4. Possible answers to the challenges: Recommendations

Following the analysis of the problems of the different areas above this chapter is going to propose some recommendations for the whole of the system of shared responsibilities and educational administration which can serve the solution of the problems arisen. The recommendations for the different areas are listed in the order of the previous chapter.

It is worth stressing at the outset that the recommendations phrased concerning the various areas and functions (personnel, content, financial administration, etc.) are closely interrelated and even overlap one another in several instances. It happens sometimes that one or another means (like the development of information and statistics) is recommended at different places These recommendations all serve the purpose of enhancing the values of equity, quality, efficiency and transparency in the Hungarian system of public education.

It is also worth mentioning beforehand, that the following recommendations for the solution of these problems are based on the conviction that there is no need to implement a major change in the system of shared responsibilities, which has developed in the past decade, as it is possible to find better solutions within the framework of this system. So none of our recommendations tend to change the basic characteristics of this system.

4.1 Teachers and Personnel Policy

Concerning the employment and the salaries of teachers, and through this the stimulation for quality work, i.e. the development of the quality of education, - as it was indicated in the previous chapter as well - there are basically efficiency problems arising but we also have to deal with the problems of quality and equity. In view of this we recommend the following suggestions for consideration:

4.1.1 Strategic responsibility at the minister’s level

Defining a strategic responsibility for the efficient use of teacher labour force at the minister’s level.

The public education act does not mention the minister’s responsibility - among the fields of his/her responsibilities - for the efficiency of the employment of the educational labour force (nor does it generally mention the responsibility for the efficient usage of resources). This is why the minister of education is compelled neither to develop a national strategy for the efficient employment of the teaching force, nor to establish the structural conditions within the ministry that could deal with these issues. In the decentralised Hungarian system this responsibility could obviously be exercised via indirect ways and methods. It would therefore be advantageous to determine the minister’s responsibility for the development of the strategies and the means that could improve the efficiency of the usage of resources in general and within this the employment of the teaching force in particular.

4.1.2 Statistics and informationsystem

The development of the public educational information, statistics and assessment system

The information and statistics system of public education should be developed in a way that it could give a proper overview of the local teaching force management and of the inequalities in the availability of teachers, and that it can render the introduction of some strategic measures possible. It is also necessary to be able to assess directly the local and institutional characteristics of the provision with, or availability of, teachers and of the employment of the teaching force. The assessment system of public education therefore has to be updated with elements that make the assessment of such local characteristics possible, such as (a) whether the maintainers properly ensure that the teachers employed in their institutions possess the qualifications required by the law, and (b) whether the institutions follow the accepted standards of the organisation of the pedagogical work. This information and assessment system should also help monitor whether the agreements with the social partners concerning the salaries and working conditions of teachers are met with.

4.1.3 Regional planning and teacheremployment

The inclusion of the issue of the efficient use of the teaching force into the process of county-level planning

During the preparation of the county developmental and school-enrolment plans it would be worth including the efficiency of labour-force management and the compensation for the inequalities in the provision with teachers as independent elements. The county public foundations should be advised to support the local initiatives that aim at these aspects (such as the initiatives to share some of the teaching force between institutions), and these considerations should be born in mind when deciding about the central support of these public foundations.

4.1.4 Achievement and pay

Rewarding quality teaching and overwork

As it was mentioned before the concept of efficiency is understood to include the concept of quality professional work. From the point of view of the individuals this means that it is necessary to deal with the issue of rewarding high quality work. So, for example, the connection between the efforts of the individual and the reward for these efforts established by the 1996 Amendment of the Public Education Act concerning teacher in-service training should be further strengthened. Besides this, it would be necessary to establish further connections between the assessment of everyday teaching and its rewards (such as merit pay for the fulfilment of the pedagogical programme). It is important to stress - and international experiences confirm this - that such a merit pay is only approved of if the level of the ordinary salaries is generally acceptable and accepted, and that it can only be realised with the allocation of additional resources. It is perhaps somewhat easier to reward extra or overwork, though it is not always easy to tell the difference between the quality and the quantity of work.

4.1.5 Social agreements

Improving the mechanisms of the social agreements and the guarantees to keep them

When making an agreement, social partners have to adjust themselves to the characteristics of the decentralised system. On the one hand it means that is it not the amount of salaries they have to agree upon, but the rules how individual salaries and wages in reality are determined. On the other hand, it should be realised that agreements should be made not only at one (central) level, but at two (central and local) levels as well.

New means have to be found to guarantee that meeting with the agreements between the social partners about the salaries and working conditions can be monitored even in a decentralised system of educational administration. Such means are above all, that social partners should have the necessary information about the general processes of the state budget and of the processes in the education system. When making agreements on salaries and additional bonuses they need information about changes in the financial support system of local governments and also about changes in their general economic conditions, on the one hand, while on the other hand they also need information about how changes in the taxation and in the financial support system influence individuals and institutions. Successful agreements (that can be implemented) would need the involvement of the school maintainers in making these agreements, the encouragement of the horizontal harmonisation between the interest-negotiating organisations of the school maintainers, and the drawing-up of clearer boundaries between the results of the local salary bargains and the central salary regulations. It would also need a systemic collection and analyses of information about the implementation of social agreements.

