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In this final chapter, the value and challenges of the GECM in promoting gender equality across three European countries, England, Hungary and Italy, are discussed. Whole-school approaches can be effective in changing attitudes and the whole-school environment. However, their design and implementation should be informed by the contingency of gender relations and the intersectionality of gender with other axes of social inequality within specific school regimes and wider national and sociopolitical regimes in Europe, which are supported by national and European gender equality and educational policies. Non-hierarchical, cross-country research collaboration and collaborative and inclusive work relations between NGOs and Universities could benefit both schools and academics and contribute to the knowledge and practice of gender equality in educational institutions.

This chapter provides an overview of the background to the Gender Equality Charter Mark Project. It describes the project’s rationale and the value of a whole-school approach. Differences in the socio-cultural and political contexts for the three countries (Hungary, Italy and the UK) that the project was based in are briefly described, as well as the different uses of gender terminology. After an overview of the different educational systems in each of the three countries, gender and educational policy, previous gender-related projects and development work is described in some detail. This chapter also outlines the structure of the rest of the book.

The Prepared Montessori environment assists children to develop an ordered mind. Implementing a new digital technologies curriculum presents a particular challenge to Montessori schools because there is no agreed strategy for how to introduce these digital technologies and no Montessori curricula include structured lessons for the development of digital literacies. In 2018, an action research project to identify whether there were authentic methods to develop digital literacies and introduce digital technologies into a prepared Montessori environment was run at River Montessori School. With a focus on the early childhood education classrooms, this chapter discusses the whole school project we ran to investigate how digital literacies can be developed and to experiment with possible strategies for digital technologies implementation in a way that aligns with the Montessori philosophy and curriculum.

Today, the teaching profession faces an unprecedented number of challenges in supporting and retaining high-quality teachers. Burnout, stress, and fatigue impact heavily on the engagement of educators, which in turn impacts on the quality of education students receive. Yet responding to teacher wellbeing remains an ongoing challenge particularly in relation to understanding mechanisms that can support wellbeing at a whole school level. The issue is made more problematic in a system that often prioritises student achievement over physical and mental health, and relationships, both in staff and student communities. There are now a number of initiatives that seek to augment the wellbeing of staff and students, yet little research has been undertaken into the impact of open education mechanisms on developing and enhancing wellbeing within the teaching profession. Thus, this chapter responds by providing a case study of one such open education initiative, the online Wellbeing Toolkit, that has now been undertaken by more than 7000 educators in Australian schools. Based on an extensive analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data sources, this chapter concludes that there are many opportunities for future open education initiatives to learn from the implementation of the Wellbeing Toolkit: an effective whole school intervention that successfully supports the wellbeing of schools regardless of location, resources, or access to funding.

As one of the important teaching infrastructure of the whole school, intelligent campus network room management is also an important application system of intelligent campus. This paper introduces the research and design of computer room management platform in big data environment.

Big data is built on the foundation of today’s horse racing technology. The rise and development of big data has become one of the most typical features of the industry’s Internetization in the new IT era. The data stored in the world has overflowed every database, and industry big data has become the focus of attention of all walks of life. Governments at all levels and all enterprises and institutions hope to dig out high-quality, high-value-added data from big data. Information, and use it to improve their profit and service model, and enhance their status in the public and industry. In the era of big data, for libraries that provide teaching and scientific research services to the teachers and students of the school, they can use efficient and fast information technology, such as big data analysis, to conduct in-depth analysis and analysis of various data in university libraries. Digging, effectively understanding the reading situation of the whole school, and analyzing their reading hobbies and reading habits, the library can effectively use this information to improve the types of books purchased by the library, which can more effectively increase resource utilization.

The usual KPI evaluation method adopts manual scoring, which requires a lot of manpower and paper for scoring and statistics. Its scoring process is very complex, complicated, and easy to lose data. It not only consumes a lot of manpower and material resources, but takes a lot of time as well. Sometimes inaccurate calculation causes unnecessary mistakes. Therefore, it is necessary for schools to develop a complete KPI Evaluation System, which is developed with PHP and MySQL database. The system is divided into two modules: foreground and background. The foreground module is divided into Login module, Self-evaluation and Mutual Evaluation module and KPI Evaluation module. In the foreground Login module, the whole school staff needs to log in before the evaluation. After the login, they can carry out self-evaluation and mutual evaluation, and the staff who have administrative positions also need to carry out KPI evaluation. The background module includes the Informant module and the Administrator module. After the administrator logs in to the background, he can manage all modules in the background and save the summary results to an Excel file.

