Chapter F
The strengths and weaknesses of the system

The Hungarian education system is undergoing a large-scale transformation. The changes have brought about a lot of good and innovative developments but there are also a lot of problems to tackle. Sometimes there are both positive and negative aspects to the same change. In the following section we are going to overview some of the major changes from this viewpoint.

Perhaps the biggest strength of this system currently in transition is the change towards a decentralised system of administration or, in other words, a system of shared responsibilities. A great number of agents (educational policy-makers at the national, the regional and the local levels, officials, social organisations, experts, market actors, teachers, parents, pupils, and the media) take a smaller or greater responsibility for the reform of the Hungarian education system. This means that a lot of different interests are articulated and a lot of players have a stake in the operation of the system. There are inevitable negative tendencies in a period like this; for example, there are no guarantees that corruption or abuse may be prevented. Yet, these unwelcome phenomena can be more or less suppressed by the proper degree of transparency and by the articulated interests of the different groups involved. It is an invaluable asset that the system allows innovation and creativity to thrive, as well as the capacity to learn from others.

The Hungarian educational supply has been made multi-coloured by the decentralised administration and the multiplicity of interests. Teachers, schools and parents have a growing variety of curricular programmes, textbooks and teaching aids to select from. The possibility for new agents (professional organisations, market forces, experts from higher education and the social sciences) to take part in the development of this supply has resulted in a surplus of innovation that by far surpasses the possibilities afforded by the economic conditions of the country (and its public education system). Innovation helps mobilise new financial resources. Beyond the central and local public resources, many additional sources (private, economic and foreign) have been drawn on in the financing of this educational modernisation through applications and cooperation.

It is probably due to the enrichment of educational choice that - according to various public opinion polls - parents in different areas and institutions are usually satisfied with the schooling of their children and the acceptance rates of schools among parents have risen in the past few years. Nevertheless, macro-level analyses often voice concerns about the realisation of the two basic values of education: equity and quality. As a consequence of the reform of the school structure and of content regulation, the system has not only become multi-coloured but also less transparent, making it much more difficult to judge and control the realisation of these two values. There are reasons for concern, for example, concerning the transferability of the system. The achievements and higher educational chances of students and student groups in different secondary schools, for example, have begun to show characteristic deviations. It is still hard to judge what role is played in these phenomena by social and economic transformation, by the different economic chances of the different settlements and regions, by individual choices, and by the conditions provided by public education. It can be generally stated that schools cannot compensate for the unfavourable effects of the social and economic processes of the past few years (such as the growing differences between the various strata of society concerning incomes and life chances). Bigger publicity and support can be expected to be given in the coming years to the programmes that may compensate for these disadvantages.

New solutions are required by the decentralisation of the education system also in the field of quality assurance in general. The Hungarian system in its current rapid transition does not yet have enough guarantees built in to ensure that schools (every school) follow curricular programmes and textbooks of a proper quality. Much of the responsibility for educational contents lies with market forces (the textbook and curricular supply) but the competition between them will bring about more even and better quality only in the long term. To enhance this process and to protect the interests of the young people in school today, the methods of quality assurance and of rewarding and supporting quality work (programme accreditation systems, forms of self-development for schools, etc.) are being rapidly developed.

The system of shared responsibilities can only function if the various sides involved strive for an attitude of cooperation and consensus-seeking. The developments of the past few years have brought forth examples both of these attitudes and their opposite. The various actors - sometimes voluntarily, sometimes due to the lack of expertise and political experience or to the incorrect estimation of their own abilities - are often driven by self-interest or miscalculate the consequences of their actions. But when the different parties recognise the potential of cooperation and the more rewarding effects of a common effort, they can create a wealth of innovation in this field (communication, forms of cooperation). For example, there have been a lot of cost-effective and quality-improving solutions developed in the field of small regional cooperation (sharing certain teachers, e.g. language teachers, who would have a low number of lessons in a small school, organising common in-service training programmes for the teachers of several small schools, etc.) Similar solutions can be seen in the organisational and developmental work of the professional organisations that extend to several areas or regions.

