ABOUT THE PROJECT

1. INTRODUCTION

Education systems today face complex, interrelated challenges: rising inequalities and learning gaps, student disengagement, teacher shortages and turnover, and growing societal polarization. These issues often stretch beyond what individual schools can manage on their own.

Traditional models of school autonomy and accountability are no longer sufficient. In many cases, they have increased competition between schools, fragmented educational services, and widened the gap in learning opportunities—especially for students in vulnerable communities.

ACCOUNTED explores emerging governance models that promote shared accountability and inter-school collaboration in education. These models prioritize collaboration across schools and partnerships with local actors—such as youth services, community organizations, and local governments—to tackle systemic challenges together.

2. Research Objectives

  • To investigate how shared and networked accountability models function in schools
  • To examine the role of new educational govarnance frameworks in fostering school collaboration
  • To assess the impact of these frameworks on educational equity, improvement and collaborative practices

3. Methodology

Our project combines international comparative policy research with local applied evaluation, using a mixed-methods approach to understand and support shared accountability in education.

At the international level, we reviewing and building a database of policy experiences that promote shared accountability across education systems. This includes an in-depth analysis of:

  • Portugal’s TEIP Programme
  • The Netherlands’ Networks for Inclusion
  • Chile’s new Local Educational Services
  • The Greater Manchester Challenge (UK)
  • Belgium’s Communities of Schools
  • New Zealand’s Communities of Learning
  • France’s Zones d’Éducation Prioritaire
  • UK’s Education Action Zones 

By examining these experiences, we aim to identify key design features, governance mechanisms, and enabling conditions for collaborative accountability frameworks.

At the local level, we are directly involved in piloting and evaluating the “Educational Zone” project in the northern area of Barcelona, in collaboration with the Consorci d’Educació de Barcelona (CEB). This initiative seeks to promote collaboration between schools and community actors in disadvantaged areas in order to reduce inequalities and improve educational outcomes (for instance, by enhancing sutdent learning , and supporting students’ transitions. Our approach is informed by the principles of research-practice partnerships (RPPs), which emphasize sustained collaboration between researchers and practitioners to co-produce knowledge, inform practice, and support context-sensitive educational change.

The impact evaluation integrates both theory-based methods (to trace causal mechanisms and contextual factors) and quasi-experimental techniques (to estimate the effects of the Educational Zone initiative on educational and social outcomes). Our data collection methods include: school questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and participatory observation in several collaborative spaces