The strong link between teacher quality and student learning outcomes calls for effective systems of teacher accountability. School systems in all Australian states have established policies and practices to raise levels of teacher accountability, but it remains doubtful whether they have the capacity to deliver on teacher quality assurance or…

In the last four years teacher performance evaluation in Chile became a major policy issue involving teachers, politicians, the media, school management, and education authorities. The discussion highlighted the unresolved question of how to insure teaching quality and reduce incompetence in classrooms and schools to the benefit of pupil learning…

In Austria, as in many other countries, the educational system is confronted with challenges. Many of these challenges directly or indirectly affect the teaching profession. The first two sections in this paper describe a few system elements with special emphasis on the situation of the teaching profession. The second section describes new demand…

This article examines the struggles of the South African government to establish school-wide evaluation policies within post-apartheid institutions. It is demonstrated that even when such evaluation policies promise teacher development and whole-school improvement, there is significant resistance to government intervention in the school…

This paper outlines the ways in which successive UK governments have regulated and controlled the teaching profession since the 1980s. Key initiatives relating to curriculum, school effectiveness and individual teacher performance are considered in some detail, because these issues have arguably had the greatest impact upon teaching and learning.…

Student teachers' learning in the field experience is seen as being at the heart of their professional training in initial teacher education. This paper reports a qualitative case study of preservice student teachers' learning experiences in school placements in Hong Kong. A multi-case study was conducted in a concurrent teacher education…

The research reported here forms part of a major international study entitled "Emergent Environmentalism". The overall purpose of the Emergent Environmentalism research is to investigate the acquisition and development of environmental knowledge, awareness and concern in both adults and young children. This report is of the results of one aspect…

National value-added datasets have recently become available that record a pupil's progress from Key Stage 2 right through to GCSE. Such a dataset is clearly a useful tool for assessing the impact various characteristics of secondary schools have on pupil performance. This paper reports on a research project which involved the use of a variety of…

Many official strategies for school improvement appear to be based on an assumption that schools operate as autonomous units, hence the privileging of school-based characteristics that are taken to provide indicators of effectiveness. However, if the systemic relationships between schools are recognized then it may be that the establishment of…

On 1 August 1989, the introduction of a National Curriculum of subjects to all maintained schools throughout England and Wales brought compulsory science education into the primary sector for the first time. As a direct result of its elevated profile and an immense amount of hard work and effort by teachers and other professionals responding to…

This paper offers a systematic critical review of controlled outcome studies of the "Philosophy for Children" (P4C) method in primary (elementary) and secondary (high) schools. Ten studies met the stringent criteria for inclusion, measuring outcomes by norm-referenced tests of reading, reasoning, cognitive ability, and other curriculum-related…

The UK Government's Key Stage 3 Strategy (KS3S) aims to transform teachers' approaches, including pedagogy, and pupils' expectations in England. It places new demands on specialist subject teachers to undertake cross-curricular work in the fields of literacy and numeracy development. However, there are insufficient research data concerning trainee…

This paper explores, contrasts, and considers some of the implications of the different ways in which the culture of practice in pre-school provision is construed by various actors ("outsiders" and "insiders") in the enterprise. "Outsiders" means those with responsibility for the formulation of the curriculum, the inspection of provision and the…

In 2002, the Scottish Executive Education Department launched a national debate on schools for the 21st century. The debate elicited over 1500 responses and it is estimated that 20,000 people took part. This paper describes the main themes arising from the debate, highlighting the support for comprehensive education and the high level of trust in…

The past 25 years have seen an accelerating erosion of the comprehensive "ideal" in England and Wales. Parental choice has replaced centralized LEA allocation of pupils, systems for engineering a balanced social mix in schools have been largely abandoned, and the introduction of "league tables" to measure the comparative effectiveness of…