Past interventions fostering innovation

In its recent history, Hungary has passed through a turbulent period with respect to national measures that have been introduced to the national education system. These rather frequent changes, especially in the last 30 years, have seen periods that ranged from high level of school-control over the curriculum and an imposition to innovate for bare survival, to strict top-down regulations and rules alongside a state-led curriculum (Halász, 2003).

In early 1973, still under communist rule, a new opportunity has been introduced to the public education through school experiments. In the seventies there was only one single school which was truly experimental, but there were many school experiments throughout the country. These schools that implemented school experiments were different from the mainstream schools and, even though rare, they opened the doors for the next phase which happened in the second half of 1970s. In this period, for the first time in Hungarian history, the state provided opportunities for research on innovation in education as well. By the mid of 1980s new legislation was ruled in by the parliament that allowed schools to take so-called particular solutions. Under this legislation, schools that acquired an authorisation by the Ministry of Education could decide to deviate from the core curriculum and apply experimental solutions that were particular to their own situations. This followed a major movement in educational research and practice in which schools would take on alternative pedagogies in order to address the needs of heterogeneous classrooms.

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The political and social transformation at the end of the 1980 and even more at the beginning of the 1990 provided an impetus to democratisation and modernisation of education in Hungary. In 1988, the first national Education Innovation Fund was established with a main goal to provide additional monetary support to school-based innovations. At the time, this state-led intervention was rather unique in the region that was in the midst of the collapse of Soviet Union. Also, in 1989 the idea of the National Core Curriculum was developed with a new framework regulation for compulsory schooling (Horvát, Kaposi, & Varga, 2013). The beginning of 1990s saw blossoming of alternative movements in education and at the level of initial teacher education student-teachers were introduced with courses on alternative pedagogies such as Waldorf and Montessori. The mere fact that the government, as well as the schools, have opened up to more democratic provisions has altered the way teachers teach and behave, and the need for learning inevitably grew stronger. In terms of how some of the previous measures reflected on the teachers’ work, particular requirements that came with the radical decentralisation and abolishment of school inspection in 1986 and aiding pedagogical experimentation supported the inventive teachers and urged others to adapt to the new ways.

The 1990s saw decentralisation move a step further having schools responsible for the curriculum, thus the international donor funding was in many cases targeting schools with enforced innovation spirit. Also, expert conversations have revealed that there were initiatives of national programmes aiding first steps in introducing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into classroom teaching. Resources were given to schools to purchase demand-led teacher professional development programmes. The Public Education Act in 1993 reflected the overall state changes providing freedoms for founding schools and allowing parents to choose the school for their children. It also stood strong against any sort of discrimination. This led to “an over-decentralised organisation of public education that was unique in Europe, with a weak potential for quality enhancement, performance assessment and for the dissemination of innovation on a national scale” (Ministry of Education and Culture, 2008, p. 13). In brief, the schools found it difficult to cope with the new provision in which they were in charge of devising their own curriculum, and this created problems for both school leadership and management, as well as the teachers at large. The problems were remedied by phasing in the National Core Curriculum from 1995 which followed overall modernisations of the content and methodology. Additionally, in the period of the early nineties, according to the expert conversations, there was a remarkable strengthening of the quality enhancement, performance assessment and innovation support from the national level. Decentralisation was

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accompanied by enrichment of state actions, tools, and interventions targeted at these areas, thus also creating many opportunities for the schools who managed to find ways to capture them.

The legislation, introduced in 1996 by the liberal government, gave each school a time period of two years, and by 1998 all of them had to create school-level educational solutions to perceived social problems. Additional to this, 1990s were characterised by large monetary investments from non-state sources, in particular from Soros Foundation, and its education modernisation programme. This investment of the non-state actors was much larger than anything the state was able to offer at the time, and under these provisions a programme of school self-development was established. In a period of just few years and under funding of Soros Foundation, 100 schools were trained to prepare self-diagnoses and develop their own school-level strategies that actively tackle issues identified by the school leadership. This was then spread through a horizontal school-to-school training method, thus creating institutionalised networks that support school development.