4.1.6 The non-pedagogical staff

The employment of the non-pedagogical staff in non-public employee status

Concerning the efficiency of labour-force management the strategic issue would be worth bringing up, and giving political considerations to, that the non-teaching staff, and especially the labour force not fulfilling professional educational tasks, should be more generally employed as non-public employees (techniques such as finite contracting or commissioning could be used).

4.1.7 Communication and learning

Raising the awareness of the problem among the public actors, the development of co-operation techniques

As the majority of the problems around the employment of teachers and personnel policies - as mentioned previously - are problems with communication, co-operation, and mutual learning and adaptation problems, these areas deserve some special attention devoted to them. We recommend the consideration of the following:

(a) It would be desirable if the various alternatives of employment policy and the various employment and payment philosophies were represented in a stressed and high-quality way in the educational policy and economic policy discourses about the employment and payment of teachers, and if the notions, the vocabulary of employment, became accepted and desirably free from political connotations (notions such as efficiency, dismissal, re-training, part-time employment, labour force administration plans, labour market analyses, etc.) There will have to be discussions held about the role of the state in the sphere of public employment among the conditions of a market economy and about the state’s possible means and measures in this field. It has to be clarified that governments (both the central and the local governments) bear a responsibility not only towards the teachers for guaranteeing their living conditions but also towards the whole society, especially towards the pupils and their parents, when trying to offer the best available quality at the lowest possible costs. It would also be important to explore and analyse the experiences accumulated in the field of teacher employment in the past few years.

(b) Problems do not only arise from the lack of knowledge but also from the insufficiency of the means at the disposal of the various actors (though these two factors are certainly closely interrelated). This is why it would be necessary to enlarge the set of political means at the disposal of the governments, the maintainers and the institutional heads (the employers). In the training of public educational managers the development and dissemination of programmes should be encouraged that would devote special attention to the efficiency aspects of employing teachers and to the general issues of personnel policy at the local and institutional levels. Information about the employment of the teaching force and the economic analyses of these practices in various foreign countries should be widely disseminated. The in-service training programmes of civil servants should partly focus on employment issues so that more knowledge of this field can accumulate within the central and local governments. There should be means and measures, such as calls for applications, to stimulate the gathering and the dissemination of the experiences gained within the country in this field and seminars could be organised around these topics. There should be a forum created that could spread the experiences (for example in the media co-operation of the local governmental press and the press of public education), and a wide publicity should be given to the different experiences (to both the successes and the failures) of labour force management.

(c) It would generally be worth devoting special attention to the introduction of efficient (regional and local) co-operation techniques but in this field some stronger measures would be necessary: namely the promising forms of co-operation should be encouraged. There should be resources put aside and special techniques developed at the central, regional and local levels of administration so that the efficient ways of labour force management could be rewarded. (Such solutions could include the joint employment by several settlements of teachers who teach subjects with little timetable time or teachers who fulfil or assist in the tasks of special education.) Perhaps a special system of applications, or a special application fund, could be created for this purpose.

4.2 The Content of Education

Following the introduction of the two-level, dual content regulation - as it was pointed out in the previous chapter - new kinds of quality problems appeared inevitably in Hungarian public education and the inequalities have increased. This is why changes that can effectively compensate for these problems have to be brought about in the responsibility relations, in the means at the disposal of the various actors, and in the system of supports and accountability. One of the most serious problems is connected with the professional quality of the central programme supply from where the schools can choose. In order to ensure that the central programmes¹ be distributed after a proper quality control several measures can be proposed:

4.2.1 The requirements for the centrally disseminated curricular programmes

The requirements set for the centrally disseminated curricular programmes (exemplary curricula) have to be defined more clearly

The general requirements for the curricular programmes that are issued centrally and can be adopted by the schools have to defined more clearly than up till now and they cannot be left at the sole discretion of the professional organisations in charge. It would be necessary, for example, to clearly distinguish institutional programmes on the one hand and individual subject programmes on the other, to document the piloting results of new programmes, to list in detail the textbooks and other teaching aids that might accompany the programmes, and to document the possible connections of the programmes.²

4.2.2 The infrastructure of programme development

The service institutions responsible for the central programme supply have to be developed and their tasks have to be defined more clearly

The national institutional infrastructure responsible for the establishment and maintenance of the central curricular programme supply is very underdeveloped. The institutional background (a national organisation for the development and dissemination of programmes) matching the challenge has to be developed. Furthermore, the complementary tasks of such an organisation for the development of programmes, including quality assurance, have to be defined more clearly in the documents that regulate the operation of the organisation, and meeting these aspects have to be taken into a more serious account during the external evaluation of the organisation.

4.2.3 Assessment of the programmes

Assessment of the working of the programmes in schools

There could be a regular assessment programme introduced to monitor how the centrally approved programmes work in reality. The organisations operating at the given professional field and the social partners concerned could be involved in such assessments, and research-type analyses could be commissioned. The central curricular programmes generally have to be given a much wider professional and societal publicity and the professional debates on them have to be encouraged.

