Education is vulnerable to corruption. Despite numerous initiatives and projects to address the corruption risks, in many countries education is still perceived as being among the sectors most prone to corruption.

In an effort to tackle the challenge in a more comprehensive and systematic way,  a number of countries have carried out in-depth assessments in their education systems over the past few years (Serbia, Tunisia, Armenia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan). The work took place in partnership with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Center for Applied Policy, and the Open Society Foundations, and relied on a methodology that interconnects several research protocols to collect evidence of policy shortcomings that create opportunities and incentives for education participants to engage in corruption. 

The country assessments were driven by an assumption that corruption in education is not an isolated phenomenon that affects the sector “from outside”, but a consequence of deeper-rooted problems in the education system itself, which affect the learning experience and environment of stakeholders in ways that may compromise the integrity of their behaviour.

According to a common definition, integrity stands for a “pattern of conduct”, a way of acting which is in line with values and principles associated with a higher goal and leading to its attainment. In education, integrity could be described as the continued commitment of education participants and institutions to act in accordance with values and principles that apply to education, without engaging in corruption.

Our thematic study seeks to identify whether values and principles that matter for integrity, might be applicable across national borders and from there, whether selected patterns of problematic behaviour in education can be qualified as violations of education integrity irrespective of cultural, historical and political differences between countries.

We use a form of mixed methods research, which involves secondary analysis of findings from the assessments of education system integrity in a selection of countries, including data on education system performance, and legal analysis of primary and secondary sources, in particular basic rules, principles, and international commitments upon which education and the public sector in these and other countries is based, and on which they rely to deliver quality, equity, and respect for the rights of education participants. Examples of such sources include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations Convention against Corruption, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, etc.

Our study establishes that there are significant, largely unexplored commonalities between integrity violations in education in different countries. They fit into common definitions, are enabled by similar factors, and infringe a comparable selection of basic rules, principles, and international commitments. The results enable the formulation of definitions and provide an overview of nine practices that violate education integrity, which can take place at any level of education: illicit access to education, improper private supplementary tutoring, undue recognition of learning and academic achievement, politicisation of education, favouritism in staffing decisions, misappropriation of funds, procurement fraud, cheating, as well as accreditation and licensing fraud. For each violation, we also identify the commitments of countries that these practices violate, and describe the policy context in which they typically take place.

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