Nicaragua presents an interesting case study of a society pursuing reform of the democratization of its school governance through citizen participation. A radical transformation with a complex institutional arrangement was put in place within a context of major political change and endemic poverty. In order to achieve our objective of empirically…

This article investigates budget monitoring and control in township schools in South Africa. The enactment of the Schools Act 1996 revolutionized school financial management in South Africa, making it part of the drive for democratic school governance. School governing bodies had to be established, whose responsibility it became to manage finances…

A lot is expected of Slovenian principals, yet very little is known about aspiring principals' own expectations of principalship. Currently there is no Slovenian study of aspiring principals, although they represent the majority of those enrolled on the "certification programme" of the National School for Leadership in Education. The purpose of…

A UK business school was researched to record its history and to account for its development. The data collection and interpretation were influenced by the flexible and iterative nature of the methodology. Theories and concepts used to make sense of the findings include: open systems, force fields, and power. The focus is on strategic leadership,…

This article presents the results of a study of the impact of three programmes of the National College for School Leadership (NCSL), namely Leading from the Middle, the National Professional Qualification for Headship and the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers. All three programmes embody a blended learning approach that includes an…

In this article, we provide a grounded narrative of capacity building in the turnaround equation by exploring the turnaround literature outside of education and applying it to troubled schools. Our analysis is based upon reviews of: (1) 14 comprehensive, historical volumes that examine the turnaround phenomenon; (2) 16 book-length analyses of…

Leadership, currently prescribed as a key requirement for effective school organization and management, is examined here as a rhetorical or discursive device, as a "turn", in the sense used in literary and sociological discussion of the linguistic turn. In the educational sphere, a tacit separation of leadership from issues of governance and…

Fiscal efficiency and organizational effectiveness were the primary objectives that underpinned the reform of educational administration in New Zealand in the late 1980s. The consequent re-organization of schools and schooling located responsibility and accountability for school performance, teachers' work and student outcomes firmly at the door…

While there is extensive research on educational leadership and management, the selection of leaders has received comparatively little attention. This article examines how educational leadership is constructed through the selection process in the context of a qualitative study of Irish education. It highlights the tensions that can exist for…

The rhetoric of "partnership" is ubiquitous in UK policy at national, regional, local and organizational levels. Self-styled partnership activity is espoused by most schools in England and Wales. This article considers the implications of the growth of partnership for conceptualizing leadership. It draws on evidence of interviews with young…

The further education (FE) sector employs a high proportion of women yet relatively few women progress into leadership positions. The article seeks to provide explanations for this gender imbalance and argues that despite change and modernization initiatives, the further education sector remains gendered in many aspects of leadership, governance…

Establishing an innovative school requires a great deal of planning effort, human power and resources. Nevertheless, many innovative schools suffer a process of regression toward the mean and lose their innovative zeal. Based on the life cycle approach, which claims that part of this trend of regression is embodied in the planning phase, and on…

The purpose of this article is to present and investigate the current situation in Greece regarding the management of primary schools and to underline the need for reforms in the field of school administration. The coordination of the relationship between the state and schools is an issue vital for both: primarily for schools, as they require a…

Inclusive education challenges all schools to cater for a wider range of students. This implies that schools and teachers have to change. This literature study analyses how, if at all, policymakers can bring about changes in schools. Specific steering concepts of policymakers, whose interventions seem to address schools as "machine" bureaucracies,…

In light of feminist scholars who have called for challenging the epistemology of existing theories and concepts in social sciences and recreating an innovative knowledge in which women are the focus, the current study aimed at tracing the career stories of 25 Israeli female deputy heads who explicitly do not aspire to headship. These deputies…