Education Indicators in Canada

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Handbook for the Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program 2007

This new handbook, officially entitled Education Indicators in Canada: Handbook for the Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program 2007, was developed to provide general descriptions for each indicator and indicator component in the 2007 Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program (PCEIP). It complements the 2007 edition of Education Indicators in Canada: Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program. These two publications share a common objective:  to provide consistent and high-quality information on education in Canada. The up-to-date array of indicators helps support informed decision-making, policy formulation and program development throughout the country.

The 2007 PCEIP Report highlights the most recent available data for the PCEIP indicators in its now familiar format:  brief analytical descriptions accompanied by easy-to-read charts and more detailed data tables. This new companion Handbook is a reference document that gives readers a broad understanding of each indicator, rather than the very specific methodological descriptions that would be necessary to reproduce the indicator using the raw data.

There are five broad indicator sets in PCEIP:

1. A portrait of the school-age population
2. Financing education systems
3. Elementary and secondary education
4. Postsecondary education
5. Transitions and outcomes.

The following information forms the main body of the Handbook, and is presented for each of the PCEIP indicators produced in 2007:

• A brief, general description.
• The major concepts and definitions used.
• An overview of the methodology, including interjurisdictional comparability as needed.
• A short review of any major data limitations.
• A list of the data sources used to produce the indicator.

The relevant data tables are cited for the reader’s information; however, these tables appear, along with the analysis, in the 2007 PCEIP Report.

Four appendices conclude the Handbook. The first presents descriptions of the data sources used for the 2007 PCEIP indicator set. (Additional information on Statistics Canada surveys and publications is available free on its website.) The second outlines revenue sources and components of expenditures for elementary-secondary education. A third appendix provides the basic reference statistics used for the 2007 PCEIP indicators. And the fourth and final appendix is a concordance table outlining the history of each indicator, beginning with the 1999 edition of Education Indicators in Canada.

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