The Funding of School Education
Connecting Resources and Learning
This report on the funding of school education constitutes the first in a series of thematic comparative reports bringing together findings from the OECD School Resources Review. School systems have limited financial resources with which to pursue their objectives and the design of school funding policies plays a key role in ensuring that resources are directed to where they can make the most difference. As OECD school systems have become more complex and characterised by multi-level governance, a growing set of actors are increasingly involved in financial decision-making. This requires designing funding allocation models that are aligned to a school system’s governance structures, linking budget planning procedures at different levels to shared educational goals and evaluating the use of school funding to hold decision makers accountable and ensure that resources are used effectively and equitably.
This report was co-funded by the European Commission.
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Country profiles
This annex presents the approaches of individual OECD review countries for funding early childhood and school education. Country profiles describe national frameworks for the distribution of funding for current and capital expenditure. They illustrate the financial flows across levels of administration and the allocation mechanisms used to determine and distribute funding to school providers and to individual schools. This does not include information on funding targeted at individual students. Country profiles present information for 2016 and draw primarily on the data countries provided for the review’s qualitative survey of school funding frameworks as well as country background reports of participating countries and country review reports conducted by the School Resources Review. provides a glossary of terms and definitions which aid in interpreting the information in the country profiles. provides further explanations and notes on countries’ approaches to funding of early childhood and school education.