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School liking shows clear associations with academic success, yet we know little about how it changes over levels of schooling, what predicts liking school at each level, or how attending alternative schools like Montessori might impact liking. To better understand school liking across time and education settings, we surveyed adults about how much they remember liking elementary, middle, and high school, and identified key school features that predicted higher school liking at each level. Because Montessori schools have many features that other literature suggests predict higher school liking, we purposely sampled Montessori alumni as well, and compared their schools' features for elementary school only (due to sample size). Moreover, we collected open-ended responses about what participants in both conventional and Montessori liked least about school, revealing what features of their school experiences might have led to less overall school liking. The unique contributions of this study are (1) showing how a wide range of school features predict recalled school liking, (2) examining data for all school levels using a single sample of participants, and (3) comparing recalled school liking and its predictors across conventional and Montessori schools. The sample included 630 adults, of whom 436 were conventional school alumni and 187 were Montessori alumni (7 participants did not report school type). Participants' mean age was 35.8 years (SD = 10.53, range = 19-77), and 53% were female. Participants were recruited online, and they responded to Qualtrics surveys about school liking, school features, and their demographics. School liking overall was tepid, and was highest in elementary and lowest in middle school. For all participants, recalling a sense of community and interest in schoolwork were most strongly associated with school liking. Adults who attended schools which emphasized studying topics of personal interest and rewards for positive behavior also liked school more. Montessori school alumni reported higher school liking and that learning was what they liked most about school; by contrast, conventional school alumni most liked seeing friends. Levels of school liking, as recalled by adults, are low overall, but are higher in elementary school and higher amongst those who recall their schools as having stronger community, catering more to student interest, and rewarding positive behavior. In addition, school liking was higher among people who attended Montessori schools. Further research could extend to a cross-sectional study of children currently enrolled in different types of schools.

This systematic synthesis aimed to identify and synthesize expert recommendations from best available clinical and scientific literature for successful school reintegration of students after psychiatric hospitalization. Following principles outlined by the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre (EPPI-Centre), we searched 15 electronic databases with all possible literature from 1985 to May 2019 and conducted both supplementary retrospective and prospective reference searches. Fifty-three documents (37 scientific and 16 clinical) met the inclusion criteria. A thematic synthesis of identified recommendations led to the development and definition of a nine-step framework to guide collaboration between school and mental health practitioners. This innovative framework offers clear, structured and consensus-based prescriptive guidelines to determine what should be done, for whom, by whom, when, and how, to facilitate the school reintegration of students hospitalized for mental health issues. Additional studies are necessary to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of this step-based framework.

In June 2020, the world witnessed an upsurge in Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd, an African American, by a White American police officer. The international response called for the global community to reassess the value of black lives blighted by racist social systems. The mass sentiment acted as a catalyst for educational institutions, including those in the UK, to mount a response. It is in this context that a School Partnership Group representing primary and secondary schools in East London embarked on developing a workshop series for the professional development of school leaders. The sessions were aimed at school transformation through anti-racist educational approaches. In this article, we present a discussion of the workshop series held in the academic year 2020-2021, which brought school leaders together in a reflective community of practice. Drawing on data from focus group conversations carried out following the end of the series, this paper argues for school leaders' professional development that prioritises 'deep understanding' supported by reflective communities of practice as a pre-requisite for effective anti-racist practice and sustained school transformation.

Developing knowledge in education systems is essential in capacity building. When the intention is to build collective capacity and sustain the capacity in schools, we claim there is a need to understand how organizational knowledge is developed and what form this knowledge may take in the school as an organization. However, theory seems to have put little weight on the development of organizational knowledge. In this article, we draw on two cases to discuss why there is a need for theoretical perspectives that may help conceptualize and aid knowledge development in capacity building. Our contribution is a theoretical model that builds on a graded theory concept, in which theory and practice are understood as entangled in process rather than as dichotomous and static categories. We hope to contribute to an understanding of capacity building that avoids the tyranny of theory and the tyranny of practice, and where teachers' and school leaders' professional theorizing is seen as essential for success.

