The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences

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On 18 July 2002 the Centre for Educational Policy Studies (CEPS) (now Faculty of Educational Management) was opened at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. Formally, CEPS is an academic department of the Moscow School, its fifth faculty, but in terms of its conception and the nature of its activities, it differs significantly from the other programmes .

CEPS was established by the Moscow School together with support from the Higher Education Support Programme and the Russian National Training Foundation. The project to create CEPS had a very clear aim, following on from many discussions with the management of OSI and other international foundations working in Russia. Everyone involved in running educational projects and participating in reforms in the education system in Russia at that time was clearly aware that there was a very small pool of people with the requisite expertise and specialist experience in this field who could understand, formulate and handle education problems at this level.

Those who conceived and created CEPS, providing it with strategic, management and financial support, assigned to it the following aim: to develop highly-qualified world-class analysts and specialists with the ability and skills to propose solutions to problems in the design and operation of educational policy in their own regions and the country as a whole. Another important reason for the development of this project was the increasing fear on the part of international charitable foundations that if or when their financial support for individual educational projects and different types of centres of excellence were to stop, these programmes and centres would simply cease to exist, and there would be no systemic effect from their investment. Therefore the Centre had another aim: to develop the country’s human resources by means of training, so that new partnerships in thinking and activity could be established in the educational community. All those involved in creating the Centre considered it extremely important to focus efforts on effective capacity building – not just in Moscow, but across the Russian regions and countries of the former Soviet Union.

CEPS was the first of its kind in terms of its scope and its approach to working with students, as there was no other similar type of centre in existence at that time. It is still the only academic centre, not only in Russia, but across all of the former Soviet Union, where “another kind of leader”, specialists in educational policy, are trained at Masters level.

A key result of CEPS’ first four years of activity is a unique Masters programme which makes a clear contribution to the development of a new management elite in the field of education, has formed a network of like-minded people, and had attracted the best minds in the field (through its active programme of publishing, research, seminar and conference activities).