The further education (FE) sector in England has experienced two decades of marketisation. This article takes as its focus the first five years of incorporation (1993-1998) for one case study college in a city ("Coppleton") in the West Midlands of England, five years that were dominated by a contract dispute. Data from interviews with…

English education has recently experienced radical policy reform in the areas of school autonomy and accountability. The key focus of this paper is on how schools might best navigate through these policy moves. It highlights how these moves have constructed schools, teachers and students in problematic ways but also how they are offering…

I want to use this essay -- basically a commentary -- as a context for some political reflections on what is happening to the governance and the labour processes at universities internationally. In the process, in addition to my critical reflections on the neoliberal impulses affecting universities, I want to do two other things. First, I shall…

This article deals with the "troubled history" of head teachers' evaluation in Italy, as a specific strand of the controversial and fuzzy embedding of New Public Management (NPM) discourse in the Italian education system. Since the 1990s, NPM has shaped both policy agendas and professionals' subjectivities, leading the way to a…

This article reviews the impact of discourses on "New Public Management" (NPM) on compulsory schooling in Switzerland during the last two decades and traces its implementation in the Canton of Bern. The analysis suggests that while NPM reformers initially promoted increased school autonomy, the introduction of market elements and school…

The Labour government showed no interest in extending local democracy in the school system, in spite of a policy rhetoric of local democratic renewal. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government's localism agenda promotes the autonomy of schools from local authorities without proposing alternative forms of local democracy in the school…

Barker argues that in England under New Labour, school leaders and teachers have been "bastardised" and suggests that the situation in 2010, with a general election afforded an opportunity in education policy for the "pendulum to swing". In this article, the key points about "bastard Leadership" are briefly summarised. The article then develops a…

Following the fall of the Iron Curtain in December 1989, the Romanian system of education has started a deep process of reconstruction that asked for a comprehensive package of reforms among which decentralisation. Broadly the paper aims to make a contribution to the emerging knowledge base about the realities of restructuring of post-communist…

This article aims to present some tensions embedded in the Italian educational reform, arising both from the enactment of neo-liberal policies and the possibilities of democratic development opened up by the introduction of schools' site-based management and decentralisation. The article uses discourses as heuristic devices and presents two case…

In the Kingdom of Bavaria, the capital city, Munich, created in 1873 positions as "Oberlehrer"--a head teacher in primary schools ("Volksschulen") responsible for one school for boys and one school for girls. The mere existence of these male "Oberlehrer" challenged for the first time the exclusive power of Catholic and Lutheran clerics in the…

This article explores governors' perceptions of the role played by school principals in the democratic governance of secondary schools in South Africa. The South African Schools Act No. 84 of 1996 has mandated that all public schools in South Africa must have democratically elected school governing bodies, comprised of the principal (in his or her…

Using the concepts of classification and framing and other relevant writings by Basil Bernstein, an attempt will be made to construct a theorised account of changes in the socio-political context of education in Britain; of the mode of governance in education and of the constructs and practice of educational leadership from the 1950s to the…

Despite the powers that parents are endowed with regarding governance of schools in South Africa, they are not yet given sufficient room and space to deliberate on issues of school governance; instead they are still excluded by some teaching staff who deny them (explicitly or implicitly) from taking part in crucial decisions affecting education of…

On the partition of Ireland in 1921, the Northern Ireland Ministry of Education assumed control of the educational services which had been previously administered by four independent bodies in Dublin. The Education Act (Northern Ireland) 1923 created the county councils and county borough councils of the new devolved state the local education…

The predictable failure of reform has been a characteristic of education systems for some years. However, the tendency of policy makers to attribute blame for any implementation deficit solely to schools and school systems is somewhat at odds with the historical evidence presented in this article. Through the lens of school development planning,…