Call for Junior Researchers: Mapping School Networks in Europe

The Education Support Program of the Open Society Foundations seeks the support up to six junior researchers to collect Comenius Programme selection results data from country managing authorities.

Background

One significant aspect of the Education Support Program’s (ESP) work is to identify and base its actions (programmatic, advocacy and communication) on primary evidence of systematic violations of the principles of educational justice and equal educational opportunity.

Based on the above considerations ESP seeks to strengthen its evidence base on the operations of the European Union’s principal school improvement programme (Comenius) that operates in 32 countries and entails 8 decentralised and 3 centralised actions. Through these actions the Comenius programme seeks to develop the knowledge and understanding among young people and educational staff of the diversity of European cultures, languages and values by supporting international co-operation among educational institutions in participating countries. It focuses on the first phase of education, from pre-school and primary to secondary schools. It is aimed to help young people acquire the basic life skills and competences necessary for their personal development, for future employment and for active citizenship. The specific objectives of the Comenius programme are:

• To develop of knowledge and understanding among young people and educational staff of the diversity of European cultures and languages and its value.
• To help young people acquire the basic life-skills and competences necessary for their personal development, for future employment and for active European citizenship.

Considering the above Comenius programme objectives and the application of policy through service commissioning ESP has identified a possible instance of public funding selectivity. To verify the possible market selectivity effects of the Comenius programme we seek to undertake a large-scale data collection exercise to verify the extent to which this hypothesis can be considered valid or not.

Tasks and responsibilities of consultant

To this end, we seek the support up to 6 junior researchers to collect Comenius selection results data from the country managing authorities on the principal actions supported by the Comenius Programme.

The specific tasks of junior researchers include:

1. Visiting the web-site of National Agencies, or the Education, Audiovisual, and Culture Executive Agency from where to compile all the available selection results and programme review reports for the Comenius actions, for the 2007-2012, in the available format. Each researcher will be responsible for collecting the data from 5 to 6 countries. Country allocations will be done considering the language competences of researchers.
2. Identify the data gaps, and contact the respective National Authority in view of obtaining the missing data.
3. In the next step researchers will coding the collected selection results data using a common format provided by OSF. This will include at least information on: project number, lead country, project country code, candidate, city of the candidate, address, zip code, result, budget allocated, etc.
4. Researchers submit brief report on the data mining outcomes using a standardised template provided by ESP, which will state the nature of missing data, if any.
5. Researchers submit the final dataset according to the standardised format.

Researchers will at least have a BA degree in relevant fields (e.g. education, sociology, etc.) and has proven expertise in data mining and large dataset handling.

Submission deadline: 25 October 2012

More information