Organizational building is essential if school leaders are to promote school improvement, but it can be difficult to combine with school leaders' requirements to satisfy teachers' personal and relational needs. The the aim of this study is to explore critical aspects when combining organizational building with requirements to satisfy teachers'…

Following the announcement, in November 2018, that Scotland would be the first educational system to introduce an LGBTI-inclusive curriculum in all of its state schools, this position paper advocates critical literacy as a theoretically congruent framework within which LGBTI issues can be explored. We suggest educators could do this by…

The use of 'soft barriers' to deter students with special educational needs (SEN) from accessing some schools has been reported in the Irish media. This article investigates the influence of ethos and culture on access to and inclusive practice in mainstream schools in Ireland. Ethos and culture are nebulous concepts yet are integral to how…

This article explores the characteristics of a successful transition of a school from traditional classrooms to an innovative learning environment. Many schools today are converting traditional classrooms into spaces which are flexible, supporting a wide array of teaching and learning possibilities (i.e. an 'innovative learning environment').…

In Spring 2020, schools in many countries had to close in response to the COVID-19 virus pandemic and move to remote teaching. This paper explores the views of pupils, parents/carers and teachers of 'home-school' in one Norwegian municipality, gathered through parallel online surveys in April 2020 during the peak of the COVID-19 lockdown period.…

Persistent disparities in exclusionary discipline procedures continue to portent negative educational outcomes for students from specific racial, income, and ability categories. Restorative practices (RP) has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate these disparities and improve school climate. This study describes the utility of…

This study analyses how studies on disadvantaged schools, improvement and test-based accountability relate to each other. The analysis covers 69 studies on disadvantaged schools reported in prestigious educational journals and conducted in 1995-2015. Educational policies related to evaluation and accountability define the official goals of…

Using an inquiry-based approach to address the challenge of improving schools provides opportunities for informed decision making and carries great promise for return on investment. Taking a collaborative approach toward improvement can be complex, yet also rewarding because of the opportunity to leverage the knowledge and capacity of multiple…

This article aims to explore the concept of student well-being and how it can be introduced and integrated within Pakistan's educational structure. The basis of the discussion is built around the need for having a student well-being model for schools in Pakistan. For the purpose of the study, the information is gathered inductively through a…

Across the globe, schools serve students from increasingly diverse backgrounds, including those still learning the dominant language. But schools have struggled to maintain pace with the changing population, resulting in a lack of prepared teachers and subsequent gaps in student achievement. In this article, we share a theoretically grounded and…

Drawing upon a broad concept of inclusion, the first section of this article is dedicated to a critical discussion of the principle of "equal opportunities," which currently dominates the social justice discourse in Germany. Specifically, this section examines how far this principle, which focuses on the role of the individual in…

This article focuses on the interplay between the concepts of 'educational infrastructure' and 'organisational memory'. Using data from collaboration between a Swedish university and a local municipality, the article draws attention to the interplay between three nation-wide improvement programmes and their educational infrastructures, and the…

Appeals to reform science education by policy makers are not new phenomena. To be sure, while science reform efforts have been ongoing occurrences for nearly six decades, perpetual educational reform efforts as a whole have been evolving and gaining momentum in number for more than a century. The general motivation for continual reform appears to…

Project-based learning (PBL) is an active student-centred form of instruction which is characterised by students' autonomy, constructive investigations, goal-setting, collaboration, communication and reflection within real-world practices. It has been explored in various contexts and in different phases of schooling, from primary to higher…

Child poverty is a global issue that affects around half the children in the world; it is inextricably bound to the poverty experienced by their parents and families and has been identified by the United Nations as a human rights issue. Child poverty can be a barrier to children and young people accessing school education or achieving any form of…