Can school autonomy in timetabling affect teachers’ working conditions and pupil’s long-term educational performance?

📚 Sources & References

(1) archival data and interview studies to examine how timetable changes affected schools´ organization of teaching, (2) a detailed comparative study of schools in Stockholm County that changed timetables compared to those that did not in order to analyze the impact on teachers´ and pupils´ working conditions, as well as (3) and register-based statistical analyses of the impact of the reform on pupils´ immediate school results as well as long-term educational outcomes. To examine the causal effect of the timetable experiment we compare changes in outcomes before and after the intervention between schools that define their own timetable and schools that do not use this freedom, using Difference-in-Differences methods. We are an interdisciplinary team with expertise in educational sciences, educational organisation and economics of education. We have experience working with education-related registers and combining qualitative and quantitative data from various sources. In prior projects, we have published socially relevant articles in leading international journals as well as in popular science journals and worked together with stakeholder organisations, which is also the goal in this project. The project comprises three work packages (WP), each of which will result in at least one scientific article and popular science briefs.School autonomy is a crucial topic in education policy. This project focuses on the relatively under-studied subject of how autonomy in the timetable can impact pupils´ and teachers´ working conditions and, by extension, pupils´ educational outcomes.