The system of shared responsibilities requires a mutual willingness to make concessions and to arrive at a common interpretation of concepts. Co-ordination is more difficult to create in such a system, the operation is characteristically based on the principle of precedence. The culture of the latter has developed greatly in the past few years, but a lot of elements are still underdeveloped or missing. There is still a lot of unevenness in a variety of fields, such as the flow of information, the development of forms of cooperation, a proper system of legal redress, the preparedness of the agents, the supporting mechanisms (e.g. appeasement, conflict resolution), and the acceptability of the system at its various levels, whatever its location.

Having access to the necessary information and ensuring its proper flow in a system that is highly decentralised and where there are large number of innovations being carried out at the same time is a huge problem. As we have seen, there are challenges to be faced in this field in Hungary. The inherited information system has difficulties in following school programmes that cut through the traditional institutional structures. The current statistical system (which builds on the different types of secondary schools) is unable to describe and reflect the actual richness of the educational work conducted in the institutions. Data collection so far has failed to keep up with the developments having recently taken place in the field of curricular programmes. Statistical data collection and processing will obviously have to catch up with the changes stemming from the transformation of the system of educational administration.

It is also a challenge that the parties involved in the decision-making processes do not possess the same level of professional expertise. There are a lot of problems connected with the fragmentation of maintainer administration: due to the large numbers and the small sizes of the local governments it is difficult, or even impossible, to develop the professional expertise needed for the local administration of public education. The professional development and continuous training of local governmental officials (and politicians) who are responsible for public education is an arduous task. Among the conditions of shared responsibilities, this task will probably require more intense cooperation between the ministries that are responsible for education and for the operation of the local governments.

As we have seen there are a number of problems concerning the efficiency of the education system. In the financial administration of Hungarian public education, the decisions about the use of the resources are mostly made by local decision-makers. These decisions - made within the framework of the central documentation - are basically determined by the local interests and interest relations. Whether the use of the resources is efficient in Hungarian public education or not, basically depends on the quality of the local decisions. And the quality of these decisions varies greatly. A lot of questions have arisen recently concerning the administration of the workforce in public education. We have seen that though Hungarian teachers work under fairly favourable working conditions (the teacher/pupil ratio is low, and so is the number of compulsory lessons) they suffer from extremely unfavourable and still deteriorating pay conditions. Yet, this situation has not been brought about by positive decision-making. On the contrary, it is a result of not making decisions, or rather of neglecting problems.

One of the major dilemmas of the Hungarian education system today is that it has inherited an employment and pay structure where job security used to be a basic value and suppressed salaries used to be accepted. This legacy is less and less viable among the developing market relations. But the news about the dismissals and the re-training of teachers are often perceived by the general public as injuring the interests of the education sector while it is also known that salaries cannot be kept at these low levels. Such discrepancies between expectations hinder the development of an efficient management of the labour force in education.

By turning teachers into local employees, the development of human resource management at the local level has become both possible and necessary. But the questions of the working conditions and the salaries of teachers do not usually come up in their full professional and financial complexity during the local budgetary debates, and alternatives are rarely elaborated clearly. Admistrators today have a basic interest in avoiding conflicts, which leads to little change in the given local relations. This statement can be exemplified by the results of the local x-raying processes that have revealed that administrators are willing to accept the splitting of study groups in exactly those schools where the number of pupils is decreasing. By splitting the groups, schools try to maintain the number of teachers, despite the decline in pupil numbers. Such solutions do not contribute to the improvement of either the efficiency or the quality of education, yet these requirements are not voiced (or not with the proper weight) by the local communities.

Finally it is important to stress that even though the development of the system of shared responsibilities in Hungarian public education is the result of a longer development, the process of transition is not, by far, over yet. Many elements of the system are still too novel for some, so they are unable as yet to gain the knowledge and the skills required by the responsibility they have to exercise, or they have not yet developed the new techniques of cooperation and control that are prerequisites of the successful operation of the system. The advancement of the current learning process - especially if it is aided by clear-sighted policies - may significantly improve the capacity of the system to realise the major objectives of public education.