It is by no means a lesser problem, as we have seen, to assure the quality of the programmes developed at the school level and to avoid that unacceptably wide inequalities appear between schools in this respect. The further steps could be taken to avoid such a situation:

4.2.4 Requirements for school level programmes

The external requirements set for the programmes developed at the school level should be defined more clearly

There is only a short article in the public education act on the requirements set for the programmes developed at the school level. A more detailed regulation would be desirable, which does not necessarily mean some legal regulation. For example, certain general professional standards could be determined and disseminated which are not legally binding yet would enjoy a proper professional legitimacy.

4.2.5 The system of experts

The development of the system of experts

In determining whether a school’s programme meets the requirements the public educational experts play a determining role. Besides regulating how someone can become an expert -which in itself could be more refined - it would be necessary to regulate the operation of the experts. There could be three basic aims set in this respect: (1) the assessment carried out by the expert should follow some more specific external standards, (2) schools should be made accountable for the compliance with the expert’s opinion, (3) all maintainers should be able to cover the expenses of the experts’ assessment work. It would also be important to develop the experts’ programme assessment competencies, which could be enhanced by further training and by some measures that help the professionalisation of the experts’ activities (such as supporting their self-organisation).

4.2.6 The responsibilities of the maintainer

The re-regulation of the maintainers’ responsibilities for the approval of school programmes

Since in the case of the smallest local governments the lack of the competencies needed for the approval of the school programmes cannot be compensated for by the external expert assessment it would be worth considering whether this right and responsibility should not only be granted when certain conditions are met. Such a condition could, for example, be that the local government employ an official specialised in educational matters. As a measure like this would infringe the rights of the smaller local governments they should be granted some additional interest-negotiation rights. In general, in the adoption of school programmes it would be advisable to strengthen the role of the specially trained and appointed professional bodies as opposed to the role the lay elected bodies play at the moment. At the same time, the social partners who have a stake in the high-quality operation of schools could pay a bigger role in practising the social control than the elected political bodies.

4.2.7 Publicity

A wider publicity of the school programmes should be assured

According to the legal regulations the pedagogical programmes of the schools are public but the huge potentials lying in their public character are by no means exhausted at the moment. It would, for example, be possible to publicise, via electronic or other means among the wider professional and societal public, certain elements of the school pedagogical programmes - of all schools, without an exception - such as the proportion of timetable hours devoted to individual subjects,. The publication of the standard format of the school level pedagogical programmes would make it possible for the national level administration to make comparative assessments of these programmes.

It would generally be desirable to give more coherence and transparency to the Hungarian system of public education, which is becoming extremely diversified from the aspects of programmes and institutional structures. Without such a step the system will not only develop inequalities that are unacceptable but also become incomprehensible for the citizens. One of the major objectives of the National Core Curriculum adopted in 1995 was exactly to avoid this. At the same time, as we have seen, the National Core Curriculum bears very few means that would force the schools to comply. The main challenge is to bring about the schools’ gradual adaptation to the National Core Curriculum without seriously limiting the autonomy of the local communities. Several of the recommendations mentioned so far can serve this purpose and the following can also be worth considering:

4.2.8 Regional planning

Realising the potentials in regional planning

As one of the possible means to influence the local institutional relations is the means of regional planning, this could be used to support a gradual adaptation to the National Core Curriculum as well. The central requirements laid down for the county development plans - the realisation of which are given central financial grants - should list some that explicitly serve this purpose (such as spreading and supporting programmes that organise education for 9th and 10th graders according to the NCC).

4.2.9 Communication and learning

The development and dissemination of programmes and school models based on the National Core Curriculum, helping adaptation by communication and learning

If models that are practically not compatible with the NCC meet approval in the process of programme development and in the support-scheme of institutional initiatives the central educational policy generates doubts in the local actors whether only NCC-compatible or also other programmes are acceptable. If the aim is to ensure that non-NCC-compatible programmes do not make their way into the central programme supply the NCC-compatibility of the central programmes and textbooks on offer and of the local pedagogical programmes has to be controlled more efficiently than today. To reach this aim the organisations responsible for the establishment of the programme supply have to be given the proper competencies and have to motivated to exercise their control properly.

Since the National Core Curriculum is a regulatory model significantly different from the previous ones the actors of public education need a longer learning period to be able to adapt to it. The institutional and financial conditions of this learning have to be granted continuously (the development of the INSET system). Learning can of course not be limited to formal training: a variety of professional and social communication forms can be strengthened (professional press, the communication between the professional organisations, research as communication, etc.)

4.3 School Infrastructures

We have indicated it in the previous chapter that concerning the school infrastructures there are serious problems with the assurance of equity and with the resources and financing possibilities at disposal, and, given the lack national standards, it is difficult to define the accountability of maintainers. As we have also argued, from the beginning of the 1990s maintaining a school in the Hungarian system of local governments meant a declaration of autonomy and freedom for the local governments, and it always met the expectations of the local electorate. By today, however, a majority of the local governments have realised that changes are necessary both in educational content and at the institutional level for the sake of financial efficiency. This tendency is supported by the amount of information that reaches the school maintainers via various channels on the educational standards and indicators of other European countries.

