Methodology for school action plans

The project, Support of regional action planning (P-KAP), was completed on 31 December 2021. Its main objectives were to strengthen strategic management in education at the level of regions, upper secondary schools and tertiary professional schools, and to align priority themes of the Czech education policy with the objectives of the regions and with the schools' development plans through specific thematic areas - the so-called areas of intervention.

The outputs and educational activities of both the schools and the regions showed that the main principles of strategic management, action planning and mutual cooperation among the social partners have taken root in the field. Educational policies of the regions and the schools' development plans have been aligned with the national strategic goals in education while respecting specific characteristics of individual regions and schools. Across all 14 regions, the implementation teams gradually formulated two regional action plans for the development of education, which became the basis for the implementation projects connecting the regional stakeholders in education and supporting cooperation among schools, employers and other social partners. A total of 918 school action plans (SAPs, which have mandatory areas) and 88 activity plans (AP, schools can customise the focus) were created in the schools. In these plans, the schools set medium-term development goals and a number of specific activities in individual content areas; since the start in the school year 2016/17 these goals have either been already achieved or are still being worked towards.

The most recent, third, comprehensive questionnaire survey of schools' needs in the specified areas of intervention was carried out in the autumn of 2021. The schools received detailed evaluation of each area of support and the implementation teams in the regions were provided with national and regional data in aggregated forms. The outputs of the questionnaire survey also became a source of information to evaluate the schools' progress in the areas of intervention defined by the operation programme.

In 2021, a total of 26 webinars took place; they included some on the content topics of interventions and some focusing on management and planning, which were organised by appointed expert guarantors in the regions. In the Support for inclusion thematic area, the mapping of the status of inclusive education in 1 366 upper secondary and tertiary professional schools was carried out by means of semi-structured interviews, which were completed in September 2021.

In 2021, the P-KAP project focused on updating and summarising the products of methodological support, which remained available to the target groups in the form of 'packages' for the regions and schools on the project website. The packages include detailed Concepts of thematic areas of regional action planning (elaborated for each area of intervention and including an executive summary and SWOT analysis) and the document Early school leaving in relation to areas of intervention, published for the final project conference in September 2021.

The so-called Edu-network (Edusít in Czech) was established in the framework of the project, an online catalogue of experts in education management, planning and areas of intervention, who are available to schools and regions for any kind of projects or activities in education, even after the P-KAP project is finalised. The experts can be contacted through their profiles on the LinkedIn professional network. The National Pedagogical Institute became the administrator of the Edu-network catalogue.

Following 2021, the regional action plans so far elaborated shall become part of the regional long-term plans.