Register evidence on education, educational and training centres
This page collects counts from the national company registers of eight countries. It explains why education centre, educational centre and training centre are three separate concepts in our graph rather than one.
The probe: driving schools
Driving instruction is an unambiguous test, because it teaches one practical skill and nothing else. Wherever a register publishes both the name and the declared activity, driving schools attach to the teaching root and do not cross to the education root.
| Country | teaching root | driving schools / sport | education or coaching root |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suomi / Finland | koulutuskeskus 137 | 33 / 0 | valmennuskeskus 28 → 0 / 9 |
| България / Bulgaria | учебен център 143 | 30 / 0 | образователен център 168 → 0 / 0 |
| France | centre de formation | 29 / — | centre éducatif → 0 / — |
| United Kingdom | training centre 1275 | 14 / 30 | education centre 953 → 2 / 4 |
| Norge / Norway | opplæringssenter | — / 0 | treningssenter 180 → — / 147 |
In Finland, of 137 organisations built on the teaching root, 33 are driving schools and none is a sports body; on the coaching root the reverse — no driving schools and nine sports bodies. Bulgaria gives 30 against zero, France 29 against zero. In Norway 147 of 180 "training centres" are registered as fitness clubs, not education at all.
Regulation creates self-description
A shared language does not mean a shared term. Where the state regulates and names a category, the market adopts the state's word; where there is no such framework, the everyday word survives.
- Greek — Greece favours the statutory "training centre" (90 against 54), Cyprus the everyday "educational centre" (144 against 6)
- Serbo-Croatian — Croatia the education root, Serbia the instruction root
- Romanian — Romania "educational centre", Moldova "instruction centre"
- Spanish — Latin America "centro educativo" (13,000), Spain "centro de formación"
Caveats
The activity code is self-declared by the organisation at registration, and it may declare several. Statistical offices collect and publish but do not assign. These figures therefore show not an official classification of each organisation but what thousands of them state about themselves.
Search matches the phrase inside the name, so inflected forms and compounds may fall outside the sample. The Italian and Spanish registers are not machine-reachable: the Italian one returns a fuzzy ranked search with no phrase count, the Spanish one publishes aggregate statistics only.
Sources
Registers: Companies House (UK), répertoire des entreprises (France), Trade Register (Bulgaria), Enhetsregisteret (Norway), Patent and Registration Office (Finland), CVR (Denmark), ARES (Czechia), Äriregister (Estonia), register of non-profits (Israel), Zefix (Switzerland), ΓΕΜΗ (Greece), Registrar of Companies (Cyprus), CRO (Ireland). Statistics: Eurostat, NACE Rev. 2, UNESCO ISCED 2011, Cedefop glossary.