This chapter expands the discussions on value-creating global citizenship education as a pedagogical approach which has been developed by taking the growing, worldwide phenomena of Soka studies in education as a focal point of inquiry. The chapter introduces Soka or value-creating education developed by the Japanese educators, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871–1944), Josei Toda (1900–1958), and Daisaku Ikeda (b. 1928). In considering the pedagogical and ontological contributions made through a study of Asian perspectives, the chapter discusses value-creating global citizenship education and its six themes for praxis that can be used for teaching within formal, non-formal, and informal education settings across a variety of different subjects and disciplines, and most effectively through a whole school approach.

This chapter traces the association between green and education, noting the similarities in concerns with the four pillars of green political parties and the principles developed by the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). It discusses the emergence of notions of greening education in the late 1980s, and green schools’ movements in the mid/late 1990s. The characteristics of the green schools’ movements in different countries are compared within a broadly shared philosophy of green schools needing to adopt a whole school approach. This is followed by a discussion of the relationship between green schools, the United Nations (2016) Sustainable Development Goals and concerns to develop global citizenship.

The chapter focuses on the use of Japanese language and the incorporation of heritage languages in a government primary bilingual Japanese programme. The weekly language distribution of the programme was 30 per cent of instruction in Japanese and 70 per cent in English. Just over 80 per cent of students at the school were LBOTE and approximately half of this number comprised students with a Japanese heritage. The aim is to show ways in which languages were used across the curriculum in the school, and to discuss this use in relation to the multilingual practices framework. Data on pedagogical choices, teacher reflections, teacher and student interviews, work samples, a student survey and classroom observations inform the discussion. The study is explained first and the findings are then discussed according to the dimensions of the framework: multilingual stance, student engagement with languages, institutional structures and pedagogies, and opportunities to learn (through) languages.

Instructional leadership now focusses on the interplay of achievement, well-being and life chances when student performance is concerned but also demands a focus on each learner, their context, needs, talents and motivation. Personalization of schooling therefore requires that curriculum, instruction and assessment become a social process characterized by consultation between teachers, students, families and communities, focusing on the student as the subject of learning relationships and by creating a culture of trust, discovery and dialogue.

The educational attainment gap that children in care usually have at the start of their school career often stays with them through primary school. Research suggests that whole school, inclusive approaches where high aspirations are also in place are most likely to successfully address the needs of children in care. This chapter describes part of a project in England where the concept of Caring Schools was developed, with four domains: ethos and leadership, child focused practice, relationships with parents and carers, and interagency working. The aim is to set out what might be considered benchmark indicators of good practice in a holistic approach.

The main goal of the case study presented in this paper was to evaluate an example of how inclusive mathematics education can be organised within a whole school approach. We selected a comprehensive school which was identified as successful in managing the heterogeneity of students within the classroom. This school uses an approach called learning office, which we describe in the theoretical section of the paper. We used video-based observations, stimulated recalls and group interviews to evaluate how the learning office is implemented in practice. From these data sources, several opportunities and challenges could be derived. Keeping some methodical limitations in mind, we can conclude that the learning office seems to be an adequate approach for designing inclusive mathematics education.

The Capabilities approach to whole school curriculum thinking is explored through the use of a model. Subjects are at the heart of this model, with the powerful disciplinary knowledge of subjects forming the basis of the knowledge-based capabilities that young people will develop through their time in schools; these capabilities then enable young people to make informed choices in life about how to live. GeoCapabilities relates this to the powerful knowledge of geography, investing the subject with its educational potential. Critiques of powerful knowledge and GeoCapabilities question the usefulness of the concept and the challenge of a subject-based curriculum. To be enabled a Future 3 ‘capabilities’ curriculum needs a powerful knowledge-led subject-based curriculum; a curricular focus on outcomes not outputs; a focus on curriculum as well as pedagogy; a coherent curriculum; a subject specialist in front of every class and the treating of teachers as professionals.

In this essay, I focus on various curricular practices of Indian schools. I discuss curriculum not as the declared, intended, or tested curriculum, but as the experienced, taught, and learnt curriculum, or what may be observed by an ethnographer sitting for the whole school day in various classrooms as the sum total of the processes that are going on under the school roof. Then the “hidden curriculum,” as the name implies, includes the non-explicit, implicit, unstated things that are also being taught to children in school along with the explicitly stated curricular subjects. This hidden curriculum is always present and relies on the structures and processes of schools, including spatial layouts, language use, interrelationships, rituals, and symbols. I highlight the importance of the curriculum, including the hidden curriculum, and mark the change in it over thirty years.

