Collective Co-Production in Russian Schools

Abstract

The growing demand for quality education services, as well as financial constraints faced by educational institutions produce the need for active involvement of parents and other representatives of local communities in the educational process so as to provide schools with additional resources. As a form of such involvement, non-profit organizations (NPOs) can be established to support educational institutions. In this paper, we assess the level of collective co-production in Russian school education and look for  orrelations between institutional characteristics of schools and their cooperation with NPOs. The data for research was obtained from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities (through the SPARK System), websites of municipal departments of education, and publicly available sources of information about activities of NPOs supporting schools. We reveal considerable cross-regional differences in the development of collective co-production in school education. The process is more active in provincial towns than in megalopolises: the proportion of schools supported by specifically founded NPOs is higher in many regional centers than in the capital cities. At the same time, a lot of regions have no such NPOs at all. As it turns out, NPOs are more likely to be created to support schools with a special status (gymnasiums, lyceums and specialized schools), where the parental demand for quality education services is higher. Meanwhile, we found no correlation between autonomous status of educational institutions and their participation in collective co-production. Thus, the increased degree of independence did not induce cooperation with NPOs for the purpose of raising extra-budgetary funds in this case.