The members of Matching in Practice are involved in a large-scale mapping of matching practices in education and related markets in Europe. If you have comments on some of the descriptions included herein or want to contribute comments or expertise, please contact us.
In practice, there are many other markets that are connected to education markets and several of them are regulated in some form. These include the market for daycare places, the market for teachers, which is centralized or semi-centralized in some countries, and the allocation of young graduates to internship positions that are an intrinsic part of their training (clerk positions for lawyers and medical internships for doctors). This page describes some of these practices.
Countries or regions with available information are coloured blue, please click on each country or region for related profile. A list of profiles on related markets can be found here.
| UK (Scotland) | |
|---|---|
| What is allocated? | Foundation training program. |
| Who is in charge? | NHS Education for Scotland; the matching scheme is run in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow (Rob Irving & David Manlove). |
| Restrictions on preference | Applicants must provide a preference list of a specified length, currently 10. |
| Matching procedure | A heuristic to find a stable matching in the presence of couples. |
| Priorities & Quotas | Applicants are ranked globally by score; quotas are decided by individual units. |
| Tie-breaking | random tie-breaking, but with repetition in an attempt to maximize the size of matching |
| Other features | Couples are accommodated. |
| France | |
|---|---|
| What is allocated? | Teaching positions in public schools. |
| Who is in charge? | The central administration for the inter-regional phase. Regions for the intra-regional phase. |
| Restrictions on preference | Inter-region mobility: no restrictions. Intra-region mobility: at most 20 schools (or cities, department…) ranked. |
| Matching procedure | The assignment uses a variant of the school-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm, followed by cycles. |
| Priorities & Quotas | There are no quotas. A point system, based on legal criteria and individual characteristics, is used to rank teachers. |
| Tie-breaking | Inter-region mobility: date of birth (rarely used given the numerous criteria entering priorities over teachers) Intra-region mobility: teachers have the possibility to rank large geographic areas. Tie-breaking might be used to select a school within this area. |
| Israel | |
|---|---|
| What is allocated? | Medical internships. |
| Who is in charge? | The Ministry of Health and a committee elected by the student body. |
| Restrictions on preference | Students must rank all hospitals. |
| Matching procedure | Variant of competitive equilibrium with equal incomes (CEEI). |
| Priorities & Quotas | Proportional to hospitals’ size, and extra for periphery. |
| Other features | Couples are to the same hospital. |
| Germany | |
|---|---|
| What is allocated? | Trainee teacher positions |
| Who is in charge? | Ministries of Education at the state level |
| Restrictions on preference | Preference lists limited to three to four teacher seminars |
| Matching procedure | Varies across states; commonly serial-dictatorship, first-preference-first or combinations of both |
| Priorities & Quotas | States set legal framework and provide priority criteria and quotas |
| Tie-breaking | Varies. Seminars mostly use subordinate criteria such as subject combination and a lottery as last option |
| Other features | Consideration of social scores in priority rankings varies between states |