In light of feminist scholars who have called for challenging the epistemology of existing theories and concepts in social sciences and recreating an innovative knowledge in which women are the focus, the current study aimed at tracing the career stories of 25 Israeli female deputy heads who explicitly do not aspire to headship. These deputies…

Technological and economic changes affect societies, and consequently bring about change in education. Elementary school principals in Turkey spend considerable time and effort managing change in their schools. This study contributes to the better management of Turkish elementary schools by determining the behavior of elementary school principals…

Workforce Remodelling in England implemented between 2003 and 2005 has been presented by the "New Labour" government as a means of enhancing the development of teachers and promoting rising educational attainments. While the processes that schools were to follow to achieve the desired "fundamental alteration in mindset" were…

The purpose of this article is to present and investigate the current situation in Greece regarding the management of primary schools and to underline the need for reforms in the field of school administration. The coordination of the relationship between the state and schools is an issue vital for both: primarily for schools, as they require a…

Fiscal efficiency and organizational effectiveness were the primary objectives that underpinned the reform of educational administration in New Zealand in the late 1980s. The consequent re-organization of schools and schooling located responsibility and accountability for school performance, teachers' work and student outcomes firmly at the door…

This article outlines a comparative analysis of three studies (one provincial, and two school division) that examined the congruence between the priorities of the Manitoba government's "Kindergarten to Senior 4 (K-S4) Education Agenda for Student Success" and priorities identified by stakeholders in a rural Manitoba (Canada) school…

Educational management was still a relatively new field of study and practice in the UK at the time of the Education Reform Act (ERA) 1988. The field focused on "management" and not leadership. This emphasis very much reflected the business world and its use in education illustrated the "policy borrowing" characteristic of an…

Our focus in this article is on the lessons learned about effective change from international experience with large-scale reform over the last 20 years. The central lesson now evident is that sustained improvement in student outcomes requires a sustained effort to change teaching and learning practices in thousands and thousands of classrooms, and…

Current workforce reform, known as Remodelling the School Workforce, is part of an enduring policy process where there have been tensions between public and private sector structures and cultures. I show that the New Right and New Labour governments who have built and configured site based performance management over the past quarter of a century…

Contrary to the claims of its critics, the introduction of self-managing schools under the ERA and its counterpart in other countries did not lead to the privatization of public education. Self-managing schools have been one manifestation of a general trend to decentralization in public education in many countries since the late 1960s. The…

The 1988 Education Reform Act sought to deconstruct the framework of post-Second World War social democratic governance and replace the tacit rule of professional providers with mechanisms of choice and market competition, thus empowering parents and school leaders. Functions, powers and responsibilities were fundamentally reconstituted and have…

This article explores the ways in which the neo-liberal impetus toward the privatization of state schooling signalled in the Education Reform Act 1988 (ERA) has become embedded in the English school system. Four main points are made. First, that ERA itself was of huge strategic rather than substantive importance as far as privatization is…

This article assesses the period following the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) and reflects on the main continuities and discontinuities in policy emphases since that Act. It begins by outlining education policy under the Conservatives from 1979. In this, it shows how the Conservative's simultaneous pursuit of marketization and centralization in…

This article critically examines two sets of ideas that have influenced educational reform in the recent past: managerialism and market approaches. It is argued that while each can be demonstrated to have led to useful change, neither provides a basis for future improvement in education. A recent example of change within the State School sector of…

The headteacher's role in school improvement and the changing nature of the role suggest the need to investigate how new school leaders learn their jobs, that is, their socialization to the leader role. This study has two purposes: (1) to identify the content and methods used in the professional and organizational socialization experiences of new…