Nathanaël Friant

Differentiated Financing of Schools in French-Speaking Belgium: Prospectives for Regulating a School Quasi-Market.

The school quasi-market in French-speaking Belgium is characterised by segregation. Efforts to apply measures that encourage greater social mixing have met with stiff resistance. In 2008 and 2009, turbulence was caused by the application of the “social mixing” law influencing the registration procedures. The purpose of this article is to present some results from a prospective research project that investigated the possibility of modifying the formula for financing schools. To do this, a generalised formula for allocating funds to schools according to need is proposed. Then, the solution tested is presented with a financing formula that takes into account indicators of the social composition of the school population. Various scenarios of differentiated financing are presented, through simulations on the effects of these scenarios for all schools. Finally, the implications of these scenarios are discussed and put into perspective with respect to the different solutions considered since 2005 in French-speaking Belgium.

Priority Education Policies in Belgium: Two Modes of Regulation of the Effects of a Market Logic

An important feature of the Belgian context is the ‘communautarisation’1 of education policies. Since 1989 teaching has fallen within the competence of the communities, whereas until then it came under the Federal state. It is the three language-based communities (the French-, Flemish- and Germanspeaking communities) that manage similar but completely independent education systems, each covering part of the country.2 In this chapter we will base our account on the French and Flemish communities. The first part deals with the general context of the education systems of these two communities and recounts their joint move towards equity up to 1989. The second part is centred on the priority education policies in the French Community. The targeted populations and the actions prescribed are analysed on the basis of official documents. Their effective implementation and the evaluation of their effects (whether desired or not) is then discussed on the basis of research and the scientific literature available. The third part of this chapter analyses, in the same way, the priority education policies in the Flemish Community. The chapter concludes, as a summary, by examining the similarities and divergences which exist between the two communities.