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This article is one of a series of papers generated from the Curriculum Reform study in Hong Kong with the purpose of understanding the impact of government’s role in the change process of the reform. This paper specifically examines the 17 government initiatives in the Curriculum Reform in terms of their adoption percentages of schools from before 2000 to 2006–7. These initiatives can be regarded as ‘soft’ measures of the Government, supplementing the hard policies on the Curriculum Reform. The adoption of these initiatives in schools reflects the extent of implementation of reform items and therefore should be crucial to the success of the Curriculum Reform. The study illustrates the impact of the government on the phase of adoption in the change process. The findings suggested that whereas the government initially played an important role in adoption of these initiatives it was not able to raise the adoption percentages further towards the end of the study. Other features of adoption and their impacts on policy and change are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to identify leadership practices and qualities of school teachers as they engaged in effecting change initiated by a curriculum reform in Hong Kong. Based on interview data of teachers from nine schools, this paper shows how teacher leadership manifested itself in schools. Three approaches to teacher leadership were identified, each delineating how teacher leaders approached the implementation task – as a compliance exercise, an adaptive exercise, or as a capacity building exercise. This paper confirms that different levels of teacher–leader engagement in professional enquiries constitute different teacher leadership practices, which have differential impacts on teaching and learning practices and the effectiveness of school improvement efforts. Implications for developing teacher leadership in schools are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the success of schools in disadvantaged township communities is shaped by an interplay of four dimensions: strategy, regulation, pedagogy and compensation. The paper presents these dimensions of successful leadership in secondary schools by drawing on a research study focusing on cases of three Soweto township secondary schools. Data sources included interviews, informal discussions and focus groups. The participants included principals, other members of the school management teams, teachers and parents. The case studies generated outcomes that contributed towards an emerging model of successful school leadership in township secondary schools facing multiple factors of deprivation. The successful school leadership practices explored in this study revealed that there were three discernible ways to characterise leadership practices in the case schools: principal-driven success; participative leadership driven by senior management; and teacher-led success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiple deprivation affects a large proportion of schools in South Africa. The past 20 years of democracy have tended to focus on reforming education through curricula revision and a raft of redress-directed interventions, through the application of what we call a broad-brush policy approach. The paper argues that a broad-brush policy application fails to recognise the contextualised challenges faced in specific schools. The central purpose of the research was to discover the specific challenges and leadership issues that schools in multiple deprived communities face, and to identify ways in which such schools dealt with these challenges. The research was conducted through a case study approach of three schools in one of the most impoverished provinces of the country. In total 3 principals, 3 parents and 26 teachers were interviewed. The study found that while the three schools shared many similar conditions of poverty that drove the poor to marginal performance, stories of success tended to be strongly related to four key factors: (1) leadership that went beyond an ordinary focus on instruction; (2) staff stability; (3) flexible scheduling that allowed parental involvement; and (4) a focus on a school-wide project that acted as a rallying point and a source of pride for the entire school. The paper identifies asset-based leadership and servant leadership approaches as generative in schools facing multiple deprivation. The paper concludes with a call for more school-based improvement initiatives that seek to interrogate the impact of factors of multiple deprivation, and a broad policy redirection towards school improvement rather than educational reform, which has been the focus in the past 20 years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 which can compare favourably with the best in developed countries. On the other extreme there are dysfunctional schools. However, along the scale there are few schools in multiple deprived areas which display high degrees of resilience and perform at levels comparable to first class schools in terms of Matriculation examination results. This paper draws from a study based on the proposition that leadership was the greatest factor to explain such performance. The study was then informed by a quest for knowledge regarding the nature of such leadership. Such knowledge is needed as the country fights to turn around the many dysfunctional schools there are. While there is a corpus of scholarship that ‘speaks’ to this matter internationally, there remains need for home-grown insights in that regard. Two theoretical lenses (servant leadership and the asset-based approach) were applied. The study employed a qualitative approach involving individual face-to-face semi-structured interviews with five purposively selected school principals each representing their school. Findings suggest that the schools in question adopted inside-out development approaches involving the philosophy that they were masters of their