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Paper abstract:

This paper presents preliminary findings from an ongoing study examining the relationship between educational inequality and elite education, with a focus on the case of state-sponsored Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS) in Kazakhstan. The study compares the academic outcomes and socioeconomic backgrounds of students attending Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS) with those attending non-elite schools in Kazakhstan, using a sample of more than 19,000 Kazakhstani students who participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018, including about 2,500 students from NIS.

Preliminary analysis using mixed-effects regression modelling reveals significant differences in academic performance and access to educational opportunities between students attending NIS and non-elite schools. When considering the performance on the PISA 2018 mathematics, reading, and science assessments, we found that students attending NIS performed significantly better than their peers in non-elite schools. We also found that NIS students are generally from more affluent backgrounds and have access to better resources and support systems, indicating the presence of educational inequality within the Kazakhstan secondary education system.

Going forward, our study plans to conduct further analyses of the data, including statistical modeling to control for potential confounding variables and examining qualitative data to explore key factors that may be contributing to the disparities in educational outcomes between NIS and non-elite schools. These include differences in teacher quality, school resources, and funding models.

Our preliminary findings have important implications for policymakers seeking to promote educational equity and improve the quality of education in Kazakhstan. Specifically, our findings suggest that efforts should be made to ensure that the benefits of an elite education are accessible to a wider range of students.

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This presentation compares how different forms of school funding influence the ability of urban public school principals’ decision-making for the development of the school in Kazakhstan. Per-capita school funding (PCF) in Kazakhstan provides schools with more adequate funds while maintaining the same regulations for the distribution of the school budget at schools with the same legal status. The presentation discusses whether the formula-based PCF creates a different managerial accountability burden for school principals as compared to incremental line item budget-based school funding. The evidence in this paper comes from a real-life policy experiment context where one part of otherwise similar public urban schools receive formula-based PCF and another – incremental line item budget allocations. Data analyzed in the paper comes from online survey responses of almost 500 school principals across the regions of Kazakhstan. This research finds that principals at schools with PCF feel more autonomous in making decisions about the development of the school than their counterparts at schools with a different form of funding. Yet, there is no difference between these two groups of principals in respect to the experience of managerial accountability burden. This research argues that the experiences of school principals are similar in terms of accountability pressures regardless of whether it is a bureaucratic or an evaluative state paradigm that guides the national education policy. What matters, however, is access to financial resources. When principals have sufficient resources to allocate toward the unmet needs of the school, they feel more in charge of the development of the school.

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Teachers’ professional learning has been increasingly identified as one of the key factors to the effective implementation of education reform and support for teachers to improve education outcomes for all students, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds. Although the existing research demonstrates the growing understanding of teachers’ professional learning as a complex process, with teachers being both the subjects and objects of learning and development, informal professional learning is still an under-researched area, particularly in the context of increasing use of social media platforms. Capturing the experiences of 41 schoolteachers in Kazakhstan using thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews, the paper provides evidence of teachers’ use of social media within professional communities to obtain knowledge manifested in an overlapping mixture of news, information, opinion, experience and teaching resources. The paper analyses teachers’ engagement in virtual professional communities within the framework of informal learning. Particularly, it suggests that virtual professional communities help to reduce the professional isolation of teachers in rural schools.

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Paper abstract:

Globally, one-fifth of individuals aged 15–24 belong to a NEET population (not in employment, education or training). NEETs have become an increasingly important phenomenon, especially for policy-makers concerning significant concepts such as social exclusion and inequality, gender, or poverty among youth. While the rate of NEET youth is comparatively low in Kazakhstan, its conceptualization has not yet come to a consensus in the academic field as well as in national policy. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate by addressing the risk factors associated with NEET youth in Kazakhstan. It has been revealed from the literature that micro-level risk factors such as being female, low educational level, poor socio-economic background, lack of support in schools, poor school-to-work transition, and health-related problems significantly predict the NEET condition. This paper will use data from the Labour Force Survey to examine factors that contribute to the NEET status and will further explore those factors in-depth in Karaganda city which shows the highest NEET rate across Kazakhstan. Determining the risk factors is significant to design better targeted preventive and intervening policy strategies towards NEET youth.