The following steps and measures can enhance the development of school infrastructures, the compliance with the standards, and a more effective use of the developmental resources:

4.3.1 Regional development and sectoral co-operation

Strengthening the ties between educational development and regional development, the development of sectoral co-operation

Since much of the infrastructure development is realised within the general system of regional development the main condition for the development of the public educational infrastructure is that this field has be devoted special attention to within regional development. To ensure that proper resources be channelled to this field the educational sector has to play an active role in the formulation of the legal regulations concerning regional development. It also have to take an active part in the formulation of the conceptions of regional development, especially by participating in the work of the decision-making bodies of regional development. With regard to vocational education it is an additional condition of the more effective use of the resources that any development be carried out in harmony with the policy of economic development and with the long-term conceptions of economic development.

4.3.2 The development of planning and resource-allocation

The development of regional public educational planning and clarifying its role

The further specification and widening of the tasks of regional planning would provide good grounds for the harmonisation of provision with institutions and equipment in Hungarian public education to set sail. The first step in this direction should be the passing of a regulation that would compel the maintainers of schools (and the schools at the local governmental level) to provide data, and would determine what data should be made available. It is essential that correct and up-to-date data be available at the local, regional and national levels on the areas of educational contents, financing, infrastructures, employment and services. Once the data provision begins the county public foundations should be advised to support - via calls for application - surveys and research projects that would compare the educational infrastructures and when the results are available they could support the development of these infrastructures. The support and the harmonisation of the infrastructure development can follow different paths: the development of existing institutions and their equipment could be supported in view of the accepted standards, but it is probably more advisable to support - along the already piloted lines - the associations of the maintainers because this way the share of costs to be underwritten by the different local governments becomes smaller.

To realise this recommendation it would also be necessary to create channels for continual communication between the experts responsible for the process of regional planning, the representatives of the county public foundations, and the central educational government. The central government should create the means of providing professional-methodological assistance for the county planners and the receivers of the resources. It is of outstanding importance to develop the professional quality of the way the county public foundations distribute their funds. One means of this is to elaborate the standards of the applications and the standards of their evaluation.

4.3.3 The development of standards

The development of the standards of infrastructure (buildings and equipment)

Besides the elaboration of certain architectural and other regulations it is important to develop architectural and other equipment standards for the sector of public education. This process was started during 1998 by the adoption of a ministerial decree on the provision with equipment. In the long run compliance with the infrastructure standards will also have to be controlled. Preceding this, however, the maintainers will have to be empowered with the knowledge and the means that enable them to comply with the quality requirements (e.g. by earmarked grants to help them catch up in fields they lag behind).

4.3.4 Co-operation between the settlements

Strengthening the co-operation and association of settlements (in small regions and around towns)

It is a basic condition of the effective development of educational infrastructures that the inter-settlement or small regional forms of co-operation and association be strengthened. The national-level legal regulations to enable this are now generally given but further measures have to be taken to develop the proper relations of interest. The central grants have to motivate the maintainers for common or shared task provision and the developmental decisions that aim at it. It would be fruitful to elaborate a sample association contract of maintainers that would list the rights and the financing and other responsibilities of the partners to help prevent that the formed associations become meaningless or dissolve after the first serious conflict. It would be essential to spread widely the experiences of the successful associations, i.e. to demonstrate for the hesitating or doubtful local decision-makers that the inter-settlement co-operation leads to more favourable conditions for all.

4.3.5 Supporting local task financing

Spreading task financing nation-wide

The development of school equipment provision and the upgrading of equipment quality can be helped by the spreading of task financing. In task financing the school maintainer sets up the budget of the institution by making decisions about the financing of each institutional task on a yearly basis. This way what is common today cannot happen in the future, i.e. that there are no resources allocated to the development of school equipment or to the maintenance of the equipment of computer technology. (The current situation can be explained by the practice of base financing, when the local body of representatives adopts a one-sum yearly institutional budget and does not regulate the internal proportions or any of the budgetary items.) The central government has to take steps to spread the practice of task financing.

4.3.6 Communication and learning

Better preparation of the local governmental officials.

It would also serve a better provision with equipment (including everything from teaching aids to cleaning materials) if the local governments were further and better informed of the advantages of the public procurement. Public procurement could be relied on consequently where a maintainer has several schools to renovate or refurbish. It would be very useful to publish the experiences of public procurement, including the tumblers in the way of such procedures and the outstanding successes. It is obvious that there are considerable potentials for economising and saving in the public procurement processes but a lot of local governments are conscious of the legal complexity of the procedure and have no experts to carry out such a process. Again, we are indicating a problem area in public education where the training of local governmental officials would be essential.

4.4 Enrolments, Student Flows

The issue of enrolments and progress within the system, which is closely related with the problems of equity and the education of disadvantaged groups, is one of the most sensitive, most topical issues of the Hungarian education system in its currently decentralised form, yet it is one of the fields which is most difficult to influence. As the most salient problems in this area arise around the transparency and the equity of the system our recommendations mainly focus on these aspects. At the same time, it is important to note that there are efficiency problems here as well (e.g. the risk of bad individual decisions, or a programme supply without long-range economic considerations) which also need solutions.