own destiny. Time, commitment, and accountability were some of their greatest assets, things that did not have to come from outside the schools. Internal success paved the way for stronger and more fruitful synergies with the ‘outside world’. We conclude that schools in areas of multiple-deprivation need leadership that moves them away from notions of victimhood and deficit thinking towards asset-based approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past two decades scholars have called for a more concerted effort to develop an empirically grounded literature on educational leadership outside of mainstream “Western” contexts. This paper reports the results of a review of research topics and methods that comprise the literature on educational leadership and management in Asia between 1995 and 2012. The review of research employed a quantitative descriptive form of systematic review of 478 articles published in eight “core” international journals in educational leadership and management over this period. The review examined trends in publication volume and impact, as well as research topics and methods used by scholars studying educational leadership and management in Asia. The study concluded that Asian scholarship in educational leadership and management remains in the early stages of development. Knowledge production is highly uneven across the continent, with only a few pockets of research excellence. Significant growth trends were observed in terms of scholarly interest in studying leadership in K-12 schools, school change, effects and improvement, and organizational behavior in education. Although qualitative research methods were more popular in this literature prior to 2006, the use of quantitative research methods has increased sharply during the past six years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Assessment of the legacy of apartheid at the end of the apartheid era in South Africa highlighted major inequalities between white and black, urban and rural areas, and several departments of education. Eighteen years into democracy, the country needs to distinguish between the initiatives taken by the government to address the apartheid legacy, the actual changes made in education and the results thereof, and the continuities and discontinuities in education. Historically disadvantaged schools now receive larger state funding (no-fee schools) and school fee exemptions are granted to lower income or unemployed parents who find difficulty in paying school fees for their children, regardless of race. The public schooling system, especially township schools, is still characterized by low pass rates, low teacher and learner morale, a resurgence of violence amongst learners, ineffective leadership by school managers, poor governance by school governing boards and generally declining school quality, efficiency and effectiveness. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the National Norms and Standards for School Funding (NNSSF) policy, in order to assess whether this post-apartheid government policy has succeeded in addressing social justice and equity in public primary and secondary education [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the relationship between leadership roles and skills in secondary schools in Greece. Drawing upon a sample of 124 secondary public school principals, a structured questionnaire was developed to measure leadership roles and skills. The Competing Values Framework (CVF) was adopted to operationalize the eight leadership roles. The threefold classification of skills by Katz (1974) was enriched by a fourth categorization in order to identify principals’ skills. The results indicate that Greek principals are inclined to perform the roles of innovator, director, monitor and facilitator more intensely, giving less attention to the broker, producer, coordinator and mentor roles. The importance of the innovator role in explaining the variance of two of four skill categories was confirmed; while the monitor role was strongly associated with human skills. The administrative skills were negatively associated with the facilitator role while the conceptual skills were not found to be correlated to any role. It is argued that understanding the nature of the associations could enable education policy makers and principals to pursue these roles and behaviors, thereby contributing to improvement of the school. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teacher evaluation policy is implemented in many countries to improve the teaching quality in schools. This paper explores the implementation of teacher evaluation policy in secondary schools in Flanders (Belgium). The case study method is used to explore the implementation process in six schools, which are selected based upon teachers’ perception of practicality of new teacher evaluation policy. We contrast three schools in which teachers perceive this policy positively with three schools in which teachers perceive this policy negatively. Due to the generic policy, responsibility for the implementation is shifted to the school. Our study focuses on school leadership actions and on teacher evaluation development characteristics during the implementation process. The results identify a difference in leadership actions and teacher evaluation development characteristics in positive perceiving schools compared to negative perceiving schools. In positive perceiving schools, school leaders formulate high expectations towards teachers, emphasize the importance of appreciation and trust and provide clear communication to teachers about teacher evaluation. Also, two teacher evaluation development characteristics, namely the meso-level support and the goals of teacher evaluation differ in the two subsets of schools. This leaves us wondering whether governments should take greater responsibility in supporting schools and local networks in order to implement policy successfully. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]