Page 13 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

Dana Ondrušková , Richard Pospíšil: A Comparative Study of Teacher’s Salary Formula
Methods, Case of Regional School Funding

Former system to allocate public funding to schools - the funding principle
based on the standardised “student basket” formula¨

As discussed above, the Czech regions perform a double function in the education
finance system. As owners of the secondary schools and special schools, they
receive funds for those schools and allocate them to individual schools, although
legal regulations heavily constrain their freedom in this process. The allocation of
central funds for direct costs in education used to be designed through a system of
per student normative amounts. This system was in operation since 2001 and
covered both the central level, namely the distribution of funds from the national to
regional budgets, and the regional level, namely the distribution of funds to
secondary schools managed by the region itself. The allocation system based on per
student normative amounts was simple at the national level, with just five age-based
normative amounts, and at the same time extremely complex at the regional level.
For secondary education there were regional normative amounts for every
educational programme provided in the region’s schools. These include:

• normative amounts for gymnasia, separately for regular programme (four years)
and for upper and lower years in long programmes (six and eight years)
• normative amounts for various artistic and sport schools’ normative amounts for
all professional and vocational profiles offered in the region’s schools.

Each school managed by the region received the allocation based on the number of
education programmes offered in the school and on the number of students in each
programme. This was the case of gymnasia that were allocated by the student basket
only through the formula given as a fixed amount in each budget year. Other
decisions made by the schools were not affected directly by any single component of
the formula or method of calculation. The key component and essential determinant
of the system was the number of students officially attending the school. At this
point it is necessary to underline that using a large number of different normative
amounts made the regional allocation process rather difficult.

Teaching costs were funded from the central government budget in the form of a
specific formula grant, namely the “student basket” scheme. based on the so called
normative per unit of effort. This scheme was elaborated and introduced as the core
of the education finance for each school by the

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