Background: To support student mental health, school staff must have knowledge of evidence-based practices and the capacity to implement them. One approach used to address this challenge is a group-based telementoring model called "Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes" (ECHO). In other applications (e.g., healthcare settings), ECHO has been shown to increase healthcare professionals' self-efficacy and knowledge of evidence-based practices leading to improved patient outcomes. Objectives: This study examined the potential for ECHO to be used as a method for increasing school staff engagement and knowledge of evidence-based school mental health practices. Methods: Using a quasi-experimental design, this study compared outcomes across two professional development experiences aimed at promoting school staff ability to provide evidence-based mental health services. School staff from four school districts participated in a school mental health training initiative. All participants (N = 57) had access to asynchronous, online mental health modules. A sub-sample (n = 33) was also offered monthly ECHO sessions. Results: Tests of group difference in outcomes revealed significant increases in engagement with online learning (d = 0.58) and satisfaction (d = 0.82) for those who participated in ECHO as compared to those who did not. Knowledge about evidence-based practices was not significantly different between groups. Conclusions: Results suggest that group-based telementoring may be a promising approach for improving engagement and satisfaction with training initiatives aimed at promoting evidence-based school mental health practices. However, further study of ProjectECHO using experimental designs is needed to make causal inferences about its effect on provider outcomes.

In this paper, Sarah Stitzlein considers the consequences of honesty on our democracy, especially for citizens' ability to engage in civic inquiry together as they face shared problems. Honesty is a key component of a well-functioning democracy; it develops trust and fosters the sorts of relationships among citizens that enable civic dialogue and reasoning. Post-truth attitudes and truth decay pose serious obstacles to good civic reasoning as citizens struggle to draw clear distinctions between fact and opinion, weigh personal beliefs and emotions over facts, and increasingly distrust traditionally respected sources of information. Stitzlein employs a Deweyan pragmatist account of truth and a distinctly social account of democracy to build a case for foregrounding honesty in the development of citizens. She describes how schools can employ communities of inquiry to cultivate habits of honesty within citizenship education. She explains how a better democracy -- one grounded in a wider understanding of social life and relationships -- might head off the temptation to be dishonest for self-serving reasons, focusing on how dishonesty jeopardizes our relationships to each other as citizens and our ability to engage in civic reasoning together to fulfill shared goals.

The changing educational landscape requires new organizational frameworks to understand how schools and universities make sense of and respond to broader institutional forces like accountability, diversity, and the market. In this article, we draw on recent innovations in organizational theory to propose a model that identifies two general processes through which pressures from the environment shape educational practice in schools: filtering and local adaptation. We review three areas where researchers have studied filtering and local adaptation--routines, sensemaking, and networks--to illustrate how these processes are currently being applied in education and how this work can be extended. We also identify studies that have begun to integrate these different areas of scholarship and propose directions for future research. This article offers education researchers new to the field conceptual tools for guiding their analysis and assists more seasoned researchers in situating their studies in a broader context of institutional maintenance, change, and heterogeneity.

In a time of for-profit schooling, continuing segregation, racism, book banning, unconscionable inequality, and antiquated approaches to pedagogy, the prescription for democratic schooling seems daunting. Yet the path is clear: We need to change society to enable democracy in schools; we need democratic schooling to bring the public out of its eclipse; and we need an engaged citizenry to address seemingly insurmountable challenges. Considerations such as this led the "Schools" journal to inaugurate this Symposium on Democratic Education in the Twenty-First Century. We recognize the magnitude of the task and make no claims to offer a complete or final solution. Nevertheless, the experiences reported in this and subsequent issues shine a light that aids along their path.

This paper explores how parents' COVID-19 safety concerns relate to school governance models (SGMs), instructional modes (i.e. in-person, hybrid, online), and perceptions of school quality during the pandemic. Leveraging two waves of household survey data across 47 states and the District of Columbia, we first conduct a series of multinomial regression analyses to explore the extent that parents' safety concerns relate to SGMs, as well as the extant that SGMs relate to instructional modes. We then explore the extent that parents' safety concerns, SGMs, and instructional modes relate to perceptions of school quality. We also examine whether the relationship between SGMs and perceptions of school quality vary across instructional modes. We find that parents' safety concerns varied widely across SGMs and that when considering these variations, SGMs appeared to be able to match parents' safety concerns with appropriate instructional modes. Although charter and private schools were consistently associated with better perceptions of school quality, we did not observe frequent associations between instructional modes (e.g. virtual instruction) and perceptions of school quality. However, we did find that the relationship between SGMs and perceptions of school quality significantly varied across instructional modes, such that hybrid instruction tended to increase the likelihood of perceiving poor school quality at charter schools but decrease these perceptions in private schools. We conclude with implications for policy and practice.

