OECD Reviews of School Resources: Denmark 2016 (eBook)

Bruce Shaw, Deborah Nusche, Thomas Radinger, Torberg Falch (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
OECD Publishing (Verlag)
978-92-64-26247-8 (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.

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Executive summary

Denmark’s public school system (Folkeskole) is based on trust, local autonomy and horizontal accountability. Municipalities and schools are responsible for making decisions about how to use and allocate their resources. This provides good conditions for managing resources effectively and for making sure resource decisions meet local needs. At the same time, municipalities and schools are held accountable for and supported in the management of their resources. There is a high level of financial commitment to education. Expenditure per student has always been clearly above average expenditures in the OECD and the EU. Recent policies, however, have acknowledged that better learning outcomes for all students are possible without using more of society’s resources on education. Concerning equity in funding, the Danish funding system entails explicit mechanisms for equalisation between municipalities and schools. The country’s approach to funding municipalities reduces differences in financial capacity across municipalities. Within municipalities, the fact that students facing some kind of disadvantage need extra resources and follow-up is widely accepted and school funding mechanisms typically take socio-economic characteristics of a school’s student body into account.

Despite sustained high investment in education and provisions to ensure needs-based funding for schools, Denmark has a relatively small share of top-performers and there is room to improve the equity of educational outcomes, especially for immigrant students. Against this backdrop, Denmark has been successful in building consensus around the need for change and in implementing a number of reforms. This includes a wide-reaching reform of the Folkeskole since 2014, focussing broadly on three main areas of improvement: a longer and more varied school day with longer and better teaching and learning; better professional development for teachers, pedagogical staff and school principals; and few and clear objectives as well as a simplification of rules and regulations. The reform set three national goals for student achievement, equity and wellbeing to provide a clear direction and framework for the systematic and continuous evaluation of the reform. The Folkeskole reform is paradigmatic of Denmark’s recent goal-oriented approach to policy and reform which holds the potential to create a sense of common purpose within a highly decentralised school system as well as greater transparency about the success of reform initiatives. Other reforms include changes to initial teacher education, the introduction of a new framework for the utilisation of teachers’ working hours (Act no. 409), and a policy of inclusion of children with special educational needs in mainstream education.

There is evidence of a growing willingness at all levels of the system to dialogue around pedagogical needs and to build on collaborative work to improve student achievement and wellbeing. However, the shift towards a culture of using data to improve student learning is still in its infancy. Teachers, school leaders and municipalities still face challenges in focussing on improved student learning and there is a need to strengthen the capacity of the different actors to work in a goal-oriented way. Embedding a learning focus in practice is a major cultural shift that needs to be implemented through a range of changes, including the further development of several aspects of teacher professionalism that are still at an early stage of development in Denmark and the strengthening of pedagogical leadership in schools.

Based on its analysis of strengths and challenges, the report identifies the following policy priorities to improve the effectiveness of resource use in the Danish Folkeskole.

Continue to pay attention to using resources efficiently and strengthen public reporting about the performance of the school system

Developments in the Folkeskole over recent years have the clear potential to contribute to its improved efficiency and effectiveness. The 2014 Folkeskole reform aims to further strengthen the focus on learning environments and student performance. Prior to the reform, there was a reduction in expenditure per student and the reform introduces a longer school day for students without a symmetric increase in the number of teachers. The introduction of a new framework for the utilisation of teachers’ working time (Act no. 409) has created greater flexibility for schools to use the time and competencies of their teachers. Whether the recent changes lead to greater efficiency and effectiveness will, however, depend on the ability of all actors in the system to use resources efficiently and to adapt to the changes the recent reforms imply. It will, therefore, be key to ensure that all actors continue to work intensively on using resources most effectively to improve student learning in relation to national goals. Knowledge-sharing across schools and municipalities will be particularly important in this regard. Considering changes to teachers’ working conditions, strategies to develop and allocate human resources effectively in schools are crucial to ensure the success of the reform. For instance, if teachers do not have the right conditions to prepare and collaborate as they use more of their time on teaching, there could be risks to both quality and equity in schooling.

Denmark should also consider strengthening its reporting about the performance of the school system to the public at large at all levels of the system to build and sustain the overall consensus for investments in the Folkeskole. Denmark could develop a system-wide reporting framework that brings together a broader range of financial indicators and outcome indicators. The reporting framework could form the basis for the periodic publication of key national analytical reports in addition to the digital publication of the data (e.g. in the ministry’s data warehouse). Municipalities and schools should make efforts to bring together and analyse data on the use of resources and outcomes. Municipalities should be encouraged to consider both financial and pedagogical dimensions in their biannual quality reports and to use data with a greater focus on the effective use of resources. Schools could benefit from a school-level reporting framework which enables them to examine the fiscal impact of their resource and curriculum decisions.

Give attention to all learning goals, monitor the learning outcomes of students at risk of underperformance and further support schools in striving towards excellence

A key challenge in monitoring education systems is to develop indicators and measures of performance that permit a good understanding of how well an education system is achieving its objectives. While national goals are typically comprehensive and broad, monitoring systems may be rather limited in the information they can offer. Schools should be encouraged to supplement standardised national assessment tools with a range of other assessments to obtain relevant information on student learning across the curriculum and to use this information to design differentiated teaching strategies. The ministry could consider introducing broader national measures of student learning to monitor the school system’s progress in stimulating students to excellence in higher-order thinking and the development of complex competencies (such as a light monitoring sample survey on a broader range of skills and competencies).

There is also room to give more prominence to monitoring inequities in learning outcomes between specific student groups. Education system targets could pay attention to the achievement of different student groups. It would be important to review how more targeted indicators for the achievement of equity goals could be included in the monitoring strategy for the Folkeskole reform. In particular, regular reporting of information on learning outcomes for groups for which there is evidence of systematic underperformance is recommended. Ensuring that key performance indicators in the ministry’s data warehouse are systematically disaggregated for different groups at risk of underperformance would be helpful for monitoring equity goals at all levels of the system. Given the high investment in schools enrolling students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds and students with special educational needs, municipalities and the school community should monitor how such funding is used in schools and how this translates into performance for students at risk of underperformance.

The Folkeskole reform aims to challenge all students to reach their full potential and to increase the number of high-performing students from year to year. A policy focused on achieving these ends must set high standards for achievement and would involve the use of differentiated approaches to teaching, assessment and evaluation to provide the right level of support and challenge to individual students, professionals and schools. Enhancing school evaluation practice would be key to continuously challenge all schools to improve and the national level could play a stronger role in stimulating more effective self-evaluation in schools and municipalities (e.g. through a national sample programme of external school reviews and/or a central evaluation framework to model good practice).

Promote the better use of data at all levels of the system

Information can only lead to school improvement if it is relevant, available in adequate quantity, and properly interpreted. As the Danish school...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.11.2016
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre
• ISBN-10: 92-64-26247-4 / 9264262474
• ISBN-13: 978-92-64-26247-8 / 9789264262478