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Purpose -- The purpose of this paper is to identify the determining factors in the performance of integrated vocational education schools, in addition to management characteristics and specificities. Design/methodology/approach -- By means of a descriptive study with a qualitative approach, a case study was conducted in two schools located in the cities of Cotia and São Roque. Findings -- The following factors were identified: engagement and commitment of teachers; motivation and focus of teachers and students; team of professionals; commitment and focus of students; family involvement; leadership and climate and selection of students. The following characteristics were observed: participative leadership associated with the use of management tools; pedagogical leadership in partnership with the school community; monitoring of student performance; performance assessment and training of teachers related to career plan; selection of students and actions along the community. Research limitations -- The results reflect the vision of the schools' managers and teachers and not that of the managing institution. There is no intention whatsoever to obtain generalization to other ETECs but rather inferences that could shed light on future studies. Practical implications -- This research ratifies what has already been proven in the literature, showing that there are no isolated factors that interfere with performance, but an interrelationship among them, given the characteristics and peculiarities of each school. Originality/value -- This study is expected to contribute to guiding school managers and teachers in the search for quality education, whether vocational or regular basic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The paper aims to explore the role and the involvement of local community within the context of Malaysian early childhood centers (nursery and kindergarten). Design/methodology/approach: The research used a mixed method with a questionnaire survey in the first phase and qualitative interviews in the second phase. Quantitative data were obtained from a survey completed by 3,519 staffs from nursery and kindergarten all over Malaysia. Qualitative data were collected from individual and focus group semistructured interviews conducted with 140 participants of the Malaysian public and private internal and external stakeholders ranging from the relevant personnel of the early childhood care and education (ECCE) centers (administrators, teachers and practitioners), academic experts, regulatory agencies and parents. Findings: Survey results indicate that the parents and community involvement with ECCE centers from the perspective of the management and practitioners is in the medium category. A total of three overarching themes were identified from the interviews, namely expertise collaboration, resource sharing and operation monitoring. There exists diversity in terms of community engagement and cooperation with ECCE centers. Practical implications: The findings are expected to provide valuable guidelines to ECCE centers' management and leadership in the aspect of community involvement where it could help to enhance their efforts of providing quality learning experiences for young children attending their centers. Originality/value: This study is part of a larger longitudinal and mixed methods project examining the quality practices in setting the standards in the Malaysian National Quality ECCE framework. These findings contribute to the understanding of community involvement with ECCE centers in the Malaysian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of principals in light of public management reforms taking place in the German educational system and in reference to the empirical patterns uncovered by the papers contained in the Special Issue. Policy makers have created new expectations and new technologies that seem to suggest to necessitate a shift from principals acting as rule-bound administrators to acting as entrepreneurial managers. The paper asks if the availability of new managerial technologies is complemented by shifts in role conception or enactment. Design/methodology/approach – The author discusses the papers included in this Special Issue by suggesting one possible overarching frame for the German situation as documented by the papers and contrasting this frame with the situation in the USA. Findings – The Special Issue papers reviewed in this paper ask if the principalship in Germany across various states has become more managerial, and the author’s conclusion is that it has not. The author suggests that in Germany, managerialism and professionalism may accommodate each other in ways uniquely German, perhaps without making the principalship more managerial. Originality/value – This paper sketches a way to conceptualize the role of the principal in the tension between Weberian bureaucracy, public managerialism, and professional self-governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The New Zealand Ministry of Education identified that teachers need to be confident they have the support of their school management team before they embrace twenty-first century teaching and learning in enterprise education (Ministry of Education, 2013b). The purpose of this paper is to outline an interpretive case study which investigated the views held by the management of a New Zealand secondary school, well known for enterprise education. Design/methodology/approach – The study used semi-structured interviews to investigate what aspects were deemed important by senior management and whether they saw themselves as pivotal in the success of enterprise education. Findings – The management team believed their role to be pivotal and that nine aspects were necessary for a successful enterprise programme. Originality/value – It is anticipated that the results from this interpretive case study will assist others in their planning, development and success of future quality enterprise education programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to suggest a methodology to calculate efficiency scores for a sample of Italian primary and middle schools. The main aim is to relate these measures of efficiency to a set of “external” factors that can affect schools’ performance, such as the average socio-economic background of their students, their location in an urban/non urban setting, etc. After presenting this analysis, the paper proposes a procedure to calculate “adjusted” efficiency measures – which take in the role of external variables – in order to assess the “pure” management efficiency of each school, and so to avoid confusing the institution's performance with the aspects relating to its background. Design/methodology/approach – Efficiency is defined in its technical sense that is, the ability to transform inputs (financial and human resources) into outputs (results achieved by students in standardized test scores). A two-stage quantitative procedure was used to investigate “managerial” efficiency, so that the impact of external variables on educational efficiency could be suitably taken into account. Findings – The results show that the average efficiency score is quite high in the sample of schools considered, but potential savings can still be made: overall, with the schools’ available resources, achievement scores could be increased by about 20 percent. Efficiency and educational equity are complementary in primary public (state) schools, and the most efficient schools are those with the lowest internal variance between the students’ achievement scores; the same does not hold for middle school students’ results in mathematics. Lastly, several schools appeared to be efficient when the external variables were not taken into consideration, while their background actually favored them, and they are not efficient from a purely managerial perspective. Originality/value – The most important piece of innovation is the investigation of managerial efficiency and its implications on policies. This study confirms and suggests that there could be an inverse relationship between apparent (baseline) and true (managerial) efficiency, that is, between the efficiency scores achieved before and after the “correction” made for external variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate whether educational leadership in Greece implements the values of total quality management and contributes to the improvement of the educational process, and to offer proposals for a framework of total quality management that would contribute to an improvement in the overall quality of the education process. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on theoretical analysis and on the current legislative framework. Three different aspects of the Greek education system are critically reviewed and discussed. Findings – This study recognises that, due mainly to the lack of a long-term educational strategy, the absence of an educational leadership development programme and limited financial support, the Greek educational system needs to review its structure and procedures - even those that are "taken for granted". Research limitations/implications – Given the differences between education and industry, and the fact that only three different aspects of the Greek education system are investigated here, more research and analysis would be required in this field. Practical implications – The paper is useful to educational planners and policy makers. From the perspective of total quality management, there may be a substantial impact on the improvement mechanisms and outputs in education, contributing to a country's social and economic well-being. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the better understanding of the value of total quality management in education, and offers recommendations that may be more widely adopted, and may contribute to an enhancement of overall educational quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on longitudinal research into the establishment of co-principalships. It discusses this innovative approach to school management in relation to women’s negotiations of their motivations, aspirations and strategies for career advancement and work/life balance. Longitudinal case studies of three primary school co-principal initiatives were carried out between 1995 and 2000. Repeat interviews and observations with co-principals, board chairpersons and school staff were conducted. Interviews were also undertaken with parents; students; and representatives of state education agencies, national governing boards, principals’ associations and teacher unions, alongside analysis of school and state policy documents. The resulting case study narratives described how each co-principalship was initiated and either established or dis-established. A discourse analysis of these narratives then examined how links between discourse, knowledge and power were being negotiated and challenged, as the new subject position of “co-principal” was being constructed in New Zealand. This article analyses the significance of the similarities and differences in the women’s career backgrounds, motivations and strategies for moving into management positions. As they initiated their co-principalships, the women variously went “against the grain” and/or co-opted elements of the new public management corporate executive model for school leadership, which was introduced within the radical state restructuring during the late 1980s and early 90s in New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]