Levelling the Playing Field: Assessing Through Equity the Quality of Chilean Schools
Proposed activities of this project are described on the Gateway to Research as aiming to support social cohesion and to “work against educational segregation by describing a more favourable picture of schools that educate pupils coming from more disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds” (para 3). To do so, policy documents were analysed and local policymakers and researchers interviewed about their views on value-added measures “designed to make fair comparisons between schools […] by adjusting for various background factors and prior attainment by the individual child” (para 1). During fieldwork in Chile, the fellow “worked with local policymakers, particularly at the Ministry of Education and the Quality Agency in Education supporting government’s thinking around innovative school accountability and school improvement methods to account for inequality when assessing school performance” (Outcomes para 3). Hence, the target groups of this project which could be the focus of psychosocial wellbeing impacts were identified by the coders as school children and their families in Chile, and potentially other LMIC in the region. During interview, the fellow reflected on more potential beneficiaries, saying, “because most of the schools that are described and categorised as failures, usually head teachers and the whole community, they experience a lot of mental health issues.”