Literature review on Stakeholder participation in education decision making

The report is here and the annotated bibliography is available here. The associated documents are mostly available here. The filenames on that page correspond to the names of the documents in the bibliography (at the bottom of some of the entries, where it says "attachments").

On September 15, 2007, the Education Support Program launched a new initiative entitled "Advancing Educational Inclusion and Quality in South East Europe". The project aims to address the problem of rising disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes continue in South East European (SEE) countries.
To address those concerns, the Education Support Program supported the development of an initiative aiming (1) to better understand the ways in which stakeholders’ participation are engaged in school level governance, by carrying out national surveys of school directors; and (2) and to support sustainable initiatives on local, national and regional level to improve quality and inclusion though enhancing stakeholders’ participation in school governance.
The project will take three years, divided into two phases of approximately 18 months each.
The present literature review aims to provide a background to Phase 1 as described above. In particular it is tasked to:
• Review earlier and recent academic and professional work on the research theme (stakeholder participation in school decision-making and the role of school level leadership in promoting participation).
• Identify basic operational definitions of core concepts relevant to Phase one survey activities.
• Identify similar surveys and studies with emphases on conceptual definitions, methods and research results.
• Summarize the state of the art by analyzing and interpreting results and identifying areas in which further research would be beneficial

"Participation" can be ambiguous in the context of school studies. For the purposes of the present report it means the involvement of all or any relevant stakeholder groups (students, family, teachers, other local community members) in any kind of school management or decision making. We do not primarily mean participation in the sense of students merely attending school or in the sense of students taking part in out-of-school activities such as sports.