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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Governing school funding
This chapter describes the different actors involved in raising, managing and allocating school funds across countries and analyses how the relationships between these actors are organised. It looks at both the sources of school funding (who raises funds for school education?) and the responsibilities for spending these funds (who manages and allocates funds for school education?). As OECD school systems have become more complex and characterised by multi-level governance, a growing set of actors including different levels of the school administration, schools themselves and private providers are increasingly involved in financial decision making. The chapter analyses the opportunities and challenges for effective school funding in such multi-level governance contexts and explores a range of policy options to reap the potential benefits of fiscal decentralisation, school autonomy over budgetary matters and involvement of private school providers in the use of public funds.