, and in many countries comes along with the main legislation, to indicate how it should be implemented. • We have considered all laws and regulations, irrespective whether they are or not still enacted or were replaced by other laws in the meanwhile. The target is to document stability and change, therefore we have tried to retrieve all laws corresponding to the above criteria, that were issued in the period under scrutiny. • We have also excluded laws on special education, that would deserve a particular attention that is for the moment beyond the scope of the current exercise. • For a better understanding, we try in this brief report to also document the context around these laws, in terms of societal dynamics and former education laws. However, this was not an explicit aim of the current exercise, and such references might be unequal across countries.