Towards Shared Accountability: Reflections from ECER 2025 in Belgrade

Between 9 and 12 September 2025, the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) brought together thousands of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners in Belgrade to debate the future of education in an era of uncertainty. Among the many thought-provoking sessions, the symposium “Towards Shared Accountability: Rethinking the Locus and Scale of School Autonomy, Assessment and Accountability in Education” stood out for its timely exploration of how educational governance is evolving across diverse contexts. Convened under Network 23 (Policy Studies and Politics of Education), the session examined how different countries are moving beyond school-level accountability systems toward more collaborative, network-based approaches.

Rethinking Accountability in Education

The symposium’s opening remarks situated the discussion within a broader diagnosis of contemporary education systems. Around the world, schools are navigating increasingly complex challenges — from declining student performance and rising inequality to teacher shortages and mounting mental health concerns. Many of these issues exceed the capacity of individual schools and demand coordinated responses across institutions and sectors. Traditional accountability frameworks, often tied to test-based performance indicators, have proven inadequate to address such systemic problems. In some cases, they have even intensified competition among schools and fragmented the educational landscape.

Against this backdrop, the symposium explored emerging policy experiments that reconfigure the scale and focus of accountability — shifting from individual schools to networks of schools and community actors who share responsibility for broader educational and social outcomes. Across four different national and local contexts, the presented studies examined how these shared accountability models are being conceptualized, implemented, and evaluated, highlighting both their potential and their tensions.

Accountability of/in Interorganizational Networks in Education (Melanie Ehren, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

The first presentation, delivered by Melanie Ehren, set the stage by offering a comprehensive review of the literature on accountability within inter-organizational educational networks. Ehren’s scoping study illuminated how new governance arrangements — where schools, local authorities, and community organizations collaborate toward shared goals — are reshaping traditional understandings of accountability.

Ehren showed that while networks offer clear advantages for tackling complex educational problems, accountability mechanisms often lag behind these collaborative practices. In most cases, she argued, top-down, bureaucratic accountability structures still dominate, focusing on school-level results rather than collective achievements. Only under certain conditions — such as when networks share a common purpose, cultivate mutual trust, and enjoy external legitimacy — do more horizontal and relational forms of accountability emerge. The presentation invited participants to reflect on how policy design can better support these enabling conditions, allowing collaborative networks to move from symbolic to substantive forms of shared responsibility.

Rethinking Accountability in Chile’s New Public Education: Moving Towards Shared Responsibility (Claudia Carrasco Aguilar, Universidad de Málaga & Luis Felipe de la Vega, Universidad de Chile)

The second paper, presented by Claudia Carrasco Aguilar (Universidad de Playa Ancha / Universidad de Málaga) and Luis Felipe de la Vega (Universidad de Chile), turned to the Latin American context, focusing on Chile’s New Public Education (NEP) reform. The authors described how Chile — long characterized by a competitive and market-oriented school system — is experimenting with a new model that seeks to transcend the logic of high-stakes accountability.

Drawing on their ongoing FONDEF research project, Carrasco and de la Vega presented a social accountability framework rooted in local self-evaluation, trust-building, and social capital development. Their participatory approach involved designing tools that help schools, local authorities, and community actors co-construct improvement plans based on shared responsibilities. Early findings from pilot implementations suggest that these processes can strengthen collaboration and equity, linking accountability not to performance rankings but to collective commitments for social justice and inclusion.

By emphasizing ethics of care and distributed leadership, the Chilean case offered an inspiring example of how accountability can be reimagined as a democratic, locally grounded process — a sharp contrast to the performative systems that dominated the previous decades.

The TEIP Programme in Portugal: Autonomy and its Limits (Marta Sampaio & Sofia Marques da Silva, Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Educativas)

In the third presentation, Marta Sampaio and Sofia Marques da Silva (Centre for Research and Intervention in Education, University of Porto) analyzed the Educational Territories of Priority Intervention (TEIP) programme in Portugal, one of the country’s longest-running policies aimed at fostering equity and improving education in disadvantaged regions.

The TEIP programme grants schools in vulnerable contexts additional resources, greater autonomy, and technical support from the Ministry of Education. These measures have enabled innovative practices and significant progress in educational attainment over the last two decades. Yet, as Sampaio and Marques da Silva explained, persistent territorial inequalities and a largely top-down accountability framework continue to constrain the programme’s transformative potential.

Using a mixed-methods approach combining interviews, document analysis, and survey data, their study revealed a paradox: while autonomy can empower schools to innovate, accountability mechanisms that remain centrally defined may undermine local adaptation and democratic participation. The authors argued that advancing towards shared accountability — one that recognizes the interplay between redistribution, recognition, and representation — is crucial for deepening educational justice in Portugal’s most vulnerable areas.

Reworking School Governance in Catalonia’s Educational Zones (Antoni Verger, Edgar Quilabert, Mauro Moschetti, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Marcel Pagès, Universitat de Barcelona)

The final paper, presented by Antoni Verger, Edgar Quilabert, Marcel Pagès, and Mauro Moschetti, examined the early stages of a pilot policy in Barcelona that introduces a new governance model known as the Educational Zone. Designed and implemented by the Barcelona City Council, the initiative groups several schools in a deprived urban area under a shared administrative and pedagogical framework.

Drawing on a realist evaluation approach, the authors explored how this mid-range governance structure aims to reallocate administrative tasks, foster collective pedagogical projects, and promote shared responsibility for educational outcomes. Through interviews, surveys, and comparative analysis with a control zone, the research team identified both emerging benefits — such as stronger inter-school cooperation and joint planning — and early implementation challenges, including the need to balance school autonomy with collective governance.

Although still in its formative phase, the Educational Zone model represents a bold attempt to rethink the scale of accountability and to institutionalize collaboration as a means to advance equity and systemic improvement.

Looking Ahead: Future Directions in Shared Accountability

The symposium concluded with an insightful discussion led by Professor Jo-Anne Baird (University of Oxford), who offered a thoughtful synthesis of the four papers and raised critical questions for the field. She emphasized the importance of continuing to investigate how shared accountability frameworks can be designed to both respect local diversity and maintain system-wide coherence. Baird also underscored the need for more comparative and longitudinal research to assess the long-term impacts of these governance shifts on equity, professionalism, and educational quality.

Her reflections brought the session to a close on an inspiring note, highlighting that rethinking accountability is not merely a technical reform but a democratic endeavor — one that calls for reimagining how responsibility, trust, and collective purpose are organized within and beyond schools.