Common legacy,different paths: the transformation of educational systems in the Czech Republic,Slovakia, Hungary and Poland

The goal of this work is to better understand the institutional changes in the educational systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We demonstrate that the educational reforms implemented during the transformation introduced very different institutional arrangements in the four countries, despite the fact that their systems shared many common characteristics at the beginning of the 1990s. Differences between the national approaches to educational reforms are particularly reflected in the modes of education decentralisation, the level of school autonomy, accountability and funding mechanisms. We believe that different institutional arrangements may have contributed to the divergent achievements of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland in the PISA programme.     

Research engagement and educational decentralisation: problematising primary school English teachers’ research experiences in China

Teachers are encouraged to enhance professional competence through reflective practice and they are also asked to undertake research to generate evidence for their professional practices. This paper reports on an inquiry into a group of primary school English language teachers’ research engagement in the province of Guangdong on the Chinese mainland. The inquiry explored the effect of educational reforms on the participants’ research engagement through the use of an open‐ended questionnaire and group interviews. The inquiry revealed that research engagement had become an important part of the teachers’ professional lives. Emerging findings from the inquiry also problematised their research engagement as it was found to have been undermined by a competitive promotion mechanism, the teachers’ conceptualisations of research and challenges in the knowledge dissemination process. The paper ends with reflections on how to make teacher research “educational” for teachers and serve as an effective way for professional development.     

Knowledge Capabilities of Local Government in the Context of Decentralisation in Ukraine

Abstract

There is an increasing actualisation of the knowledge component of the institutional capacity of local self-government authorities in Ukraine within ongoing decentralisation. The issue that arises concerns the officials’ knowledge sufficiency to generate and implement new ideas on the territories’ development, and the availability of unique skills for the development of relevant programmes, projects and plans. Herein, the analysis of the real knowledge needs of officials, whose sphere of competence lies in decision-making about the territories’ ways of development as well as their practical implementation, plays an important role. The article presents the results of a study of the opinions of local self-government officials of united territorial communities (UTCs) from the Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Zhytomyr, Kherson and Poltava regions of Ukraine, concerning their level of knowledge on the territories’ management; their needs for additional knowledge; the most common and convenient ways of obtaining knowledge; and the most problematic areas where the new knowledge is most demanded. The obtained data and the conclusions drawn can be considered, in particular, as an informational basis for the formation of training programmes and plans, cases and tasks for specialists training in the field of public administration.     

Educational decentralisation in Zimbabwe and Malawi: A study of decisional location and process

Debates about decentralisation, involving questions such as who should make decisions about public schooling and who should pay for it [Caillods, F., 1999. Preface. In: McGinn, N., Welsh, T. (Eds.), Decentralization of Education: Why, When, What and How? UNESCO, Paris] have permeated and affected educational planning in the last 20 or so years. This paper reports on and draws lessons from two pieces of work: an empirical study on the locus of decentralised decision-making power among Zimbabwean school heads, teachers and parent school governors in the areas of school finances, human resources and curriculum; and on a review of one article on the process of educational decentralisation in Malawi. Cross-national studies are necessary in this age of the internationalisation of education. The paper reveals that the process of educational decentralisation, and stakeholders’ perceptions of the locus of decentralised decision-making power are contested issues. There is no automatic link between decentralisation and the improvement of quality. The level of clarity of the guiding policy (ies), the capacity of the stakeholders, and the availability of resources are important deciders of the success or failure of educational decentralisation.     

The reforming trajectory of the Italian educational system. Site‐based management and decentralisation as a challenge for democratic discourse

This article aims to present some tensions embedded in the Italian educational reform, arising both from the enactment of neo‐liberal policies and the possibilities of democratic development opened up by the introduction of schools’ site‐based management and decentralisation. The article uses discourses as heuristic devices and presents two case studies regarding the enactment of policies of educational governance promoted in 2003 by a local authority (the Italian Provincia) and inspired by the democratic discourse. These policies were intended to promote the participation and collaboration of schools and heads in educational planning. It illustrates how the neo‐liberal discourse re‐shaped the Italian educational system and challenged welfarism. At the same time, we also attempt to illustrate the action of cultural path dependencies and the space emerging for a democratic discourse, which could be interpreted both as an alternative to its neo‐liberal counterpart and as an attempt to re‐discover democratic participation and promote more equity‐oriented practices in the educational field. Two different understandings of educational governance and headship seem to emerge. The study underlines how the intertwining of national and local policies inspired by contradicting discourses could result in the spread of competitive practices and consequently in a further differentiation of the educational provision and stratification between schools, or have an egalitarian outcome, where processes of collaboration, collective empowerment and reflexivity are enacted. Our work demonstrates how democratic and collaborative spaces opened up by site‐based management and policies of educational governance implemented at a local level are always at risk, due both to the rise of competitive pressures and the resilience of welfarist discourses and practice.     

Determinants of ‘community participation’: the tradition of local initiatives and the institutionalisation of school management committees in Oromia Region,Ethiopia

A School Management Committee (SMC) is an administrative tool adopted in many developing countries to decentralise administrative and financial responsibilities at school level, while involving local people in decision-making and making education more responsive to demands. I question the assumption linking administrative decentralisation and popular participation. There is a long-lasting tradition in Africa of schools built and run through local initiatives, even in the absence of governmental education services. Instead of seeing SMCs as a means to promote community participation and evaluating its effectiveness, I investigate people’s motivation to commit to education and the social dynamics beyond the institutionalised framework of SMCs. I also shed light on factors that cause differences in the extent and form of participation.     

Fee-free education,decentralisation and the politics of scale in Papua New Guinea

Policies aimed at both reducing the costs associated with schooling (particularly through fee-free education) and decentralising responsibility for education delivery have become a central part of international education doctrine. This article draws on the ‘politics of scale’ literature to highlight how these education reforms are contested at different scales, in turn leading to uneven administrative and material outcomes. It examines education policy reforms in Papua New Guinea, which have – contra international trends – sidelined non-state actors and strengthened the state’s role in managing education services. National fee-free education policy has been contested at different administrative scales. Church administrators have rallied (without much success) at national directives; subnational administrators and politicians have had greater success, rolling back some aspects of national policy; while local-level schools have employed their own tactics to resist national fee-free education policy. In turn, this case study highlights how fee-free educational policy shapes and is shaped by conflict at multiple administrative scales. The article’s findings have implications for debates about the relationship between fee-free education and decentralisation policies.     

Regional Differences in Higher Educational Choice?

This paper examines geographical differences in choice of field in higher education. Formerly, educational attainment differed considerably between rural areas and urban centres. Today these differences are pretty much offset. What kind of education students from different geographical areas pursue is however less well known. This article examines this question. It analyses data from public administrative registers on the entire Norwegian population born between 1955 and 1983. It finds that people who have grown up close to a university more often study at a university, whereas people who have grown up near a university college more often study at a university college. Corresponding differences are found in the choice of educational field.     

Disjunctured reciprocity: paradoxes of community-school relationship in Nepal

ABSTRACT

Community-based school governance has been promoted as a popular policy for decentralisation of education around the world. Within this policy, schools are expected to create institutional spaces such as School Management Committees with an assumption of reciprocal relation between school and community. This article questions the simplistic assumption through an ethnographic study of community-school relationship in Nepal. While these relationships may conflict with the kind of reciprocity assumed in school governance policies, we argue that this disjunctured reciprocity, firstly, reflects the gap between policy blueprints and action, and, secondly, reveals the competing logics of community-school relations which remain unacknowledged.