4.4.1 Responsibilities concerning equity

The responsibilities concerning equity should appear in the regulations

There can be no longer delays in determining more precisely the responsibilities of the various administrative levels and actors concerning equity. Assuming the responsibilities at the central governmental level is extremely important as the issue relates mainly to groups whose powers are limited, who cannot represent their interests in an effective way. The additional responsibilities of the central educational government could include the commissioning of regular reports to see whether the central guidelines are being followed. The local and regional responsibilities in this area should be determined more clearly as well. The responsibility for this could be allocated to the minister by law. The counties should be made responsible for the provision for the target groups where the provision is not covered by the local governments. In the process of regional planning and in the situational analyses preceding the planning the provision for the groups most in danger of lagging behind should be stressed. The legal regulations concerning the educational responsibilities of the local governments should include the tasks the fulfilment of which would help prevent the appearance of unfair differences and segregation.

4.4.2 Citizen’s basic rights

Identifying new institutional possibilities for the protection of citizen’s basic rights

The protection of the citizen’s basic rights that are related with equity - and quality - asks for the identification of new institutions where citizens can seek amends in case of a law infringement. One proposal is to appoint a parliamentary ombudsman to whom anybody can turn to with rights infringed in the sphere of education, who would help take the necessary steps. Another proposal concerns the law courts, where there could be jurors designated to specialise in educational cases. Besides these measures citizens will have to be much better informed about the existing institutions where the can turn to for the protection of their rights (such institutions are, for example, the county public administration offices).

4.4.3 The elaboration of basic standards

The elaboration and strengthening of basic standards

It is an important task for the central level to elaborate the most important guidelines and national standards which could serve as a kind of measure of the realisation of equity in the future (such as setting down what the still acceptable differences are between the provisions that the different schools receive). It would be necessary to develop (complex) indicators that would make the identification of certain target groups and individuals possible. With the currently available statistical data it is impossible to monitor the realisation of equity, the characteristics of student flows, the actual drop-out rates and the horizontal movements within the system. Continual monitoring of these processes would raise our understanding and would help the dissemination of desirable practices, and the elaboration of a student-level statistical system would provide means with which the problems could be followed by the central, regional and local administrations.

4.4.4 Horizontal movements within the system

Assuring the possibilities for horizontal movements within the system

All the means that can assure the horizontal movements of students within this highly diversified system should be identified and applied. Such means could include, for example, (a) the settlement or regional level harmonisation of the institutional programmes, and (b) the evaluation of the institutional programmes from the aspect of their compliance with the timing requirements laid down in the National Core Curriculum and with the general requirements of transferability within the system. The rules for the transfer between the primary and secondary levels should be laid down in a framework-like set of national rules which would limit the autonomy of the local governments in regulating this specific field but would not completely exclude some reasonable local solutions. Towns could even be compelled by law to pass a public decree to regulate this field.

4.4.5 The transparency and coherence of the school system

Policies should be launched to enhance the transparency and coherence of the school system

There should be a complex policy elaborated and applied - at least within the phase of compulsory education - that would increase the transparency and, in general, the structural homogeneity, of the school system. This policy could include elements such as the unified usage of names of the various grades and educational cycles, the harmonisation of financing, the common determination of the entry requirements, the unification of the certificates obtainable at the exit points, and the strengthening of the horizontal co-operation between schools, etc. In this field the responsibilities of the bigger local governments and of the regional administrative bodies could be more stressed than they are at the moment.

As far as the recommendations for the structural changes are concerned it would be very important to ensure that pupils, at least in their first years of schooling, can attend school at the settlement of their residence. It would also be important to ensure some training with vocational content and focus on practice to help pupils obtain a vocational qualification and to choose a career-orientation, perhaps even before the basic general knowledge examination.

In lower secondary education it is important to ensure that 9th and 10th graders attend a school from where they can proceed on. It is also important to limit the organisation of entrance examinations at the secondary entry level to a few well-grounded cases, and to ensure the transferability of the system.

It would be advisable to make stricter conditions about repeating a grade since this practice, according to the international experiences, does not help improve student attainment. Some practical skills and competencies could also be tested in the basic general knowledge examination. In the concluding phase of secondary education the educational content should more flexibly adjust to the career intentions of the students and to the demands of higher education, of vocational education and of the labour market. For the sake of raising the number of people with completed upper secondary qualifications it is important to support the institutions of adult education, and within them the institutions where primary education can be completed and the final (upper secondary) school leaving certificate can be obtained at an adult age. The current development of the post-secondary sector helps disadvantaged students enter the post-secondary level of schooling but the preparatory programmes that would help these students enter university or non-university level higher education still have to be developed. Also, these students should be supported when taking part in the preparatory courses.

4.4.6 The connection between education and economy

The long-term needs of the economy and manpower market needs should be transmitted to education

Institutional and other mechanisms should be developed to help defining the long-term needs of the economy and transmitting it to the education system. This should be more emphasised in regional planning, especially in development plans in connection with vocational education. Similarly, especially in vocational training, institutional negotiations, co-operation and communication should be encouraged in which changing manpower market needs could be transmitted to schools and individuals choosing schools.

4.4.7 Career-orientation

The development of the system of school- and career-orientation

The school- and career-orientation counselling and information system plays a crucial role in improving the transparency of the system, in assisting individuals in obtaining proper information and making informed decisions about their progress within the education system. The tasks of the public authorities in this respect should be more clearly defined at the central, regional and local levels, and additional professional and financial support should be provided for the development of the infrastructure of this information system.

