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Greece’s School Buildings Organisation (SBO) is developing bioclimatic pilot schemes which are yielding positive results. Bioclimatic action has been one of the principal priorities of Greek school infrastructure planning since 2004. Among the activities undertaken by SBO to use renewable energy sources in school buildings is a pilot project to design and install a photovoltaic system in a secondary school in Athens.

To get a picture of the impact of the current economic and financial crisis on educational building programmes so far, the OECD Centre for Effective Learning Environments (CELE) has been conducting a survey of member countries and regions. The survey focuses on three main issues: the impact of the crisis on publicly funded projects, the impact on projects funded by private finance initiatives or through a public-private partnership, and the extent to which the crisis has affected the construction industry’s ability to build schools.

This report discusses the most relevant issues concerning school choice schemes, and how they intertwine with equity considerations, through a literature review and analysis of the effects different types of school choice programmes have on equity. In the last 25 years, more than two-thirds of OECD countries have increased school choice opportunities for parents. The empirical evidence reviewed here reveals that providing full parental school choice results in further student segregation between schools, by ability, socio-economic and ethnic background, and in greater inequities across education systems. The report identifies certain characteristics of programmes that can prevent schools from hand-picking their students - crowding out disadvantaged and low performing students. As school choice is here to stay, countries should explore choice designs that balance parents’ freedom to choose with equity considerations: this report develops two particular schemes: controlled choice programmes – also called flexible enrolment schemes – and weighted funding formula.

The following is taken from the “Annual School Construction Report, January 1999” written by John B. Lyons of the United States Department of Education.

What link can be established between successful teaching and learning, and school design? Three examples of large-scale school construction and renovation projects in France may go some way towards answering this question.

This paper examines the current academic and policy literatures concerning school evaluation in primary and secondary education within the OECD countries. First, it provides a typology of the existing systems of school evaluation across the OECD. It encompasses the diverse criteria and instruments commonly used to carry out schools evaluation, as well as the players involved in the design and implementation of school evaluation. It also describes potential consequences for schools. Second, this paper analyses how school evaluation schemes are interrelated with other components of the evaluation framework, such as teacher evaluation and system evaluation. The potential complementarities, duplication and inconsistency of objectives stemming from these interrelations are discussed. Third, this paper presents the advantages and drawbacks of different approaches to school evaluation, the resistance and implementation difficulties resulting from misalignment of interests between different stakeholders, and possible ways to overcome impediments to implementation. Finally, it reviews the quantitative and qualitative evidence available on the impact of different school evaluation schemes on school performance, student learning and the incentives for the teaching staff. It concludes by considering the circumstances under which school evaluation schemes seem to be more conducive to school improvement. The effectiveness of school evaluation schemes relies on developing competencies for evaluation and for using feedbacks. Alignment of stakeholders' interests is also critical to have the support of those being assessed.

Many Latin American countries are undertaking projects, in line with practices disseminated by PEB, to share school facilities with the local community, to adapt traditional schools for students with disabilities, and to collaborate with private companies to finance educational buildings. The articles below describe current initiatives in five countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela.

This study provides a literature review on school funding formulas across OECD countries. It looks at three salient questions from a comparative perspective: i) What kind of school formula funding schemes exist and how are they used, particularly for promoting the needs of socially disadvantaged pupils?; ii) How do school formula funding regimes perform according to equity and efficiency standards?; iii) What are the unresolved issues? Formula funding of schools, as opposed to administrative discretion and bidding, relies on a mathematical formula containing a number of variables (e.g. number of pupils), each of which has attached to it a cash amount to determine school budgets. Across OECD countries there are four main groups of variables in such formulas: i) student number and grade level-based; ii) needs-based; iii) curriculum or educational programme-based and; iv) school characteristics-based. Sometimes output and outcome-related variables are also used. The performance of formula funding compared to alternative funding regimes is dependent on the details of the formula and on the wider education policy environment. Formula funding systems typically advance transparency and accountability at low administrative costs and in combination with matching complementary policy tools they can also contribute to equity and efficiency. Currently, there are several ongoing debates across OECD countries: First, there is an inherent tradeoff between transparency/simplicity and sensitivity to local conditions/complexity. Second, knowing how much educating to a given standard costs is problematic and subject to heated debates. The main reason for this is that the causal relationship between education costs and student performance is largely unknown and even the identified impacts appear to be relatively small. Third, even though resources are allocated according to need estimation, they might not be devoted to these needs. Fourth, it is still undecided whether the introduction of school formula funding regimes has changed actual school funding practice.

The Austrian Institute for School and Sport Facilities (ÖISS), responsible for providing the country with guidelines, information and consultation in the field of school building, places special emphasis on school grounds. The ÖISS works to raise awareness of the importance of school grounds not only for physical activities and recreation, but also for learning, communication and the environment.

