Network governance for school improvement policies: an example from Portugal

• In Event: Educational governance in a comparative perspective: changing ways to coordinate school improvement

Proposal

Since the end of the last century, Portugal is witnessing a restructuring of the State which aims to address the ineffectiveness of the state’s bureaucracy by introducing school administration models which allow for greater community involvement and greater school autonomy. Various policies have been introduced, all of a very different nature but drawing from the New Public Management “educational toolkit” (Verger & Curran, 2014, p.256 ); programs and practices have focused on school-based management, but also on pedagogy, allowing schools to decide about their curriculum and educational projects, according to their social contexts (ibidem). These programs and practices have been enacted in schools and their communities, based on reflection, negotiation, and joint work (e.g., school external evaluation), contributing to a gradual reduction of the State’s hierarchical control, and thereby increasingly incorporating principles of network governance.

One of the most relevant examples of this shift in governance is the Pedagogical Innovation Pilot Project (PPIP) (2016-2019); a State's initiative founded on school-based management, aiming to promote students’ success and combat school dropout. The program was implemented in six school clusters (4355 students/ 711 teachers), located across the country, which were given greater autonomy in the organizational, pedagogical, and curricular domains (Costa & Almeida, 2019).
PPIP brought together multiple actors whose number and identities vary, through a plurality of levels (e.g. experts, municipalities, teachers, parents, public educational administration, etc.). The aim of the program was to allow for a more flexible school organization, particularly in the pedagogical domain by changing school actors’ representations. The program inspired current policy which allows schools to submit ‘innovation plan’ to change and manage 75% of the national curriculum.

This paper will analyse the PPIP as an example of the change in mode of governance in Portugal, presenting findings from a mixed methods evaluation of PPIP (Costa & Almeida, 2019; Creswell & Clark, 2017). The study included document analysis of archives, 85 interviews with key informants (school and deputy principals, coordinators, year and class directors, etc.), and a questionnaire to all teachers, students and parents who participated in the PPIP (300 teachers answered, 2100 students and 1300 parents).

Findings indicate that network governance was central to enhance school actors’ engagement and stakeholders’ mobilization in PPIP’s conception, enactment, and monitoring, through questioning and joint reflection. Equally significant is that PPIP was implemented in a results oriented framework which combined autonomy and accountability: actors jointly agreed to be accountable for their results (to reach zero retention and dropout and promote the quality of learning), and implemented a set of innovative strategies to meet these results by addressing their (local, contextualized) problems. However, despite the changes towards increased network steering, signs and manifestations of hierarchical governance remain due to the historically deeply rooted bureaucratic form of managing collective action in Portugal. The result is a governance process with a high level of complexity and hybridity.

Author

• Estela Costa, University of Lisbon