4.4.8 A strategy of support for those who fail

A special strategy for the support of groups dropping out of the public education system

The current responsibility relations can only be partly blamed for the inequalities in the chances for progressing within the system of public education. But there is a need for an overall national strategy that would deploy special means for the support of these groups. By elaborating a coherent support policy the central government could enhance the realisation of equity within the system. Such a policy should identify (a) the target groups, (b) the means of support, and (c) its system of accountability. For the elaboration of an efficient strategy that would help progress in the system it is extremely important to correctly identify the target groups (e.g. the children of the long-term unemployed, children living in backward regions and settlements, children in a disadvantaged situation because of their cultural or language background, the Romani children, etc.) The financial stimulants could play an important role within this strategy as well. For example, it would be important to raise the normative grant allocated to students in school-based adult education, which, in its current form, motivates neither the maintainers nor the institutions to offer institutionalised, separate assistance to those lagging behind, or to deal with them on an individual basis. It is also important to support remedial courses. It would be desirable to create a central fund from where the institutions dealing with these target groups could draw extra resources, via applications, for their operation and for their developmental work. There should be a scholarship programme launched for those in secondary and higher education.

It would be extremely important to give additional support for those specialised institutions that assume a greater role in dealing with these target groups. It would be important, for example, to spread kindergarten schooling among the disadvantaged groups, and this could be helped by special target programmes, such as head start programmes before starting formal schooling. The enlargement of the capacity of student hostels could improve both the access to secondary schooling for those living at small settlements and the special provision of other target groups (such as helping Romani children get into secondary education). There should be a network of corrective institutions and institutions offering second chances maintained, which would operate with flexible programmes.

It would also be essential to develop some special pedagogical programmes that could partly help the concrete provision for certain groups (complex remedial curses), partly improve the receptivity and tolerance of society (programmes to enhance social cohesion), and partly improve the innovation capacities of institutions and teachers (programme development and school development). All these elements could be built in initial and in-service teacher education. As far as the concrete programmes are concerned it would be urgent to provide a full-scale speech therapy service and to develop programmes that would help the development of basic skills and the integration of the work-place experiences. There could be programmes developed for the co-operation with the families. The textbooks, teaching aids and INSET-programmes that could spread these newly developed programmes and programme packages should be developed and disseminated.

4.4.9 Communication and learning

Communication and learning: helping the dissemination of successful models

For the whole of the support policy the success, the spreading and the quality assurance of the programmes should be very important. Within this it is important not only to support the promising initiatives but to follow up and analyse their operation and to disseminate the successful models (with the help of publications, seminars, etc.). The realisation of the target programmes and the usage of the earmarked grants have to be monitored, and they have to be analysed from the aspect of efficiency (quality assurance) not only for the sake of cost-effectiveness but also for the acknowledgement and analysis of success. Besides the recommendations listed above it is important to commission traditional research projects and to obtain the findings of deeper problem analyses.

4.5 Quality Assurance

As it was described in the previous chapter there is a full consensus among the actors of the Hungarian education system that quality assurance is probably the most important theme of public educational development but it is also the field where most agents have the least experiences. This is why quality assurance is the field of Hungarian public education where it is fairly easy to create a societal consensus and there are a variety of possibilities for development and interference.

The quality issues of the decentralised Hungarian public education culminate at two major points: at the national or system level and at the local-institutional level. Besides this, there are several actors involved at the same time in pinpointing and solving the problems with quality. Consequently, there are three major principles to be born in mind when suggesting recommendations for interference: (a) the principle of active governmental interference, i.e. accepting the fact that the strategy that aims at the assurance of quality requires active participation on behalf of the central government; (b) the principle of a several-actor, several- level system, i.e. accepting the fact that several actors are involved at the same time in the task of quality assurance; and (c) the principle of local and school-level responsibility, i.e. accepting the fact that the guarantees of quality assurance have to be developed in a way that preserves the advantages of the local responsibility. The following recommendations can be formulated for this field:

4.5.1 The sectoral strategy for the assurance of quality

Defining quality and elaborating a quality policy at the level of the central government.

The significance of the problem and the uncertainties about the means that can help its solution requires the elaboration of an independent governmental strategy to build up a comprehensive system of quality assurance. The foundation of such a strategy requires the commissioning of tasks such as the overview of the research and development already existing in the field, getting acquainted with the international experiences that can be utilised among Hungarian conditions, mapping out the institutions and other actors working in the field, the support of a public consensus about the concept of quality in public education, the differentiated analysis of the specific problems with quality that appear in the particular developmental and administrative areas (e.g. content regulation or the employment of teachers), and the analysis of the relations between quality assurance and some other administrative sub-systems, especially the legal or financial regulations.

4.5.2 The institutional conditions of evaluation and quality assurance

The creation of the institutional conditions and the national and regional organisations of assessment and quality assurance

The Public Education Act entitles the minister of education to establish a national level system of institutions that can be allocated the responsibility of quality assurance. The related tasks are already present at, or can be allocated to, the existing institutions, but some of them require the foundation of new institutions. Such an institution is a national institute, whose basic task is quality assurance, and its local and regional units to co-operate with. Besides this it is important to re-evaluate the tasks of the already existing institutions from the aspects of quality assurance and to develop their competencies and sets of tools.