Analyses of policy documents and interviews with three Norwegian politicians revealed differences in how school leaders were described, positioned and ascribed responsibility in Norwegian education policy between 1990 and 2017. While how politicians positioned school leaders changed substantially during the period, a stable trait was vague descriptions of school leaders' responsibility. In 1990, school leaders were envisioned in a managerial position, above teachers, as employers. A more recent White Paper, from 2017, positioned school leaders closer to the teaching profession. The interviews showed that after the PISA-shock in 2001, politicians united across party lines in a 'new regime of understanding', downplaying traditional conflicts between Norwegian politicians. While Parliamentary politicians rhetorically disagreed, there was, underneath the policy discourse, a growing realpolitik consensus in questions of education policy. The study investigates policy descriptions of school leaders after 1990, when Management by Objectives was introduced in education. To position Norway in the international policy context, we draw on Stephen Ball's concepts fabrication, managerialism, magical solutions and neoliberal performativity. Three periods, with simultaneously appearing residual and emerging tendencies were identified. In conclusion, we question an apparent lack of ambitions for school leadership in Norwegian education policy. The article contributes with new insights into education policy fluctations.

The Central Gulf Coast Children's Defense Fund summer program has provided a solution to the issues related to learning loss and poverty over the last three years. Elementary students were strategically selected from low-income, at-risk, and minority communities to participate in the Freedom Schools program. This study describes the benefits to the students, their families, and the community, as well as the Servant Leader Interns who provided the culturally relevant curriculum. The history, structure, and essential components of Freedom Schools are described for the national model and Central Gulf Coast's approach. The benefits of the program are also shared, as well as the practical implications for the participants in this study.

This study examines the relationship between alternatively certified mathematics teachers' stated reasons for entry and their odds of retention at the school level and at the district level. Study participants were members of the 2006 and 2007 cohorts of New York City Teaching Fellows who completed three surveys over a 9-year period. Administrative data sets from the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) provided employment history of cohort members as well as demographic information about the teachers and sites of employment in New York City (NYC) public schools. Drawing on retention and survey data, we found that, of the four reasons for entry factors, two were predictive of NYCTF mathematics teacher retention (i.e., job benefits and alternative certification) and two were not (i.e., altruism and meaningful job). Given the cost associated with recruiting and training alternatively certified teachers, information to improve the initial selection process and increase the rate of retention makes financial sense for districts that employ alternatively certified teachers.

The current case study examines the process and components of a multi-site school-wide restorative justice (SWRJ) implementation program. Using Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology and the Outcome Logic Model (OLM), the authors describe results from a collaborative program evaluation conducted by university researchers and external specialists implementing SWRJ in five middle schools. OLM results include operational definitions and analyses of the program's implementation resources, activities, outputs, and outcomes, as well as findings surrounding gaps in practice and outcome monitoring. Key learnings from this case study included the importance of administrator buy-in, focused implementation teams, strong professional development systems, and the utility of systematic program mapping frameworks like OLMs. Identified challenges included leadership turnover in schools, overreliance on individual RJ specialists for implementation, and an imbalance of activities across the tiers. Implications and recommendations for organizational consultants, educational leaders, and school-based restorative justice scholars are discussed.

Talcott Parsons did not leave us with a global and consistent sociology of education. Instead, different aspects can be found in Parsons's oeuvre in different theoretical contexts. This paper summarises these different parts of Parsons's sociology of education -- his writings on the concepts of education and socialisation, the university, the school, the professions, and modernisation -- and discusses central criticisms and perspectives for further theoretical development. The paper goes on to argue that the value of cognitive rationality serves as a common basis of Parsons's sociology of education and that Parsons's sociology of education should be characterised as normative functionalist. Since the current sociology of education does not deal very intensely with Parsons's theoretical approach, the paper also considers references to other authors and the relevance for current questions and research in the sociology of education.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered practices in the K-12 education system. Though several studies have documented impacts on students and staff, limited research has explored educators' experiences with these changes. This study addresses this gap using interview data to examine elementary school educators' perspectives. Results suggest that the pandemic facilitated a variety of adaptations in schools that led to outcomes that were primarily negative (student social development and educator stress), mixed (student well-being and academic achievement; educator support, time demands, and well-being), or positive (student resilience and flexibility; educator resilience, sense of community, autonomy, and flexibility). This study describes ways in which pandemic-related changes in schools produced a mix of unfavorable and favorable conditions. An important implication is that rather than aiming for a complete "return to normal," schools should identify what may have worked better during the pandemic, such as increased social-emotional learning and individualized instruction, and explore ways in which such changes could be maintained going forward.

