Ownership and real estate management for community schools in the Netherlands

This study provides a first glance at the structure of the decision-making process towards a BM&O and ownership model in the Dutch community school sector. This decision-making process is a multi-actor decision-making process. Studies show that in practice a lot of problems arise from the way ownership and BM&O are arranged in Dutch community schools. The general idea in practice is that a lot of these problems are caused by the fact that ownership and BM&O structures are discussed to late in the process of developing new community schools. By discussing the ownership and BM&O in a late stage of the process the building is not adapted to its use.
To enable organizations to discuss and decide upon a BM&O and ownership structure in the beginning of the process (before the program of requirements, design and construction of the building has been carried out) of developing a new community school this study aims on developing a graphical representation of the decision-making process itself. Such a graphical structure assist in understanding the decision-making process and lays grounds for the development of a decision support tool. In this study a combination of Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM) and an Bayesian belief network based on expert opinions (adjacency matrix questionnaire and validation interviews) has been used to reach this objective.
The FDM approach allows for selection of the most important variables influencing the decision towards an ownership and BM&O model in the Dutch community school sector. By conducting a survey among the organizations that are often part of the community school initiative, that have made these decisions in the past, an overviews of the decision-making factors is obtained. By conducting a second survey that aims on finding the relationships between the variables that influence the decision-making process a directed acyclic graph (DAG), of the decision-making process has been made.