Education plays a major role in modern society and in people’s lives. Children spend a considerable part of their early life in schooling, acquiring knowledge and skills that are useful later in their lives. Schooling does not end with the coming of age, but often continues through life, as many people change their occupation or complement their earlier studies. The concept of lifelong learning depicts this development. (Kirjavainen, 2009). Besides as education has been considered an important source of long-term economic growth and a key element in keeping up in the present day global competition, the educational expenditures have become a substantial proportion of the budgets of state and local governments. (Kang & Greene, 2002). These facts prove that education, and particularly it’s funding, is an important issue of nations is Central and Eastern Europe. (Oliveira, 2005). From the governments’ and the taxpayers’ point of view, it is not irrelevant how this spending is used. There are both equity and efficiency aspects that have to be taken into account in school performance. Equity of schooling emphasizes the importance of providing equal opportunities for education regardless of student’s family background, race or place of residence. (Kirjavainen, 2009). Thinking of students in terms of traditional categories of race, class and gender declines in usefulness; instead the intersection of categories as well as consideration of local and global contexts needs to be taken into account. According to Sherman’s (1988) definition of the efficiency as ‘the ability to produce the outputs or services with a minimum resource level required’, the focus of an educational system should rely on delivering good quality education minimizing the use of resources. Furthermore, Farrell (1957) who is credited with pioneering the measurement of productive efficiency recognized the importance of measuring the extent to which outputs can be increased through higher efficiency without using additional resources (inputs). As mentioned, a strong educational system is a driving force of economic prosperity and, hence, a question about what determines educational efficiency is of special importance. (Stupnytskyy, 2002). Confronting significant decline in student achievement with increasing educational expenditures, a number of studies have focused on the measurement of technical inefficiency and the identification of the sources of inefficiency in local public education. (Kang & Greene, 2002). Despite the generally accepted difficulties, school performance assessment can, among others, be used to set performance targets, to make resource allocation decisions, and to improve overall school performance (Fitzsimmons & Fitzsimmons, 1994). This study is trying to investigate the differences of the efficiency level in the primary schools of the Prefecture of Florina in Northern Greece, where the amount of immigrants is significantly high. More specifically the main aim of the study is to justify these differences according to the students’ origin, family socio-economic status and parental educational level.

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