Mental health challenges among students remain a complex and widespread problem facing school leaders. Though schools are a front-line pathway for providing mental health services, many struggling youth are not receiving the professional help they need (Atkins, Hoagwood, Kutash, & Seidman, 2010; Findlay, 2017). Creative and collaborative solutions are needed to bridge the mental health gap. School leader support is essential to the successful implementation of mental health interventions (Forman, Olin, Hoagwood, Crowe, & Saka, 2009). This paper summarizes the novel approach taken by school and community leaders in one rural Ontario community who jointly piloted a school-based social worker (SBSW) role to support secondary schools in two districts. Interviews with five district leaders (four involved in designing the intervention and the SBSW who piloted the role) reveal conditions necessary for the pilot to take place, as well as leader involvement in setting up, supporting, monitoring the new role. Interviews highlighted multiple ways which the pilot improved student mental well-ness: one-on-one and group counselling sessions, charting fresh pathways networks of support available to students, creating a safe space for student and staff drop-ins, among other benefits to schools and stakeholders involved in the pilot. Results also detail three challenges leaders encountered along the way: stakeholder agreement, role clarity, and the temporary design of the role. Findings underscore how school-based social workers show promise in addressing rising mental health challenges.

For 3 decades, policymakers, educators, and scholars have been appealed to the promises of the learning organisation concept. Drawing from the last Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS 2018), this paper is the first to use a large-scale cross-country survey to assess the robustness of the relationship between schools operating as learning organisations and teachers' outcomes, a pivotal question for school improvement and effectiveness. Multiple regression analysis highlights that the factors underpinning a school as a learning organisation (namely, culture of inquiry, shared vision, growing leadership, lower professional learning barriers, and teamwork) have a positive impact on teachers' job satisfaction and self-efficacy. Policymakers, school staff, and other education stakeholders can use these findings as supporting evidence to engage with the learning organisation concept. Indeed, in times of increased strain on teachers across the globe, becoming a learning organisation can prove a vital shield against deteriorating teachers' wellbeing.

Our paper revisits a neglected chapter in the history of geographic education--the civil rights organization SNCC and the Freedom Schools it helped establish in 1964. An alternative to Mississippi's racially segregated public schools, Freedom Schools addressed basic educational needs of Black children while also creating a curriculum to empower them to become active citizens against White supremacy. Emerging out of a history of Black fugitive learning, Freedom Schools produced a critical regional pedagogy to help students identify the geographic conditions and power structures behind their oppression in the South and use regional comparisons to raise their political consciousness and expand their relational sense of place. Freedom Schools have important implications for higher educators, especially as contemporary conservative leaders seek to rid critical discussions of race from classrooms. They offer an evocative case study of the spatial imagination of the Black Freedom Struggle while pushing us to interrogate the inherent contradictions, if not antagonisms, between public higher education and emancipatory teaching and learning. Freedom Schools prompt a rethinking and expansion of what counts as geographic learning, whose lives matter in our curriculum, where and for whom we teach, and what social work should pedagogy accomplish.

Purpose: In organisational and innovation research, the term "open innovation" refers to the inflow and outflow of knowledge to and from organisations--with open innovation theory suggesting active exchanges of knowledge with external actors leads to the development of exploitable new ideas. In the field of education, however, the exchange of knowledge with external parties represents a paradigm shift. In response, this article presents findings from research design to explore the nature and composition of school innovation networks, and the effects of such these networks on knowledge mobilisation. Design/methodology/approach: The study draws on data from a representative random sample of 411 German school leaders. Respondents were asked to detail their engagement in open and closed innovation activity and their school's external collaborations during the last 12 months. A latent class distal outcome model was developed to examine whether different types of collaboration associate with different knowledge mobilisation processes. Findings: The study findings suggest that schools in Germany mainly use internal knowledge for innovation, with external knowledge exchange taking place on a very limited basis. Knowledge mobilisation varies depending on the innovation network. The authors use the findings to indicate new insights for how schools can further innovate learning and teaching in future. Originality/value: Although there is increasing discussion on Professional Learning Networks in schools, the discourse on knowledge mobilisation within educational networks is limited, making concept of open innovation so far completely absent from discourses on school improvement. This paper initiates the population of this new research space.

