ASSESSMENT OF THE EFFICIENCY OF BUDGETARY FUNDING OF GENERAL SECONDARY EDUCATION IN UKRAINE

Abstract

The Ukrainian education system has demonstrated remarkable resilience, continuing to function even under the adverse circumstances of war. The government has introduced a wide range of measures to amend regulations and legislation, enabling educational institutions, teachers, and students to adapt to the conditions of martial law. New man-agement, training, and budgetary tools have been implemented, which influence all aspects of the educational process due to their universality. The aim of this study is to develop new approaches to assessing the efficiency of budget funding for general secondary education at both the state and regional levels. Specifically, we explore the pos-sibility of using the adapted method of Data envelopment analysis (DEA). We used this method to quantitatively assess the efficiency of budget funding during the pre-war period (2020-2021). For the war period (2022), we used statistical analysis due to significant changes in the information base. To assess the efficiency of budget financing of teachers' salaries in general secondary education institutions, we considered two in-put indicators: funds from the state educational subvention (transferred from the state budget to local budgets) and local budgets' own funds for education. Student's achieve-ments in Ukrainian language and literature, history of Ukraine, mathematics, and Eng-lish were used as performance indicators of the educational process in the national external independent evaluation of 2020-2021 in the regional context. A "thermal ma-trix" was created to display integral indicators of the efficiency of regional budget fi-nancing. This tool is used for risk-based management and helps to identify problems in education, enabling regional managers to formulate more effective education policies. In summary, the effectiveness of the adapted DEA method for assessing the efficiency of budget financing for general secondary education has been confirmed. The specific challenges of implementing the DEA method during the period of martial law will be the subject of our further research.