1. The review team identified stakeholder groups with whom to meet via consultation with the national co-ordination team, soliciting input from stakeholders during the pre-visit and a desk review of key educational institutions in Portugal. The review team did a pre-visit and a main visit, which were conducted online due to the COVID-19 pandemic context. The school visit was conducted in person in Portugal at a later stage.
2. The review team selected school clusters (public schools) and an individual independent private school to visit during the main visit by creating a stratified sample of schools, randomly selecting schools and then verifying the schools selected through this process captured the desired variation in school qualities. Specifically, the team created regional sub-samples of schools matching specific qualities. The team was interested in observing a range of school characteristics: varying levels of: (i) school cycles; (ii) socio-economic challenge (as measured by proportions of students receiving social support); iii) school cluster sizes; iv) eligibility and non-eligibility for Priority Educational Intervention Territories (TEIP) support; v) private and public governance; (vi) dropout rates; (vii) foreign student population rates; (viii) the existence or absence of school projects to promote equity and inclusion and ix) geographical location (one school in each region and rural/urban settings). The team created sub-samples Lisbon and Tagus region, the North, the Centre, Alentejo and the Algarve for its six school visits. Within each regional sub-sample, the review team specified a desired mix of school characteristics (e.g. low socio-economic status school with strong academic results) and selected a school cluster or individual school at random that matched these desired characteristics. For the six school visits, the randomly selected school cluster or individual school was the one visited.
3. Visits took place in a particular school within a cluster, except from the private independent school that was non-grouped. The review team met with school leaders, teachers, parents and students representing all schools in the cluster.
Online pre-visit programme (Zoom meetings)