This paper explores different conceptions of responsibility within and beyond neoliberal frames. Such exploration draws on the experiences and accounts of "Ashleigh," a head teacher at a primary school in outer London that is part of an academy chain. Ashleigh and her school were key participants in a study that explored matters of…

Contemporary accountability frameworks position school leaders as being essential to improving school performance and driving innovation. Simultaneously, new accountability demands have forced the restructuring of school leadership, both in terms of form and function. In this paper, we look at the growing trend of distributed leadership among…

Most policymakers and academics agree that entrepreneurship is indispensable to society's development and well-being. Fostering entrepreneurship has become a matter of highest priority in public policy worldwide. Given the growing pressures of decentralization and competitiveness that schools have faced over the last 20 years, the role of school…

This paper reports on evidence from five school principals regarding leadership practices that work in multiple deprived contexts. The South African educational landscape is complex, often described as a cocktail of first and third world institutions. Looking at the schooling system on a continuum, on the one end there are first class schools…

As accountability systems have increased demands for evidence of student learning, the use of data in education has become more prevalent in many countries. Although school and administrative leaders are recognizing the need to provide support to teachers on how to interpret and respond to data, there is little theoretically sound research on…

This article deals with the changes introduced in the Italian education system after the 1997 School Autonomy reform. Looking at the complex interplay between global influences and processes of local inflection, the work explores the degree to which we are witnessing a significant shift towards a new mode of governance and the interplay between…

Principals, as one of the professional leaders in a school, are accountable for the quality of education in the school. This is a part of the normal job description and expectations for the person in such a post. In the South African context with a large number of underperforming schools, there is an intention to have an additional performance…

This article reports research conducted recently into evaluation policy. The research comprises two parts: a questionnaire survey and qualitative interviews. Drawing from data collected in a survey of 65 curriculum leaders and interviews with 12 from the group, the article discusses how school evaluation policy functions to help make schools…

"School-based management" (SBM) rose to become a prominent trend in educational reform in Western countries during the last few decades of the 20th century and has likewise been introduced into a number of Asian and African nations. A key component of SBM is the increase of internal accountability within the school with the aim of…

This article reports findings from a case study of district leadership for school, family and community partnerships in a suburban district in the mid-Atlantic region of the USA. Analyses suggest that the case district's family and community involvement specialist has been successful in using different kinds of data to achieve a variety of goals…

This article reports on a study that explores collaborative structures of shared decision-making in an urban secondary school in the USA. The data in the study came from unstructured interviews with 20 teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, a counsellor and 10 students. The interviews took place over a three-week period in June of 2001…

Is it possible for principals/heads to be effective educational leaders? In this study, we compared the work of principals/heads in two policy contexts. In Policy Context 1, standards for student performance were common and well-established, and authority was devolved to the school level for reshaping the school to meet those standards. In…