• According to the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), principals, on average, report frequently engaging in a number of activities that are consistent with instructional leadership. However, this is not the case in every country and large proportions of them report that their training did not include any instructional leadership training or course.
• Although continuous professional development could help fill those gaps, many school leaders report a number of obstacles preventing them from taking part in such learning, including a lack of support and opportunities, and personal and professional obstacles.

PEB and the Ministry of Education of Portugal brought together 67 library and resource centre professionals, policy makers, educators and information technology specialists from 21 countries around the theme “Designing Schools for the Information Society: Libraries and Resource Centres”. The seminar, held in Portugal in June 1999, addressed how the growing use of information technology and the move toward schools as community learning centres are affecting the demand for and use of space in educational institutions, with particular reference to changes which promote lifelong learning and the creation of the information society. Below are excerpts from some of the presentations.

The eruption of violence in society is a natural phenomenon; its rise or fall depends on complex, interrelated social processes. The same applies to violence on school premises, any study of which must address the individual characteristics of young people who perpetrate violence and the specific social context of the school. Violence is a generic term, covering violence towards property as well as people.

New Zealand’s special funding system allows state schools a greater level of independence in managing their property compared to most other countries. Schools receive a fixed budget as an entitlement from the three “pots” of the educational property funding structure. The government’s unique use of accrual accounting together with a new Five-Year Property Plan agreement gives schools a high degree of certainty of the property funding available, as well as responsibility for deciding how to modernise their own buildings.

The legislative framework of the Italian education system has changed radically over the past five years. After decades of announcing, discussing, proposing and experimenting with reform, the school of tomorrow is rapidly becoming a reality. Is it possible today to construct school buildings that will easily house the reformed school that is being defined? This is probably the most urgent question that the administrators, managers and experts of local authorities are now seeking to answer.

The French government set up in 1995 the Observatoire national de la sécurité des établissements scolaires et d'enseignement supérieur, a national agency for safety in schools and higher education, bringing together the public owners of school buildings, representatives of staff and parents from public-sector schools and those under contract in the private sector, and the relevant ministries. Its mandate covers any issue concerning the safety of people, premises or equipment: solidity of buildings and fire risk, accident analysis and prevention, technology and science equipment, and major hazards.

Science laboratories in schools are expensive to equip and maintain. Specific pedagogical needs, new technology and safety requirements contribute to the costs. In an effort to get the most efficient use of facilities, some countries are rethinking school labs with a move toward more flexible approaches.

Since 1999 the Department of Education and Training in Western Australia has operated a successful security risk management programme. Its strategy is to help school principals both evaluate whether existing controls comply with security procedures and provide adequate, cost-effective levels of security to meet the risks faced by their schools.

Recent demographic, economic and political trends have placed the issue of school size at the heart of school effectiveness and efficiency discussions. The subject of school size is particularly salient in remote and rural areas where the viability of small schools has been questioned. In spite of the relevance of school size policies, the literature on this issue is quite fragmented with few studies taking a comprehensive view on the implications of school size policies. This literature review attempts to bridge different strands of relevant research and describes existing country practices in order to provide a broader picture of the benefits and costs associated with different school sizes. The paper describes the different trends that have affected school enrolment and how different countries have managed school size policies, with a particular focus on school consolidation. It discusses the consequences of school consolidation and the alternatives to consolidation when schools are facing declining enrolment. It also reviews the different mechanisms through which school size affects the quality and efficiency of schools, and the existing empirical evidence on these effects.

School Works, a not-for-profit company in the United Kingdom, has developed a secondary school design process which enables communities to create unique school buildings that cater for their own particular needs. At the heart of this process is the basic principle that it is the people who work and learn in a school building every day who really understand its ethos, its needs, its strengths and its weaknesses, and that truly involving the school community will generate an innate sense of ownership and respect for the buildings. School Works has put its participatory process into practice at an inner-city school in London.

Instructional leadership is the set of practices that principals use in relation to the improvement of teaching and learning. It is a strong predictor of how teachers collaborate and engage in a reflective dialogue about their practice. In most countries and economies, the majority of principals act as instructional leaders, though one-third rarely engage in any of this type of action. Distributed leadership is the ability of schools to incorporate different stakeholders in their decisionmaking processes. This type of leadership appears to advance the creation of a shared sense of purpose within schools. Nearly all schools involve their staff in decision-making processes, but they differ concerning the opportunities that are offered to students and their parents/guardians to be involved in school decisions. Principals who acquired instructional leadership competencies through training, or in a separate course, are more engaged in instructional leadership actions in their school than principals who have not participated in such training.