The ultimate purpose of education indicators can be described as providing a basis for monitoring the quality of education. Even though the current indicator sets have become quite comprehensive, and there are clear signs of their use in policy-debates, there are still some important aspects in which their impact on educational policy and practice could be strengthened. Addressing this issue appeared to be extremely timely in terms of informing developments of evidence based policy and practice (e.g. in the DfES, UK) and was the main motive to carry out this study. The objectives were concerned with several conceptual issues, with more theme-based ways of reporting indicators and gearing them to policy issues and with feedback to lower level units of education systems, notably schools. The overall purpose of this study can be seen as learning from national use and application of educational indicators to provide suggestions for enhancing the supra national effort. In addition the aim was also to provide suggestions for the improvement of national applications through the mechanism of international exchange and countries learning from one another. This report consists of five thematic chapters and three country-based summary chapters of the interviews that were conducted with system level officials, politicians, and school directors. Chapter 1 (EJ794968), "Perspectives on Education Quality, Education Indicators, and Benchmarking" (Jaap Scheerens), provides six perspectives on educational quality. The second chapter (EJ794969), "Three Sets of Indicators on Education: 'Education at a Glance' (OECD), 'Key Data on Education' (European Union), 'The State of Education' (French Ministry of Education). Elements of Comparison and Analysis" (Julie Sedel), compares three indicators systems. Chapter 3 (EJ794970), "The Use of Educational Standards and Benchmarks in Indicator Publications" (Sally Thomas, Wen-Jung Peng), highlights the fact that a lot of variation exists in the conceptual interpretations and definitions of terms. Chapter 4 (EJ794971), "National Interpretations of the International Indicators" (Alejandro Tiana, Niels Egelund, Morin Thygesen), addresses national initiatives that were found in the countries that participated in the study. The fifth chapter (EJ794972), "Feedback of Indicators to Schools" (Peter van Petegem, Jan Vanhoof), addresses important methodological issues concerning the interpretation of school effects. The sixth thematic chapter (EJ794973), "Attention that Indicators Receive in the Press" (Maria Hendriks, Giovanna Barzano, Emanuela Brumana, Claudia Cremonesi), presents an analysis of press coverage on the international indicator publication in Italy. The country-based chapters [Chapter 7 (EJ794974), "Reports on the Interviews about Reception and Use of International Indicators"; Chapter 8 (EJ794975), "Reports on the Interviews with School Principals"; and Chapter 9 (EJ794976) "Benchmarking the Quality of Education: Discrepancies and Correspondence between Theory and Practice in Seven European Countries"] present interviews with state-level officials and politicians and discuss the degree to which the international indicator publications are known and how this information is used.