1,721,071 research outputs found
Invisible barriers: the career progress of women secondary school principals in Greece
No full textThis paper examines the career progress of female principals in Greek secondary schools and the under?representation of women in management positions. Drawing on in?depth interviews with six women principals in Athens, the paper considers the factors affecting women's participation in school management. The findings demonstrate that women are greatly under?represented in secondary school management positions. The main reasons for this disadvantage are personal factors, covert discrimination, gender stereotypes and constraints experienced through their socially defined role
Instructional leadership in Greek and English outstanding schools
Full text linkThis research paper examines instructional leadership in outstanding secondary schools within a centralised (Greece) and a partially decentralised (England) education context. Since the purpose of the study is exploratory, the researchers adopt a qualitative approach, employing a series of four qualitative case studies with the purpose of examining the impact of instructional leadership on student learning, teachers' professional growth and school improvement, using the interpretivist paradigm. Semi-structured interviews with various data sets (stakeholders) within and outside the school, observation of leadership practices and meetings, and scrutiny of relevant macro and micro policy documents are employed to enhance methodological and respondent triangulation. Recognising that instructional leadership is not confined to the principals’ leadership domain, a sense of shared and distributed leadership prevails in schools, while its implementation is inevitably linked to system constraints. The findings from the Greek schools link to the official expectations that principals operate as administrative rather than instructional leaders, while an unofficial instructional ‘teacher leadership’ culture suggests potential for reconsidering leadership in Greek state schools. In contrast, the decentralization of school activities creates the platform for the emergence of shared and distributed leadership within the English context, where school actors enact direct and indirect instructional leadership roles. This cross-country comparative study demonstrates theoretical significance in its focus on the collaborative and reciprocal nature of instructional leadership, while its empirical contribution liesin generating new knowledge on how instructional leadership is contextually bounded<br/
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Organisational culture
No full textThis volume provides insights into effective strategic management as a major contribution towards educational transformation in the new South Africa. Through a mix of theory and school-based practice, and drawing on wide research, it offers syntheses of educational management theory and examples of practice taken from South Africa’s schools. Contains sections on: The Context of Education Management in South Africa; The Management of Schools; Theory and Practice in Educational Management; Organisational Structure; Organisational Culture; Transforming Schools - Managing the Change Process; School Effectiveness and School Improvement; Quality Assurance and Accountability; Theories of Leadership; Leadership and Roles; Strategic Management and Planning; Development Planning
Instructional leadership in centralised systems: evidence from Greek high-performing secondary schools
Full text linkThis paper examines the enactment of instructional leadership (IL) in high-performing secondary schools (HPSS), and the relationship between leadership and learning in raising student outcomes and encouraging teachers’ professional learning in the highly centralised context of Greece. It reports part of a comparative research study focused on whether, and to what extent, IL has been embraced by Greek school leaders. The study is exploratory, using a qualitative multiple case design to examine two HPSS in Athens. The research design involved a qualitative approach using several different methods, including semi-structured interviews with school principals, deputy heads, subject teachers and subject advisers, plus observation of leadership practice and meetings and scrutiny of relevant policy documents. The findings show that IL is conceptualised as an informal collaborative leadership practice, interwoven with the official multi-dimension role of Greek principals and their ‘semi-IL’ role. In the absence of official IL ‘actors’, teachers’ leadership has been expanding
Sensor based ambient air concentration data for nitrogen dioxide and particles in Oxford, measured by the OxAria project 2020 to 2021.: Measured ambient levels of NO2, PM10 & PM2.5 at 10-second, 15-minute & 1-hour resolutions in Oxford, 2020 to 2021.
No full textOxAria is a Natural Environmental Research Council funded collaboration between the University of Birmingham and University of Oxford, supported by public and commercial partners. The project has applied advanced technological and environmental health expertise to understand the air and noise impacts of COVID-19 across Oxford City.
See also https://oxaria.org.uk/
The application of high-resolution sensing technology in this context offers potential to measure air pollution at an unprecedented scale and scope, providing a more comprehensive picture of air pollution across Oxford than has previously been possible.
Data obtained before, during and after relevant COVID-19 restrictions have been used to understand impacts upon road traffic, air and noise pollution levels and to assess implications for healthy life expectancy and therefore human health. This information will be used to provide an evidence-base for air quality policy within local authorities, public agencies and national Government
School leadership theories and the Malaysia education blueprint: findings from a systematic literature review
Full text linkThe leadership models were developed in Western, mainly decentralised, contexts, and there are clear implications for how such models might apply in highly centralised cultures, such as that prevailing in Malaysia
Leading and sustaining Zimbabwe's private schools: matching vision with economic reality
Full text linkThe political, economic and social challenges in Zimbabwe are well documented. Public schools have been damaged by a shortage of resources, and by a brain drain of teachers. This has led many parents to seek private education for their children but the country’s economic problems mean that they often cannot afford to pay the fees. This demanding context informed the authors’ study of leadership in twelve private schools in Harare and the surrounding area. Individual and focus group interviews were conducted with 19 leaders in these schools. The findings show that most of the schools have experienced significant falls in student numbers, despite cutting fees. This creates a severe management challenge for principals, other leaders, and school owners. There have been redundancies at several of the schools, which the leaders find stressful, while salary levels remain modest, although still higher than those in the public sector. The infrastructure and facilities are generally good compared to those in the public sector but leaders lament that they cannot be enhanced in the current financial climate. Most of the schools have a distinctive Christian ethos, and a vision to provide the best possible education for their children, but the leaders’ ambitious plans are thwarted by Zimbabwe’s harsh economic realities
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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