Main Trends and Current Issues

New Benchmarks of Education Policy in Russia

The National Doctrine of Education in Russian Federation lays down ideological foundation of education policy in Russia for the period 2000-2025. It is a fundamental program document manifesting predominant significance of education among other strands of public policy. The Doctrine defines strategic targets of education in Russia until 2025, namely:

creation of a sound background for sustainable socio-economic development and spiritual growth of Russia; providing guarantees of quality life and national security;
strengthening of the democratic rule-of-law state and civil society;
providing staff of adequate quality and quantity for fast-growing market economy integrated with global economic processes;
backing up the assertion of Russia of being a great power in education, culture, arts, sciences, high technology and economics.

Evidently, the new Federal Law on Education has incorporated most of the principles of the Doctrine. It is important that the new law is value-oriented; the following new milestones of development of education law and policy are benchmarked by the law:

securing life-long learning according to the professional and educational priorities of every person;
acknowledgement of equality and free competition of all educators regardless of their organizational form and ownership;
openness of education system to external demands, including consideration of the needs of community and economy in general through consultations, external accreditation, collaboration in designing educational standards, participation in management of educational institutions;
informational transparency of educational institutions to the student as a customer including the new requirement to disclose essential data about the educational institution; from 2011 onwards any institution’s website must contain information on the founding date of the institution, its managerial structure and types of courses taught, its property and finances, electronic resources, its scientific research, existing programs of social support of students, as well as personal profiles of its academic staff and scanned copies of the main entitling documents.