In this period, prior to the accession to the European Union in 2004, Hungary was characterised by a high level of economic support from charities and large international organisations (e.g.

Soros, or World Bank at the level of VET) with their own agendas. In particular, this period also quite strongly featured rapid development and investment in innovative practices, particularly those targeting the teaching communities (Halász, 2015). For instance, at the dawn of the new century, a purely national programme called Comenius was introduced to the Hungarian education sector, under which 1500 schools were given the opportunities to hire quality leadership and management consultants, many of which came from the industry sector.

As a large investment at that time in Hungary, this enabled schools to receive training on self-analysis and strategy development. This brought along more interest in management and leadership training, and working with innovations in education was officially seen as a part of the formal training.

In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, innovation as a modernisation strategy came hand in hand with transition towards market economy (Halász, 2003; Radó, 2001) and this is true also for the Hungarian education system. While after 2004 the influence and work of some of the internationals remained, the investment and provisions shifted to state regulated programmes substantially funded by the European Social Fund (Halász, 2015). These programs were firstly procured through HEFOP – the Human Resources Development Operational

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Programme (Humáneröforrás-fejlesztési Operatív Porgram), and later reintroduced through TÁMOP – the Social Renewal Operational Programme (Társadalmi Megújulás Operatív Program). Fazekas (2018) summarises and explains how these two programmes influenced curriculum developments in Hungarian schools, as provided in Table 7.

Table 7: EU funding targeting curricular developments and its implementation in schools

Source: Fazekas (2018)

Table 7 particularly looks into those aspects of the two national EU funding programmes that targeted development of school level solutions and innovations, and the analysis of these interventions has shown that they were all based on a complex development model with an interest of changing teaching methods, development of networks and culture of knowledge sharing (Fazekas, 2018).

The study conducted in Hungary in the period of 2012-2016 under the title The impact of EU-funded development interventions on teaching practices in Hungarian schools has provided valuable additions to overall understanding of implementation of innovations in Hungary. This research confirmed the ideas that innovative interventions had the strongest impacts in schools described as knowledge-intensive, and that some of the elements that support such schools include high level of teacher learning and horizontal cooperation, climate of trust, and school leadership that is oriented towards knowledge creation and sharing. Of similar importance was the element of continuous collection and analysis of data, and openness towards the social

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environment. Schools that calibrate well with the notion of having distributed leadership and active involvement in overall school development set the best examples of successful schools in Hungary under the support of European Social Fund interventions (Fazekas, 2018).

Prior to this study a National Education Sector Innovation Strategy (Nemzeti Oktatási Innovációs Rendszer stratégia – NOIR) was devised following a comprehensive international review of the education system. The NOIR strategy proposed an institutional framework for knowledge creating and sharing with the aim of improving and developing educational practices that would enhance effective teaching and successful learning in schools. The objectives included (OECD, 2016, pp. 28–29):

1. Developing regulatory institutional and organisational frameworks 2. Improving human conditions

3. Ensuring quality

4. Improving knowledge management

5. Exploring potential of technological development

The NOIR strategy indisputably argued that “[a] well-developed sectoral innovation system contributed significantly to the performance of the education system and to the achievement of key public policy goals of the education sector” (OECD, 2016, p. 29) and insisted on the need for a comprehensive and coherent national strategy that continues to bring key partners and stakeholders to focus on improving the quality of education. In the following years, the NOIR strategy was supplemented with a further so-called NOIR+ study which specifically focused on the fourth objective of developing and improving the knowledge management system through better structures of sharing and creating knowledge (ELTE PPK, 2015). The special significance of this study was that it provided a base for the development of the teacher career progression system, which in its essence builds on the notions of teachers’ learning within school communities (Halász, 2018).

5.1.3 Current situation: overview of reforms supporting innovation and teacher learning