Page 16 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE, V.78, # 1, 2021, pp. 4-25

At the same time, this approach oversimplifies actual employment situation at
schools, because there are more than just two distinct categories of school staff:
apart from teacher conducting classes or conducting practical training, the following:
school leadership (principals and deputy principals), school administration (office
staff, accountants and similar), support pedagogical staff (psychologists,
pedagogues, librarians, curriculum advisors), technical staff (maintenance of
equipment and machinery, gardeners, drivers), cleaning staff. Of course, all these
categories of staff work in Czech schools, fulfilling their different roles. However,
from the point of view of school finance, they are also quite different, in terms of
employment levels or salaries. A flexible budgeting process should recognise this
variety and not lump them all into two inflexible categories.

New system of funding “Reform 2020”

The formula should essentially ensure horizontal equity of funding across schools.
In order to ensure the equitable system, the new funding approach includes the
elements that takes into account school size, by means of weighting factors. They
are supposed to increase proportionally with the real teaching costs and are inversely
proportional to school size, acknowledging higher per student costs when class size
is smaller. These coefficients can be derived from the basic formula for the student
basket by substituting higher values for students’ weekly school hours, determined
by the curricula for each school year and lower expected class sizes for small rural
schools. As administration costs are included in the formula proportional to the
required spending on teacher salaries, higher coefficients for smaller schools do also
account for higher administration spending due to fixed costs to some extent. Unlike
the previous student basket calculated basically on a performance – coefficient ratio
and an average salary of the teaching staff the introduced formula called Phmax is
supposed to express the maximum of teaching lessons per one class. The calculation
is adjusted for each field of education and organisation of the classes. As for
secondary grammar school there are two types of educational levels lower-
secondary and upper-secondary education. Consequently, the level of Phmax differs.

Calculation method of Phmax enables to cover and adjust different components of
the salary - compulsory components of extra – pay salary for management,
educational advisory services. By the 2020 reform the MEYS aims at fulfilling one
of the strategic goals which is to make the education on primary and secondary level
more efficient, to eliminate the discrepancies and disparities of each individual
school unit as far as the evaluation of the teachers is concerned.

16