Purpose: There is a significant volume of literature relating to the mentoring needs of new principals and vice/deputy principals, but little is known about the mentoring needs of recently appointed middle leaders in an educational setting. This study explored the mentoring needs of five female middle leaders at a K-12 case study school of 550 students in Perth, Australia. Design/methodology/approach: Each participant had three mentoring sessions, followed by a semi-structured interview using open-ended questions to provide data on the participants' mentoring needs. The research was framed within an interpretive phenomenology paradigm that focussed on the participants' perceived experiences and how they then interpreted these experiences. One of the researchers was active in this research, acting as the mentor (Neubauer "et al.," 2019; Smith and Osborn, 2021). Findings: The findings of this study revealed the importance of the mentor being a "critical friend". In addition, the participants referred to leadership identity, leadership from the middle, managing relationships and gender as other important mentoring needs. Originality/value: This empirical study contributes original findings on the mentoring needs of a previously neglected group of educational leaders who provide an essential bridge between classroom practitioners and senior leadership in Australian schools. This study is unique because it links these mentoring needs to the practice architectures, factors at the case study school that either constrained or enabled middle leading (Kemmis "et al.," 2014).

Historically, the Swedish school system has been designed to level out differences between pupils. There has also been scepticism about assessing pupils. However, new school reforms in Sweden centre on performance and tests. This article focuses on pupils (year 6) in Swedish elite schools and their perceptions of assessment. The pupils are in an environment radiating exclusiveness and achievement through tradition, the physical environment and social contexts. The study is based on qualitative interviews in which the pupils were asked about their vision of the future and the importance of good school results. The pupils recount extensive preparation for the tests, which technically have no bearing, something which testifies to the importance attached to high grades even though they play no role in the pupils' future careers. But the pupils translate the 'artefacts' tests and grades into a resource supporting their long-term performance and future access to attractive degree programmes.

This theoretical paper focuses on the creation of the overly criminalistic Latin@ stereotype in the United States as a response to growing numbers of immigrants threatening white hegemony. As a mechanism of social control, Latin@s have faced inequitable treatment within the judicial and school systems of the United States. This paper examines criminality literature and its focus on the white/black binary before a legal system evolution that controls Latin@s. Social, legal, and racial control of Latin@s has occurred via negative public sentiment, inequitable juror practices, biased judicial sentencing and leniency, over-policing, and the "War on Drugs."

School principals are responsible for the safety and well-being of the children entrusted to their care. Parents expect their children to be safe and protected and that school leaders establish and maintain clear lines of communication during a time of crisis. Within their capacity as school leaders, it is incumbent on them to guarantee that school personnel are prepared and responsive in a manner that ensures student and staff safety. In practice, school principals and staff are often forced to assume the role as actual 'first responders' until other professional emergency responders from the community arrive. This paper highlights the importance for school principals to take a leadership role in ensuring that Emergency Action Plans (EAP) are clearly defined, communicated, reviewed, rehearsed, and revised. It focuses on Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL) 8, 9 and National Educational Leadership Preparation (NELP) National Education Leadership Preparation 5.3, 6.2, 6.3 standards.

School belonging is important for well-being and academic achievement of youth. School belonging is a broad concept for which researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds have developed a variety of synonyms and indicators. To explore the content of the concept of school belonging, an expert rating study was conducted with 73 expert researchers who rated different synonyms, indicators, and clusters of indicators of school belonging. Results showed that the experts considered connectedness the most suitable synonym of school belonging and inclusion, acceptance, connection, and respect the best indicators. With a multidimensional scaling analysis, two dimensions (the object of belonging and the intra- versus interpersonal nature of belonging) and five clusters of indicators were identified. The findings of this study provides some conceptual clarity that may help future research.

Professional learning (PL) encompasses the complexity of teacher learning and teacher agency in the process of learning. This paper aims to shed light on this complexity and proffers a conceptual meta-model of PL grounded in pragmatism to inform action in the design and evaluation of PL. It will firstly explore the aim and implications of the meta-model followed by outlining the methodology underpinning the development of the meta-model. Next, it will detail the constructs of the meta-model before outlining how the meta-model can be used at system, school and teacher levels. The authors hope that this will make both a theoretical and practical contribution by synthesising the conceptualisations of professional learning to date and serving as a platform for future theoretical and practical development.

In this article, we contest globalised notions of data as 'universally' beneficial, necessary and 'evidence-based'. We do so by drawing upon narrative accounts of the problematic ways data impact educators researching and working in university and schooling settings over time and in varied national contexts. We reveal how data are transient and often erroneous, even as data appear omnipresent and omnipotent. Employing an auto-ethnographic storytelling approach, we draw upon our diverse experiences as educators working within and across multiple national and subnational contexts -- in England, Singapore, Bangladesh and Australia -- to reflect on how data have reconstituted and recalibrated our experiences in school and university settings. We seek to break the 'myth' of data -- that we cannot live without the supposedly complete construction of work and life that dominant, reductive assemblages of data provide. In doing so, we argue for the reimagination and demystification of broader data regimes.

