Investigating the Relative Efficiency and Productivity Change of Upper Secondary Schools: the Case of Schools in the Region of Central Greece

The study investigates the relative efficiency and productivity change of upper secondary schools in the region of Central Greece during the period 2015-2018. It measures the technical and scale efficiencies and productivity change by using input-oriented data envelopment and Malmquist analysis. Empirical analysis reveals that few are efficient and most are inefficient, which causes a significant waste of resources. The efficiency under constant returns to scale varies in interval [0.64-1.000] and under variable returns to scale in interval [0.78-1.000], with average efficiency score being 0.852 (85.2%) and 0.936 (93.6%), respectively. These show that schools could produce on average the same quantity of outputs with 14.8% or 6.4% less quantity of inputs. The scale efficiency varies in the interval [0.64-1.000] and the average is 0.908 (90.8%). This finding suggests that schools on average refrain 9.2% from the optimal scale. The results show that average values of efficiency are moving around the average performance of upper secondary schools of other countries in the world and the European Union. The total factor productivity change, of production factors, has risen by an annual average of 6.8% relative to the base year 2015. To further improve performance, it is proposed to set up an observatory that will measure performance annually and indicate schools with lower performance (e.g. 80%), to be taught by benchmarking schools to improve their performance and reduce the waste of valuable resources. These results can be used by the administration and political institutions to reduce the waste of resources, to improve the achievements of schools.