WAYS TO IMPROVE THE BUDGET SUPPORT OF SCHOOL EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT IN UKRAINE

Abstract

The efficiency of budgetary funding for general secondary education is a quite relevant issue, as such funding requires a significant proportion of budget resources spent on education. International researchers have suggested different approaches to determining this efficiency. The article examines if it’s possible to use one of the modifications of the Data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to assess the efficiency of budget financing of general secondary education. This method was tested on the data on the financing of schools in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine in 2020 using resources from four types of local communities budgets (regional budget, city budget, district budget and the LC budget). The resulting indicators of the model (outputs of funding) have been constructed based on the results of the nationwide external independent assessment in several subjects, which the students obtained after graduation. The authors offered several variants of the resulting indicator and calculated the integrated efficiency indicator. It is shown that it is partly possible to solve the problems of optimization of the network of secondary education institutions by the simulation approach using DEA. The quality of education is generally lower in small general secondary education institutions, as such they need to be reorganized. At the same time, other school activity indicators that may not be reflected in education statistics need to be taken into account when making final management decisions to optimize the school network, in addition to the results of a nationwide independent external evaluation. In particular, economic and social factors should be further considered, such as the possibility of economic development of the settlement at the expense of local resources, infrastructure, proximity to markets, energy factors, etc. In this case, the methods of economic and mathematical simulation are applicable.