The most important tasks of the institutional system of assessment and quality assurance are the following: (a) the continual development of the methodologies and tools of assessment and quality assurance, the formulation and further development of some comprehensive national standards, the formulation and analysis of indicators; (b) developmental and competence-building tasks aiming at the key professional actors of quality assurance (local governmental administrators, experts, school heads, teachers); (c) the compilation, systematisation and analysis of databases and information on quality, the involvement of new sources of information, commissioning intermittent “x-raying" procedures and analysing their findings; (d) tasks concerning the examination system, especially the creation and management of the databank of the examination assignments, the development of the examination standards, the analysis of the examination results; (e) regular monitor-type surveys based on representative sample taking in certain content areas, and active participation in such international surveys; (f) intermittent surveys of some targeted problem areas, the organisation, the implementation or the commissioning of minor research programmes and the development of the forms of co-operation in these fields; (g) the compilation, the usage and publication of information and analyses related with quality assurance that are gathered from various sources; (h) regular and comprehensive reports on the whole of the education system with special regard to macro-level processes and inter-sectoral relations; (i) participation in the activities that aim at the preservation of the international competitiveness of education and in the realisation of topical European objectives relating to quality.

4.5.3 The national standards of institution and programme assessment

The development and publication of national standards to be used in institutional and curricular programme assessment

In order to make the proper assessment of institutions and the curricular programmes of the institutions possible, i.e. to assure the quality of institutional operation and of the curricular programmes it is necessary to develop and publish the national standards. As we have argued when dealing with the content function the assessment and quality assurance of the curricular programmes offered for the schools requires the formulation of national standards that can serve as a basis for the evaluation of a particular curriculum (i.e. the determination of objectives, the description of the proposed tools and of the criteria to measure achievement, etc.)

Similarly there is a need for the development of nationally accepted standards to be used during the comprehensive assessment of the institutions. Assuring the quality of the local institutional assessment process requires that the experts or other actors involved in the assessment use the criteria and procedures that have been nationally approved of. One of the most important element of institutional assessment to be used everywhere should be the examination to what extent the internal system of assessment and quality assurance has been built up and used by a given institution.

4.5.4 Maintainer responsibility and interest

A clearer definition of the assessment responsibility of the maintainers and the creation of their interest in quality assurance

There has to be special attention devoted to the role of the local and institutional level actors in quality assurance. It is a special reason for concern that the assessment responsibility of the school maintainers is not defined clearly. Thus, as we have often seen, this responsibility of theirs is not practised or practised only at a minimum level. It is no longer viable to maintain the situation that the different local governments - irrespective of their actual competencies - bear the same responsibility for the success of schools. Only those local governments can be entrusted with responsibility for assessment that are able to develop the necessary competencies. It is also important to regulate the work of the experts who play a determining role in local assessments.

Incentives have to be introduced to really motivate the school maintainers to carry out the professional assessment of their institutions. This purpose could be served by reserving central and regional grants for this purpose, including the resources that can support the development of the professional competencies of the officials managing education at the local level (e.g. their training programmes). But it is also important to make it an important criterion when evaluating the work of the local governments at what level they carry out the assessment of their institutions.

The county (regional) developmental plans that came into effect in 1997 and the public foundations that support the realisation of these plans could also be used in quality assurance. Some of the central grants provided for the county public foundations could be tied to the objectives of quality assurance to make the public foundations themselves interested in the development of quality assurance.

4.5.5 Professional support

Support for, and the development of the competencies and set of tools of, the maintainers and school heads in the field of assessment and quality assurance

As the majority of school maintainers simply do not possess the competencies and means that can serve the assessment of institutions it is necessary to develop these competencies It is also important to provide the resources continually that maintainers can devote to commissioning the external assessment of their institutions.

It is also necessary to provide the maintainers with the external professional support that enables them to build up and operate the mechanisms in their institutions (e.g. an internal system of assessment, regular self-evaluation) that can continually assure the quality of the institutional operation.

4.5.6 Quality assurance intervention

Quality assurance intervention and the creation of the substitution possibilities

In case a local government is unable to assure the minimum acceptable quality of service due to its own fault or to external conditions the possibility has to be created for an external intervention that aims at the assurance of quality (e.g. extraordinary support from an external expert, special budgetary support, launching an individual programme or action for institutional development, etc.) For extreme situations the conditions have to be created to make the transfer of the service possible to another provider (another local government or a private service provider).

4.5.7 Emphasised development of certain special areas

Assuring the quality of programmes dealing with disadvantaged groups is of outstanding importance

As the problems with quality appear multiplied in the institutions that deal with the disadvantaged social groups this sphere has to be devoted special attention to from the aspect of quality assurance. The need might arise to launch special innovative programmes that raise the quality of education at settlements and schools in a disadvantageous situation.

4.5.8 Communication and learning

Gathering the experiences with quality assurance, communication and learning

It is important to enhance the development of a social climate that supports quality assurance and its professional organisation by, for example, the following means: (a) with the participation of the actors of the education system, the consumers, the social partners and the market actors there could be debates initiated to discuss the problematic of quality and the strategy to be developed to assure quality; (b) on order to strengthen the transparency of the system the information on the experiences with “the issue" of quality has to be disseminated among the actors of the public education system; (c) it is worth supporting the foundation and strengthening of the professional associations and other organisations that deal with quality; (d) it is important to ensure the publicity of assessment.

