School-to-school collaboration has been central to many improvement efforts over recent decades. In an attempt to promote both improvement and equity current developments in England have included changing formal governance arrangements to promote collaboration for improvement through "federations" and "chains" of schools.…

Coalition government policies have put into question the role of local authorities in a "self-improving school system". In a number of local authorities new authority-wide partnership bodies are being set up involving all local schools, including academies, and controlled by headteachers. This article begins with an analysis of the new…

In this paper I report on leadership for sustainability in regional schools in Western Australia (WA) in the context of the Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative (AuSSI-WA). Case studies are developed to examine leading cultural change in eight WA regional schools with data presented in three representative narrative accounts. Consistency is…

This article reports on a study that was conducted in 10 urban schools, situated in the city of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The research explored the perceptions of school stakeholders with regard to the effects of power relations between teacher unions and school managers. It is assumed, within the context of this…

The overarching purpose of this study is to examine the prospects of school leadership for the development of intercultural education. The article focuses on the ways in which Greek-Cypriot headteachers conceptualize: diversity and intercultural education; and their school leadership roles in culturally diverse settings. To this extent, interviews…

This concept article discusses the importance of developing psychic income as an administrative strategy to enhance the context of school environments and to curb high teacher turnover. The hope is to promote further debate and research in order to establish the extent to which psychic income influences retention rates in hard-to-staff schools.…

It is known that the work of headteachers is demanding. Observation, diaries and logs completed by headteachers show a relentless, complex and emotionally demanding workload. What can be learned about headship from how new headteachers spend their time, and perhaps as importantly, what can new headteachers themselves learn? This article draws upon…

New technologies are widely used in several domains of human activity and business, including education, because of their positive impact on information management and service delivery. Considering technology's ability to provide for advanced and updated technological tools and applications, information and communication technologies (ICT) have…

In England, the governing body of each school has duties in relations to special educational needs (SEN), and these have recently been extended. It is common practice for responsibility for this area to be delegated to an individual governor or subgroup of governors. Clearly, such arrangements are dependent upon an effective relationship between…

Debates about governance, across the public sector, including education, continue to generate a substantial literature. The intention of this article is to engage with these debates by reviewing the articles in this special edition. In this review article, we first consider the wider context of the articles by revisiting some of the central…

This article analyses school governance in Switzerland. It elaborates on the different actors involved, their roles and functions, and how these change as school governance in the cantons changes. Quality management is identified as a core activity at all levels and for all actors involved in school governance. In these re-structuring processes,…

Complexity theory (CT) has had a meteoric rise in management literature and the social sciences. Its fledgling importation into school leadership and management raises several questions and concerns. This article takes one view of CT and argues that, though its key elements have much to offer school leadership and management, caution has to be…

In recent years, teacher participation in school decision making has become an important topic for discussion in the field of early childhood education in Hong Kong. The purpose of this article is to discuss the theoretical significance, difficulties and issues of greater teacher participation in curriculum and pedagogical decision making in local…

The goal of this research was to understand the managers' value system, the students' moral development, and their relationship in the high schools and pre-universities of District One in Kerman City. The research method used was descriptive-correlational. The statistical population was composed of high school and pre-university managers and…

Prior to 1997, managing school attendance was the sole responsibility of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). Since devolution, responsibility for school attendance has resided with each of the four UK-wide administrations. These are the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) in England; the Scottish Executive Education…