Funding organisations: the case of regional public schools in the Czech Republic and Slovakia
Funding organisations: the case of regional public schools in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

Summary/Abstract: Reforms in financing public education are often connected to the redesign of school funding formulas, which present a powerful and efficient tool for providing an effective redistribution of public finance for school organisations. A properly designed formula can, via a bundle of variables, help to adjust differences between schools and mitigate fluctuations to stabilise the sector. Thus, various coefficients are chosen and set by the decision-making authorities; they are based particularly on the political arguments revolving around the relative importance of various indicators. Given these facts, the aim of the present paper is to carry out a comparison of three funding formulas in order to evaluate the allocation of funds to the regional schools with regard to their scope as far as the number of students is concerned. In order to reflect the consequences of different formula funding regimes, the paper presents the results of a comparative study based on the correlation analysis method. It offers unique and comprehensive results pertaining to the impacts of different school funding methods, proving that a bundle of well-designed compensatory factors is able to balance the discrepancies caused by the different sizes of schools. The results are supposed to enable decision-making bodies to rethink and reconsider their strategies for the modern funding of regional schools.

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