New Ways of Financing Schools: Per-Capita Funding

This chapter examines the policy learning that has taken place during the process of piloting the per-capita funding formula and the school-board governance models in Kazakhstan. It draws on evidence from policy documents, secondary data sources and the primary data from collaborative research by the Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education (NUGSE) and the University of Cambridge (2019–2020) and the NUGSE research project for 2021–2023 focused on country-wide implementation of per-capita school funding. The chapter describes the process of piloting this funding and documents how school principals perceive this new approach and the new mandated policy of appointing their boards of trustees. This research concludes that the piloting of the per-capita funding model and scaling up this reform affirm the importance of time and an ongoing policy evaluation for enabling policy learning and achieving improved policy outcomes. Hence, every phase of piloting this funding resulted in some new understanding of this model among school principals. In addition, they gained knowledge about the boards of trustees’ role in school improvement.