Abstract:

The New Public Management (NPM) began to be implemented in Europe throughout the 20th century. NGP aims to instill a more active dynamic into public administration and management, based on decentralization and principles such as efficiency and effectiveness and on the approximation of the Public Administration to citizens; the recognition of competencies and delegation of responsibilities; and also the improvement of the performance of the administrative sectors of the State, in order to make them more efficient (Warrington, 1997). In the education sector, NGP has been translated into the progressive implementation of measures that have led to the effective decentralization of the education system and the increased autonomy of schools.

In Portugal (1980s), the NGP boosted the decentralization process of the education system and the autonomy of schools. Progressively, new actors start to integrate the local educational scenario, such as the local power (Municipal Councils) and the stakeholders who, at different levels of intervention, participate in the process of reflection and construction of a school more adapted to the local territory and more efficient in its mission of integration and response to local contexts, thus becoming more efficient on the school massification process (Formosinho, 1992).

In this context, the Collaborative Networks of Schools appear, whose missions aim to transfer knowledge and enable local strategies to solve problems that are often common to several territories (sharing of good practices).

The ESCXEL - Network of Schools of Excellence is an example of a collaborative network of schools, with unique features in the Portuguese context: created in 2008 by a group of researchers from CICS.NOVA/NOVA FCSH (Portugal), currently has 32 school clusters (about 153 schools), spread over 8 municipalities of the country. It is a research project, whose object of study is public educational policies, constituting itself as a project of scientific production that serves to support the construction of public policies, the development of methodologies to materialize their implementation in the field (Schools), and tools to monitor their efficacy and efficiency; But it is also a stakeholder, whose focus is to empower schools and communities to promote educational excellence; support municipalities in the preparation of municipal educational development plans; identify, disseminate and monitor educational "good practices"; and support the development of self-evaluation processes (cf. www.escxel.com).

Following a bottom-up methodology, ESCXEL integrates into its coordination team, the researchers of CICS.NOVA, a representative of the schools of each municipality and a representative of each municipality.

In this communication, we will address a practical case of how the ESCXEL Network has acted in the context of the implementation of the process of transfer of competencies of the State Administration to local authorities: the elaboration of the 2nd generation Educational Charters (D-L n. 21/2019 of 30 January). We will address the methodology followed and how ESCXEL, as a collaborative network, acts in the implementation of public policies (State), through its role as a mediator between local authorities (Municipalities) and Schools, using a collaborative methodology of local agents and implementing the principle of knowledge transfer between Research and Schools.

Keywords:

School Networks, Public Policies, New Public Management, Decentralisation.