Education Leaders Call for Greater Transparency as Digital Fraud Tests Public Trust

Education systems need to make information easier to access and understand, protect sensitive data and respond to increasingly sophisticated fraud, participants heard at Council of Europe meetings in Strasbourg, France, on 14–16 October 2026.

The discussions marked ten years of plenary meetings of the Council of Europe Platform on Ethics, Transparency and Integrity in Education (ETINED) and its first International Forum on Transparency in Governance of Higher Education Institutions, bringing attention to the relationship between institutional accountability and democratic values.

Participants examined how digital technologies can help prevent misconduct, how public information can give education communities a stronger voice, and how governments, civil society and the media can work together to defend integrity without compromising privacy, institutional autonomy or academic freedom.

Transparency needs to serve students and society

Villano Qiriazi, Head of the Council of Europe's Education Department, said transparency is central to democratic university governance and accountability, explaining that institutions are strongest when they openly communicate how they make decisions, spend resources and treat students and staff.

Martín Benavides, Director of UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), described integrity in education as a democratic imperative, placing transparency within the wider responsibility to protect the values on which democratic societies depend.

Discussions on open school data stressed that publishing information is only part of the task, because students, parents and teachers also need the skills to interpret it and understand how it influences decisions affecting their schools.

The same expectations apply to universities, which manage public money, award qualifications and conduct research, making access to understandable information essential for meaningful public scrutiny and participation.

Benavides proposed a social contract bringing together public and private higher education stakeholders around common standards for transparency and access to information, supported by sound public regulation and adapted to national circumstances and institutional capacity.

Ivanka Popović, former Rector of the University of Belgrade, called for "accessible transparency" rather than "unconditional transparency", describing universities as "without walls but with floors" to convey the need for openness supported by safeguards for sensitive information.

Cooperation turns integrity commitments into practice

ETINED's work shares common ground with IIEP's Ethics and Corruption in Education programme, ETICO, which has spent more than two decades developing knowledge and practical tools, training thousands of education stakeholders and supporting peer learning.

Its technical assistance includes corruption-risk assessments, public expenditure tracking surveys, ethics charters and codes of conduct, giving countries ways to identify weaknesses and establish clearer expectations for professional behaviour.

IIEP's partnership with the Council of Europe dates back to its contribution to the Prague Forum in 2013, with subsequent cooperation covering teacher codes of conduct, academic integrity, capacity building in the Western Balkans and open school data.

Joint work on open school data is expected to lead to co-published policy guidelines in 2027, extending efforts to make education information useful to the communities it concerns.

Montenegro provided an example of how cooperation can support national reforms, adopting an Academic Integrity Law in 2019 and an Ethics Charter in 2021 following a joint study visit and technical support from IIEP, with further training helping national bodies and higher education representatives put those commitments into practice.

Digital fraud brings new demands for the next decade

Forged qualifications, impersonation and unauthorized assistance with applications remain concerns, but digitalization and artificial intelligence are changing how misconduct occurs and creating new demands for institutions responsible for detecting it.

Muriel Poisson, IIEP's acting Team Leader for Knowledge Generation and Mobilization and lead of ETICO, said fraud is becoming more professionalized, explaining that digital tools combined with human judgment can also help institutions identify misconduct more effectively.

Poisson identified the growing influence of populist movements and their rejection of ethics, integrity and accountability as another challenge for organizations working to protect these principles in education.

At its 10th Plenary Meeting on 14 October, ETINED reviewed priorities including open school data, preventing and countering education fraud, and its 2028–2031 programme, setting the direction for cooperation over the coming years.

The partnership between IIEP and the Council of Europe rests on a shared commitment to integrity as essential to the right to education, democratic citizenship and education as a public good, with continued international cooperation supporting education systems as risks and technologies change.