Preventing corruption in the education system

Corruption can be defined as “the behaviour of persons entrusted with public or private responsibilities who neglect their duties to achieve unjustified benefits”. Measures to prevent corruption in the field of education are geared in particular to enhancing the quantity, quality and efficiency of the education system, and of course access to education. It is difficult to introduce people to the issue of corruption and the need to fight it, if the immediate environment in which they are educating is itself corrupt. In educational system it is hard to gauge which corrupt practices have the greatest impact - grand corruption within the scope of infrastructure measures (construction of new school buildings) or petty corruption, where the sums involved in each individual instance are small. Adequate measures for combating corruption need to be taken implicitly, because corrupt practices shatter confidence in the quality of the education system.