Purpose: School leaders who articulate a desire to center equity in their schools often neglect to examine how racism persists in their parent and family engagement strategies. This oversight can reify structures that are oppressive and exclusionary to the marginalized families school leaders claim they want to engage. Research Methods/Approach: In this study, we use case study methods to examine the way one social justice-oriented school attempted to challenge and disrupt the persistence of Whiteness and White supremacy in a unique family group. We interview one school leader and parents and conduct extensive observations of group meetings. Findings: We found that Whiteness and White supremacy can be persistent despite leaders' desires to eradicate these entrenched phenomena. Implications: Our findings show that knowing Whiteness and White supremacy are present is not enough. Rather, school leaders need to actively interrupt these dominant structures to see meaningful change.

The problem of teacher shortages in rural areas are intractable, as schools lack adequate qualified teachers, which inevitably exerts a negative impact on student learning and school development. In Taiwan, the government has implemented relevant policies, but the high teacher turnover rate and the high proportion of nonqualified teachers are issues that are still unsolved. This research investigated the relative importance of the determinants influencing teacher school selection and compared the teachers from rural districts with those from urban. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was adopted to analyze the proportion and ranking of the determinants, and a self-developed questionnaire was distributed to teachers from 25 rural and 25 urban schools in Taiwan. Initially, 10 urban and 5 rural schools were selected through the researcher's social connections, and the remaining schools were recommended by the selected schools. The final 500 samples comprised 50 schools, each contributing 10 teachers to the research. The research results indicate that decent quality of life and professional autonomy are the most valued criteria by the participants, while monetary incentives, including both salary and subsidy, are moderately valued. Moreover, among the comparison between schools from different districts, teachers from rural areas are relatively pessimistic about the working conditions despite holding advantages in the areas of several determinants, which contradicts the stereotype of the unattractive hard-to-staff school. The findings provide suggestions for policymakers regarding the implementation of incentives catered to teachers' needs to lessen the negative impact of teacher shortages in rural areas.

This paper considers how effectively inspection takes account of the 'lived experience' of young people in school and in their leisure time, and identifies some weaknesses in both data gathering and reporting. It asserts that Ofsted should be more forthright in its judgments of the curriculum range now offered in schools, and regrets its lack of attention to the non-formal educational opportunities available out of school which have the capacity to enrich young lives.

This article proposes reform of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). It considers the purpose of inspection in English schools and describes the previous system of inspection based on Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools (HMI). The question of how effective Ofsted is -- in comparison to similar countries -- is then addressed. The creation of Ofsted is described and its strengths acknowledged before discussion of the frequent criticisms it has attracted. Whether or not the English education system actually needs rigorous inspection is considered and the conclusion reached is that inspection is desirable, but not the current Ofsted model. The remainder of the article outlines the principles that could underpin a more positive model of inspection and the most pressing issues for reform. It ends with the recognition that, since schooling will be subject to change in a modern technology-driven world, models of inspection also need to be flexible.

This paper argues that Ofsted's initial approach to the use of criteria encouraged a misguided view of how inspection judgements should be made and, at worst, militated against the professional discussion between inspectors and schools that should always have been at the heart of the process.

In this article, I argue that parental privacy has often been given too much weight in theorising about justice at schools. Susan Okin famously stated that as the family serves as the children's 'first school of justice', it should also be internally just. However, she agreed with John Rawls on that interfering directly within the family life, even in the name of equality and justice, would risk causing injustice to those who do not share these liberal ideals. I ask in what sense this principle of non-intrusion into the private should be extended over the school institution. If the principles of public justice and private morality came into conflict in school education, which set of principles should be given priority? I pose Rawls' suggestion concerning children's schooling against his depiction of the family and claim that these two are normatively at odds with each other. Of the two, the latter seems paradoxically to allow for more extensive public regulation and therefore his view of the school must be modified accordingly. Moreover, I revisit one of Okin's main arguments that countering injustices requires active and explicated countermeasures where education plays a key role. Therefore, it is justified to prioritise principles of public morality, and teach related substantial values at schools, given that they accord with the demands of justice. Parental privacy applies to schools only in a limited sense.