This qualitative phenomenological study explored the barriers, solutions, and drivers of change for the inclusion of students with disabilities in Catholic elementary schools from parents' perspectives. Eight open-ended interviews were conducted with the parents of students with disabilities who attended Catholic or public elementary schools,…

Purpose: To improve school organisational performance and innovativeness, and meet diverse student needs, school leaders should be innovative, risk-takers and proactive, thus applying entrepreneurial practices/strategies and market mechanisms. This study aims to investigate, from a schoolteacher's perspective, the degree of entrepreneurial…

There are many examples of collaborative action research being used to promote school change. Reflecting on evidence gathered as a result of collaborative inquiry led by a teacher in a primary school in Cyprus over a 3-year period, this paper examines what is involved in using such an approach within a centralised education system. In so doing, it…

Teachers are frontline actors in actualising educational innovations. In some contexts, teachers' professional agency is undervalued. This study investigated teachers' agency and its related workplace affordances in Hong Kong, which features a centralised-decentralisation education governance system, and a hierarchical work culture. The study was…

Purpose: This paper presents a study on how professional learning communities (PLC) are developed in an Asian setting, and the nature of leadership that helped to cultivate and sustain PLC in this setting. Research Method: The study adopted a sequential mixed method, starting with a survey followed by qualitative case studies, involving focused…

Over the past two decades Malta has been witnessing wave after wave of reforms. Whilst official documents speak of the need for more decentralised forms of governance the reality shows otherwise. Data from a series of studies involving school leaders show that they still feel that a top-down approach is being adopted leaving limited space for…

In England the balance of responsibilities between national and local government for the governance of education is changing. Relationships between schools are shifting and new structures, groups and alliances are being created in response to national policy. The article is part of a project to understand how the new local education landscapes are…

The "world culture" framework posits a convergence in the organisation of education across the world. On the other hand, scholars observing teaching practices inside classrooms find significant variation among nations and regions of the world. This study examined the global change patterns of classroom practices at the between- and…

This qualitative case study used General Systems Theory and social network analysis to explore the relationships between the members of a district central office and principals of elementary schools within an urban school district in the Midwest. Findings revealed sparse relationships between members of the district central office and principals,…

This article examines Japanese education system especially relevant to the school curriculum, which might support Japanese high performance in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), mainly through Japanese policy documents. The Japanese education systems have been constructed by the local context of society and politics,…

The present small-scale study aimed to investigate teacher agency from the perspective of in-service language teachers in relation to their perceived professional space. It specifically aimed to have an understanding of factors contributing to teacher agency positively and negatively. To this end, eight Turkish EFL teachers working at private and…

The Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD) was created in 2011 to rapidly turn around the lowest performing schools in the state by authorizing high performing charter management organizations to operate the schools. A lack of enough quality applicants, however, led the district to directly run a group of schools. This research investigates…

Prepared for a Strategic Education Governance learning seminar, this working paper analyses the ways in which the Dutch government tried to reach overarching goals in education, in a system characterised by a high degree of distributed autonomy of education institutions and the participation of multiple actors, and consequently a government highly…

The following paper attempts to assess whether research benefits school empowerment, as argued by the evidence-based literature, or, whether an education system under centralised circumstances, may be another expression for the centralisation trap which undermines school empowerment. This study follows an official Call for Research initiated by…

Here, at "FORUM's" invitation, is the text of the 2014 Godfrey Thomson Trust public lecture at the University of Edinburgh. Its backdrop is the centralisation of educational decision-making in England since 1988 and the power and patronage exercised by the Secretary of State. Taking as examples recent policies on childhood, curriculum…