Policy & Others

This country review offers an independent analysis of major issues facing the use of school resources in Portugal from an international perspective. It provides a description of national policies, an analysis of strengths and challenges and options for possible future approaches. The analysis focuses on the process of decentralisation of school governance, the integration of local, national and international funding streams in educational financing, and the development of the teaching profession. The report covers primary and secondary school education.

This report on Responsive School Systems is the second in a series of thematic comparative reports bringing together findings from the OECD’s School Resources Review. Evolving educational objectives, changing student needs and demographic developments require school systems to be highly responsive to new patterns of demand and adapt their provision accordingly. The organisation of school facilities, sectors and programmes plays a key role in doing so and in providing students with a high-quality education where they need it. The report aims to assist governments in organising school infrastructures and services to achieve their education policy objectives and to ensure that resources are used effectively and equitably. It offers a systematic analysis of the governance of school networks, their adaption to demographic changes and student needs in urban, rural and remote areas, as well as the vertical and horizontal co-ordination of education services to improve students’ transitions.

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.

Bianchi and Giorcelli (2022) study the long-term and spillover effects of a management intervention program on firm performance in the US, between 1940 and 1945. The authors find that the Training Within Industry (TWI) program led to positive effects which lasted for at least 10 years. Firm sales of treated firms increasedd by 5.3% in the first year after implementation, peaking at 21.7% after 8 years, before reducing to 16% gains after a decade. The authors claim that the program generated long-lasting changes in managerial practices. Finally, the program also led to positive spillover effects on the supply chain of treated firms. First, we reproduce the paper’s main findings. Second, we test the robustness of the results to (1) changing the main specification sample and (2) testing other difference-in-differences estimators, using the same data, provided by the authors. We find that the results are robust to these changes. All point estimates in the study remain statistically significant and of similar magnitude. While the paper's finding reproduce and replicate, challenges in reproducing results we encountered lead us to recommend improvements to journals' code policies.