In the context of the school development discourse and of current regionalization processes in particular, support systems for schools have increasingly gained importance. At the same time, an important research gap has emerged with respect to inter-relations between support systems and regionalization processes. In fact, there is a lack of robust instruments for analyzing support structures in the regionalization context. We address this gap by developing a heuristic to examine support systems designed for educational landscapes along different dimensions. For this we use aspects of motivation and governance theories. We then apply the heuristic to interview data collected in the regional school network project ‘Schulen im Team – Übergänge gemeinsam gestalten’ about the role of Local Education Offices. Our findings suggest that the heuristic makes a contribution to evaluating support systems in the regional context and might be applicable in a more general context also.

Keywords
Support system; School development; Regionalization; Educational landscapes; Educational governance