Annex C. Visit programme
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.
2. The review team selected schools 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) socio-economic challenge (as measured by proportions of students receiving social support and average levels of maternal education); ii) student performance on national examinations; iii) eligibility and non-eligibility for Priority Educational Intervention Area (TEIP) support; iv) private and public governance; v) VET provision; and vi) rural, remote and urban settings. The team created sub-samples for the Lisbon municipality, the Lisbon Metropolitan Area outside of the Lisbon municipality, the Porto municipality, the North region outside Porto, Alentejo and the Algarve for its six school visits in the main visit. 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 at random that matched these desired characteristics. For five of the six school visits, the randomly selected school was the one visited. In one case, the initially selected school had unique circumstances that would have led to an unrepresentative visit, so a replacement school was randomly selected to visit.
3. While visits took place in a particular school within a cluster, the review team met with school leaders, teachers, families and students representing all schools in the cluster.