It is very important to carry out in the future the analysis of the experiences that accumulate with the introduction of the local-institutional pedagogical programmes (the professional background for this could be provided by the envisaged national institute for evaluation). It is on the basis of these analyses that the scope of the professional in-service training programmes can be enlarged in a way that helps the quality assurance function to operate, which have to be supported both by the central and the local level and by the market. There is a need to explore the local-institutional aspirations for quality assurance and to publicise the useable models. This could mean the description of complex quality assurance models and their operational experiences but also the formalisation of such informal elements that have been in use at the local, institutional or inter-institutional levels as a kind of control of internal quality (for example, the feedback of the next educational level to the former, enrolment policy among the institutions of the same educational level, etc.) The publication of the gained and useable experiences could be financed by a centrally financed target project.

4.6 Financing and financial administration

One of the most important statements made about financing in the previous chapter referred to the scarcity of resources. In the field of financing and financial administration there are, however, further problems with inequality, quality, efficiency and transparency. Our standpoints when formulating the recommendations are the following: (a) the financing system of public education is built in the overall financing system of public administration, so any change is only possible within this given framework; (b) the current problems can be addressed within the financing system that builds on the autonomy of the local actors.

The following recommendations can be made.

4.6.1 An inter-sectoral financing policy

Strengthening the connections between the policy of sectoral financing and the overall policy of public financing

Since the financing of education is very closely tied to the macro-level budgetary processes and is not separated from the local governments’ general financing of the public services the basic condition for the solution of any financing problem is to tie the sectoral financing policy closely to the overall policy of public financing. Within this the most important measure for the sectoral financing policy is to determine its own tools within the general system of the support for the local governments and to always bear this system in mind, whether the actual issue is the raising of teacher salaries, the development of the infrastructure, or the proper provision of the operational costs. In the field of the development of the infrastructure - as it was emphasised before - the sectoral policy also has to be placed in the context of the general regional development policy, i.e. the distribution of the majority of the resources has to be planned within this policy.

4.6.2 The development of the standards

The development of the standards and parameters that determine financing

Following the 1996 Amendment to the Public Education Act the number of centrally defined parameters rose that determine the expense demands of the institutions’ operational conditions and operation. These parameters have to be developed further, especially the ones that relate to the direct professional work of the institutions. During the determination of the parameters special attention has to be paid to avoid the infringement of the autonomy of the actors operating at the lower levels of the system of shared responsibilities. Besides this, the financing parameters have to be “tested", their reliability has to be analysed. It is the interest of the educational policy-makers to introduce the new parameters always gradually, carefully, with the involvement of the other actors and with proper social publicity, where everybody can accept that the development of the quality of education is a mutual interest. In this respect, as we have indicated it before, there is a social consensus. It should be avoided, therefore, that such parameters are built into the system too fast, which would make a majority of the institutions question the legality of operation.

4.6.3 Regional planning and development

The development of regional planning and the strengthening of the institutional structures of regional planning

The development of regional planning is important in order to enhance a more effective financial administration of the developmental resources and not so much the operational resources, though its effects on the operational expenditures must not be underestimated either. Regional planning can be one of the most effective tools to create the professional training structure that meets the demands of the economy and to form the bigger institutional sizes that are required by a more efficient use of the labour force. The strengthening of the institutionalinfrastructures of regional planning (the development of competencies, the provision of information, etc.) is a major condition for a more efficient regional distribution of the Vocational Training Fund.

4.6.4 An information and statistics system

The development of the information and statistics system of public education

There is a need to operate an information and statistics system that can provide information on the basic data of financial administration and on the distribution of resources at the systemic level of education. We should be able to monitor to what extent the institutions and the maintainers follow the centrally defined parameters of financing. The statistics system should be able to provide proper information for the elaboration of financing standards and models as well.

The evaluation of financing at the local and institutional levels. The assessment system of public education should make it possible to evaluate financing at the local and institutional levels from the aspect of the extent the institutional budgets enable the fulfilment of the basic professional tasks, and from the aspect of the extent the maintainers follow the centrally defined parameters when adopting an institutional budget. But the means of the so-called external evaluation of education should be based on the voluntary participation of those who take part, on their solutions of channelling information, and on trust.

4.6.5 A system of target financing

The further development of the central target and task financing

The system of target and task financing, which complements the system of normative financing, is the major tool for the compensation of inequalities and for the support of innovations that can improve quality. This system makes it possible for the central government to directly support - according to the priorities of the national policy - the realisation of tasks which are not supported by the normative financing.

4.6.6 Communication and learning

Communication and the development of competencies among the actors of financing and financial administration

It is important to gather more feedback on the practices of financing, on the good solutions, on the successful models, on the more efficient ways of financial administration or on associations, and on other local solutions. At the local and institutional levels it is of high importance to develop the school heads’ competencies in financial administration. Therefore, this field has to receive special attention in the central development strategy of the school management training infrastructure, and, in the system of school management training, courses with such programme elements have to be supported.