OECD Reviews of School Resources: Austria 2016 (eBook)

Deborah Nusche, Henno Theisens, Marius R. Busemeyer, Thomas Radinger (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
OECD Publishing (Verlag)
978-92-64-25771-9 (ISBN)

Infos

The effective use of school resources is a policy priority across OECD countries. The OECD Reviews of School Resources explore how resources can be governed, distributed, utilised and managed to improve the quality, equity and efficiency of school education.

The series considers four types of resources: financial resources, such as public funding of individual schools; human resources, such as teachers, school leaders and education administrators; physical resources, such as location, buildings and equipment; and other resources, such as learning time.

This series offers timely policy advice to both governments and the education community. It includes both country reports and thematic studies.

Textauszug

Executive summary

The Austrian school system benefits from high levels of investment. Although education has also faced some budget cuts and budget pressures seem to be increasing, the recent economic and financial crisis did not yet have a strong impact on the education budget. An international comparison of spending data indicates still relatively high general levels of public investment in education in Austria. The school infrastructure is good and classes are relatively small and student-teacher ratios relatively low. However, there is concern that the country’s considerable commitment of resources to education has not sufficiently been translated into educational success as measured through international surveys. In the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012, the mean performance of Austrian 15-year-olds was only slightly above the OECD average and below the level of other European countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Finland. While Austria had a comparatively small share of low performers, the country also had a small share of top performers. There are also continued concerns about equity. Student’s socio‐economic background has a key impact on their achievement and educational trajectory through Austria’s stratified school system that is characterised by early tracking and selection. Students with an immigrant background are at particular risk of underperformance. Hence, the main challenge does not lie in expanding investments, but in using available resources more effectively and efficiently to improve the quality and equity of schooling.

The governance of school education in Austria is characterised by a complex distribution of responsibilities between the federal and the provincial levels based on a split between federal and provincial schools, a complex distribution of federal funding for teacher salaries of provincial schools, and limited school autonomy for their staff and finances. The present arrangements create structural challenges for the efficient management of school resources. As clear lines of accountability and integrated monitoring systems are lacking, governance arrangements set incentives to over- and misspend, obfuscate the flow of resources, and nourish a culture of mistrust. The distribution of responsibilities leads to the establishment of inefficient parallel structures – including for personnel management – in the form of provincial school boards and school departments of the provinces. And the present distribution of responsibilities prevents a more integrated approach to the governance of the school system. This is evident in the existence of multiple information systems which hampers a comprehensive approach to monitoring the performance of the system; the lack of strategic planning of the school offer as a whole which results in an inefficient organisation of the school network with many small schools; the lack of a comprehensive approach to monitoring and steering the supply and demand for teachers, and the lack of a comprehensive approach to making human resource allocation decisions which, together with negative incentives resulting from funding responsibilities, leads to a lack of administrative and pedagogical support staff. At the lower secondary level, important steps have been undertaken to harmonise the regulatory regime with the New Secondary School reform, a reform of initial teacher education, and the introduction of a new teacherservice code. However, besides needed change in the political willingness of all stakeholders, a full move to comprehensive schooling seems unlikely as long as the split between federal and provincial schools is maintained.

This report analyses the use of school resources in primary and lower secondary education in Austria based on the situation at the time of the visit of the OECD review team in June 2015. The federal government presented a comprehensive reform proposal in November 2015, but at the time of drafting, the political debate was ongoing and it was still unclear which elements would be implemented. This report focuses, in particular, on governance and funding, the organisation of the school offer, and the management of the teaching workforce. It identified the following policy recommendations and suggests prioritising a reform of the current governance arrangements.

Reform the current governance arrangements and improve the transparency of resource flows

Ideally, the governance and funding for all levels of education should be placed under the same regulatory regime ending the formal divide between federal and provincial schools (as well as between federal and provincial teachers). The dual structure of provincial school boards and school departments in the provincial governments should be transformed into a unitary structure. This would eliminate inefficiencies in the current system and create the conditions for integrated and strategic policy making, especially at the lower secondary school level. It would thus also facilitate moving to a more comprehensive school system in the future provided there is sufficient political willingness to delay early tracking and selection among all stakeholders. Given the legacy of Austria’s school system and political realities, any future governance and funding arrangement will most likely have to be a political compromise involving both the federal and the provincial levels. The new institutions are thus likely to have a hybrid character with shared responsibilities between the federal and the provincial levels.

The new institutions replacing the provincial school boards and the school departments of the provincial governments should be responsible for recruiting and assigning all teachers to individual schools with funding for all teachers being provided directly by the federal government via the new institutions. This would help align financing and spending responsibilities, render the complex transfer arrangement of teacher funding through the provincial administrations unnecessary, increase the transparency and effectiveness of funding flows and teacher allocation across different schools, and at the same time eliminate some rigidity in the teacher labour market. The employment of other pedagogical support staff, and possibly also of administrative support staff, should also be transferred to the new institutions responsible for teacher recruitment. This would facilitate a broader view of the human resource needs in schools and help to harmonise and equalise levels of support staff in different schools. Schools should gradually receive more autonomy for choosing their personnel, accompanied by effective accountability mechanisms, investments in school leadership capacity, and steps to increase school size. To keep other levels of governance involved in the funding of schools, municipalities and provincial governments could continue to be involved together with the federal level in financing maintenance costs and infrastructure investments. To facilitate strategic planning, responsibilities should be distributed by levels of education rather than school type. If municipalities remain involved in the funding of schools, it would be important to establish some kind of fiscal equalisation scheme on the provincial level to prevent inequalities between municipalities and schools. It would also be essential to provide incentives and support for a rational organisation of the school offer (e.g. through the creation of municipalschool associations (Schulgemeindeverbände), school clusters and larger catchment areas). Alternatively, the federal government could devolve all funding responsibilities for infrastructure and maintenance to the provinces and concentrate on the funding of teachers only. If a unified system of teacher funding and allocation that involves the federal and provincial authorities through the new institutions is not feasible and the current system of provincial and federal teachers and the split in responsibilities is maintained, some of the unintended incentives should be addressed. The refunding of teacher costs should be based on actual salary costs rather than nominally low salaries or an equal split between the federal and provincial governments in funding teachers for all general compulsory schools could be introduced, as is the case for vocational schools in dual VET where very little to no overspending occurs.

Austria should explore different ways to introduce more elaborate and needs-based formula funding which takes into account additional factors besides student enrolment to address inequities in a more targeted way and take steps to improve its accountability and controlling instruments. Both these measures would contribute to greater transparency of resource flows and help create greater levels of trust between different levels of government. Formula-based funding has the advantage that the criteria used to distribute funds across schools are made explicit and, therefore, open for informed debate and subject to political scrutiny. Bringing together the different information systems and merging them into an integrated system that links data on students, teachers, schools and resource flows would facilitate more rigorous accountability and monitoring of the use of resources. This is essential in a context in which the federal government is responsible for financing and the provinces are in charge of spending, thus setting problematic incentives and creating a lack of transparency and trust. More integrated data and information systems would allow drawing conclusions about the effective use of resources and thus facilitate more targeted policy interventions. And it would facilitate the monitoring and steering of the teacher labour...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.6.2016
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• ISBN-10: 92-64-25771-3 / 9264257713
• ISBN-13: 978-92-64-25771-9 / 9789264257719