This chapter discusses and outlines the research upon which Chapters 4– 6 of the project are based. One of the perceived barriers to an LBP approach to literacy is the perceived gap in many teachers’ knowledge about language, depending upon their own education history touched upon in Chapter 1 and discussed further in this chapter. A challenge in undertaking the research upon which this project is based, was how to develop teachers’ own metalinguistic awareness and that of their pupils’ and students’ at the same time. The approach taken, was to locate and situate developing teachers’ knowledge about language in the context of their own current assessment and curriculum goals, objectives and practices. It discusses how such curriculum intervention was made possible by changes to assessment and curriculum practices in the UK, together with changes to school inspection protocols. Taken together, such recent initiatives have brought the issue of literacy to the fore in secondary education in England in ways that are unprecedented. The chapter draws upon the research undertaken to discuss how teachers’ own metalinguistic awareness is bound up with their own autobiographies and experiences of schooling. Secondary school teachers are expert in the discursive practices that characterise their disciplines, which all too often remain assumed and implicit. It shows that teachers’ implicit knowledge about language can be brought to the surface remarkably quickly, particularly when focused and targeted at their own subject discipline.

In this chapter, we describe the critical role that safe and supportive school cultures play in the educational success of students impacted by trauma and students with neurodevelopmental disabilities. Centering on the stories of several real students and their families, the chapter explains how individual supports and services schools provide to these students, typically through the special education system—while an essential ingredient for supporting their progress—often fail to achieve desired results when not delivered in the context of a supportive school environment. Based on the experiences of these students, as well as important insights from research, we will argue for an educational approach that shifts perspective—that moves from the outside in—by first paying close attention to the educational context that surrounds students and then analyzing carefully the individualized services each particular student needs to succeed within that broader context. We will describe a process that the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (TLPI) has developed for helping educators create safe and supportive, trauma-sensitive school cultures and will argue that this process can also support the creation of inclusive school cultures that research suggests are critical for students with neurodevelopmental disabilities. The chapter concludes with implications for policy.

Students not only learn about well-being concepts in positive education in specific timetabled classes but also through extra-curricular activities and pastoral structures. Sport, for example, is one of the most under investigated avenues for the integration of well-being systematically in education. When considering the future direction of well-being, I argue that it is in the coaching of sport and creating a whole school strategy where it is possible to integrate strength-based approaches. It is clear that the creation of a school, which embraces positive education, must also have the students themselves as leaders in creating change. A collective approach to improving well-being is necessary, and the student body is a powerful voice in engaging with and leading their classmates. While student leaders in both pastoral and prefect positions have some opportunities to engage as a collective and develop their leadership capabilities; sports leaders require a forum to develop their leadership potential.

The “A me gli occhi project” has been organized to support the development and consolidation of visuospatial abilities in students of the last two years of primary school, with the hypothesis that such a training would have a positive impact on their performance in mathematics. The present paper focuses on the second phase of the project, during which twenty game based training sessions have been organized along the whole school year. Students’ mathematical abilities have been measured at the beginning of the project and at the end using a standardized math test. Results show some improvements in the experimental group compared to the control one, confirming the initial hypothesis.

The next 3 years of Australian research (1999–2002) are described in detail in this chapter, focusing on researching conflict management across whole school populations. This phase of the research, named Cooling Conflict, implemented, evaluated and refined the combination of drama and peer teaching techniques developed in the DRACON research, producing increasingly positive results as the techniques were adapted and enhanced to give students and schools more appropriate tools for conflict management. The chapter describes two separate Cooling Conflict projects, the first in a single New South Wales country school, the second in a range of schools in Sydney, both primary and secondary. The chapter notes that a major outcome of these projects was the discovery that they could be life-changing for some of the students involved, and for the ethos of conflict in selected schools. There was also overwhelming evidence that students were learning something they believed was useful about conflict.

One of the aims of the School of Architectural Engineering is to develop the consciousness of students regarding detailed design and environmental sustainability, together with a critical understanding about the practical viability of architectural “forms.” The hermeneutical foundation of the whole School program consists of overcoming the cultural dichotomy that was introduced in the building sector during the 19th century, as a consequence of the expansion of technique. Our ethical convincement is that “buildability” should be—in everyday practice as well as in monumental buildings—the epistemological and disciplinary foundation of “making architecture”.

In 1996, Brazil enacted a law to reform the educational system, requiring a reorganisation of all curricula, including that for religious education. The new curricula should aim at ensuring that students master their own language, appreciate the religious phenomena of their country and learn to construct arguments so that they become able to propose ideas logically in the most diverse situations. Educational institutions must ensure access to socially constructed knowledge and provide opportunities for socialisation and for students to experience democratic citizenship. Students should become able to refute or reshape fossilised knowledge that may have been distorted through dogmatism. The search for the formation of a national commitment towards these objectives permeates the whole school curricula. Reflection on this pedagogical development has boosted the drive towards a fresh orientation of the religious education curriculum.