School improvement programmes aim to develop schools’ internal capacity for change and improvement. Key elements that can contribute to their success include changing classroom practices by focusing on teaching and learning; ensuring professional development and building on data for improvement; building schools’ capacities to deliver, along with providing enough ownership and autonomy; and ensuring policy consistency by balancing external pressure and support. The aim of the project ist to give constructive and innovative answers on the following positions of the OECD: „PISA data on autonomy shows that schools with more autonomy to make decisions on curriculum and instruction had better performance than those that did not, but school systems where schools had more autonomy regarding managing resources did not perform better.“ (OECD [HG.]: Education Policy Outlook 2015 – Making Reforms Happen, Jänner 2015, S. 17.). Steering education systems is a significant challenge for education policy makers. Education policy-making environments have become increasingly complex, due to increased decentralisation and institutional autonomy, greater accountability, and reduced public budgets. Furthermore, educational contexts and institutional and policy approaches vary depending on each country’s historical development and political and institutional frameworks, as do distribution and approaches to education funding.
The Erasmus+ project Innovitas compares legal and pedagogical approaches of school autonomy within German speaking countries. In a constructive-critical way the project aims to provide stakeholders, like head teachers, with relevant tools in the context of school development. On the basis of good practice options, concrete instructions for action and thought-provoking impulses for change processes in the field of education are presented. Recently the topic of school autonomy became a policy priority within the educational systems in the participating member states. In 2017 a new legislative act on the education system was adopted in Austria with the aim of optimizing the legal framework for schools and making the Austrian education system fit for current, but also future challenges. Also Bavaria was confronted with political changes on the topic of schools. With the participation of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano the partner contributed 20 years of experiences in the field of school autonomy in practice to the project. The project group is composed of highly qualified experts and practitioners from the education sector who illuminate the topic from a legal and pedagogical point of view. The project group, which consisted of 11 partner organizations, was primarily coordinated by the Board of Education of Vienna. The partner organizations are based in Styria, Salzburg, Vienna, Lower Austria, Bolzano, Bavaria and Hessen. While most of the participating institutions are located in the public sector, the group was accompanied by two research institutions and an association, that specializes in the field of school law. The interdisciplinary cooperation, which happened during seven partner meetings and during topic-based working groups, resulted in a total of 10 intellectual outputs on a high professional and scientific level. The 10 outputs are manuals, curricula and surveys and raise the questions of what school autonomy legally is and allows in a European comparison, how autonomous leadership culture is currently lived and perceived, and how to learn from neighboring European countries. The involvement of the participating organizations in school authorities, research centers and pedagogical universities from Austria, South Tyrol and Bavaria ensured a practical and technically sound examination of the topic. The 10 outputs are addressed to future school administrators and policy makers. Through exciting articles, the topic of school autonomy was illuminated from a legal as well as a pedagogical point of view, and in parallel, statistical surveys on quality assurance and European comparability were evaluated. The project thus serves to support educational policy developments to realize the idea of subsidiarity in the school system; to reflect on the interdependence between the individual system of autonomous schools and the system as a whole; and to link systemic automatization and site-based quality development and improvement. This made the participating school administrators aware of the different realities and approaches of school autonomy in the participating partner regions and promoted the European dialogue on the topic. The results were largely disseminated during two major events for school principals and administrative personnel in Salzburg and Brixen as well as in the participating institutions themselves and are available online to school administrators and other stakeholders alike, who incorporated them into their management style. Since the project was very well accepted within the target groups, the project group plans to apply for a follow up project.