Education spending review for Romania: teachers and EU funds
A county-level database of teachers, pupils, pay and income separates the wage bill into pupil numbers, staff per pupil and relative pay, and maps EU funds for education county by county.
Sector
Education
Evidence
What pupils learn and how teachers are organised show what schools deliver and what families seek beyond them. More than half of Serbian fifteen-year-olds tested in autumn 2025, after months of strikes, fell short of the basic level in mathematics; in the EU, a third. More than half of teachers in grades five to eight work part-time; in the EU, under three in ten.
What pupils learnfifteen-year-olds below the basic level in mathematics, of every 100Serbia 53EU 34
Who teaches themteachers in grades five to eight who work part-time, of every 100Serbia 54EU 28
OECD, PISA 2025; European Commission, EU PISA 2025; Eurostat, teachers by employment status, 2024
Context
For ministries, schools and donorsFor founders, investors and school operators
Serbia’s school system was built for more children than it now teaches. Each generation is smaller than the last, while schools, classes and teaching posts have shrunk far more slowly, and too many pupils leave school without basic skills. Families who can afford it make up the difference themselves: private lessons, a private school for a few, paid places at university.
Schools are funded by the classes and posts they hold, not by the pupils they teach. As classrooms empty, the posts stay and thin out: small schools cannot fill a teacher’s timetable and many teachers split their week between schools, while city schools struggle to find teachers of mathematics, physics and computing. What suffers is a teacher’s time with one school and its pupils, a preschool place for every child and help for those who fall behind. With public spending on education below the EU average, the question for policy is how the people and money in the system could reach every child and teach each one better.
We review education systems as a whole, as we do health systems: financing, staffing and the school network, set against what pupils learn and who is left out. We have done so for the World Bank in Romania and Serbia, and know from the private side what families look for beyond the public school.
Private schools still teach only a small share of pupils, while private kindergartens and faculties already take a sizeable one, and families pay for extra lessons and for places at university. The room is real but specific: generations are shrinking, so growth comes from the large cities and from winning families over from the public school. The schools and faculties that manage it choose a clear profile, show results parents can check, keep good teachers on full contracts and carry pupils from one stage to the next. Fees come in advance, so the constraint is rarely cash; it is premises, a guarantee for the whole cycle, and the teachers.
We help founders and investors find where demand outruns the offer, build an institution that can hold its price, and judge whether an existing one is worth buying. We know the public system they compete with from reviews of its financing and staff.
Direction
What we do here
Public expenditure & functional reviewsWhere public money goes, what it achieves, and how the same budget could do more.Policy & programme designWhom a programme should reach, with what instrument, and how it will be judged.Custom analytical & performance toolsModels, dashboards and indices, used every time a decision comes back.
Examples of our work
Education functional review for Serbia
Review of the analysis and drafts of the World Bank’s functional review of how Serbia’s school system is organised, staffed and funded, with comments drawn on knowledge of the public sector and its pay.
Public pay reform in Serbia: the analysis and model behind the Public Finance Review 2025
A job-level model of general government pay, anchored on evaluated positions and run on 2023 data, simulates the move to a single pay base without pay cuts. It compares scenarios and phasing under the fiscal rule by sector and job group; teachers and school staff are a third of the employees covered.
Read the casePrivate higher education in Serbia: the market and the options to acquire
Built from the filed accounts of every private institution, official enrolment by field and source of financing, listed tuition by programme and data on graduate outcomes.
Private primary and secondary schools in Serbia: market study
The filed accounts of every verified operator are matched to enrolment school by school, with demographic projections for the largest cities and a reading of the rules of entry.
What we do here
Market entry studiesHow large the market is, who buys, who competes and what it takes to win.Target search & screeningWhich firms exist, who owns them, and which deserve a closer look.Business plansA plan a board can approve and a lender or investor can fund.
Examples of our work
Private higher education in Serbia: the market and the options to acquire
Built from the filed accounts of every private institution, official enrolment by field and source of financing, listed tuition by programme and data on graduate outcomes.
Private primary and secondary schools in Serbia: market study
The filed accounts of every verified operator are matched to enrolment school by school, with demographic projections for the largest cities and a reading of the rules of entry.
Education spending review for Romania: teachers and EU funds
A county-level database of teachers, pupils, pay and income separates the wage bill into pupil numbers, staff per pupil and relative pay, and maps EU funds for education county by county.
Education functional review for Serbia
Review of the analysis and drafts of the World Bank’s functional review of how Serbia’s school system is organised, staffed and funded, with comments drawn on knowledge of the public sector and its pay.
Public pay reform in Serbia: the analysis and model behind the Public Finance Review 2025
A job-level model of general government pay, anchored on evaluated positions and run on 2023 data, simulates the move to a single pay base without pay cuts. It compares scenarios and phasing under the fiscal rule by sector and job group; teachers and school staff are a third of the employees covered.
Read the caseEarlier experience
Before Econominess, Nemanja Šormaz worked on the school workforce, on skills and on the move from school to work: as special adviser in the government from 2015 to 2017, as an individual consultant, and as executive director of a Belgrade economic think tank.
Teachers’ staffing and pay
Review of the functional analyses of the education system as special adviser, then analysis of the school workforce for public pay and staffing reform: staffing counted in full-time equivalents rather than heads, the place of teachers in the new pay grades, and the cost of moving them to the value of their jobs.
Work-based learning
Two rounds of an employer survey on dual vocational education, with host firms, in-company instructors and the former students they hired, and later a dialogue with leading exporting SMEs whose proposals included support for dual education, tracked each year against government action.
Skills for a shrinking workforce
A national study of labour and skills needs for the economic migration strategy, built on labour force survey microdata, a sector employment forecast, and interviews and focus groups with about eighty firms.
The other side
Where families look for more, and how a private school or faculty earns its premium.How the system could reach every child and teach each one better.
Read this as an investorRead this as an institutionContact
Tell us the decision in front of you, and when you need it.
Company profile, PDF · Belgrade, Serbia