Page 15 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

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

Apparently, the higher the share of teachers with more years of experience or
belonging to a higher qualification category, the larger the actual salary expenses are
in the school. In the short term schools had only limited influence over this factor.
As a matter of fact, the total funding for a school was determined not on the basis of
raw enrolment figures but the number of equivalent students, i.e. a weighted sum of
students.

In response to this criticism, the ministry elaborated a radical reform, aiming at a
complete change of the system of financing the education. The goals settled by the
MEYS are declared as follow:

(1) To allocate funds in a transparent and predictable way

(2) To establish a more equitable system of allocating resources

The idea behind this is to acknowledge the legitimately higher costs of smaller
schools which have lower enrolment rates due to their rural location. The following
part will present an overview of the new system of redistribution of funds for the
secondary schools which principles will be presented in the following chapter. In
order to compensate the additional incurred costs or the losses caused by the
decrease of the number of students the local governments were forced to use several
methods to balance the school budgets or to increase school resources. Resourcing
this way was not systematic, transparent and presented uncertain financial resources
not convenient on the long term.
The data on which the research is based can be completed by the comments of
educational department staff: “In order to allow regions to perform their duties, the
ministry provided us (regions) with software that supported the calculation of the
normative amounts (from year to year), and to actually allocate funds to individual
schools. For each individual school it was difficult, even impossible to control the
calculation and if the funding was done correctly.” This fact means that the
computerisation and mechanical application of the rigid calculation done by a
special computer programme reduced understanding the formula and using it
strategically to address differentiated needs of schools.

Another fact important to emphasize is that due to the existence of different
programmes at gymnasia (upper and lower stages of six-year long and eight-year long
programmes) in many cases it may be very difficult or even impossible to distribute the
funds correctly according to the method as many teachers and other school staff
contribute to the teaching in the education programmes on a different scale. there is no
sound methodology to allocate parts of FTE staff to different programme.

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