Abstract:

Educational decentralisation has become, in recent decades, a central element of public administration reforms in Portugal, reflecting broader transformations in the governance of educational policies. The transfer of responsibilities to municipalities, consolidated through Law No. 50/2018 and Decree-Law No. 21/2019, aimed to bring decision-making closer to local contexts, promote educational responses better aligned with territorial needs, and encourage forms of multi-level governance involving different institutional actors. Within this framework, the present study analyses the perceptions of two key actors in this process—municipalities and school clusters/single schools—regarding the transfer of educational competences. The research is based on a nationwide questionnaire survey that collected responses from 169 municipalities and 275 school clusters/single schools. The analysis focuses on several dimensions of the decentralisation process, namely municipal involvement in local educational management, the articulation between municipalities and schools, and the organisational impacts associated with the transfer of competences. The findings point to the existence of differentiated perceptions between these two levels of governance. While municipalities tend to value the strengthening of local intervention capacity and the proximity in addressing educational issues, schools express greater caution regarding some organisational effects of the process. These results suggest that educational decentralisation constitutes a complex process of reorganising relationships between different governance levels, in which distinct expectations and institutional coordination challenges coexist. Understanding these perceptions is essential for deepening the debate on local governance models in education and on the conditions required for the consolidation of effective and sustainable decentralisation processes.

Keywords:

Educational decentralisation, Multi-level governance, Municipalities, Schools, Portugal.