The first article of this issue explores Australian principals' understandings of educational leadership, with particular reference to distributed leadership. These Australian findings are then located in a broader context by relating them to perspectives in other settings. The author argues that there is a disconnect between theory, policy endorsement and the views of practitioners. The second article also focuses on ‘distributed leadership’ in a secondary school science department. The analysis highlights the nature and pattern of these practices and the continuity that provides coherence to these practices. The authors conclude by highlighting the importance of leadership appointments and time required to support the development of these practices.
The third and fourth articles in this issue move on to consider roles and responsibilities of teaching assistants and the management of teacher ‘misbehaviour’ in the English education system. The third article offers a critical insight into some of the issues associated with remodelling the workforce. The author argues that a discourse of maternality within schools has emerged and this is related to gendered self-sacrifice and conscientiousness which masks the exploitative nature of the role. The fourth article draws on five cases of the management of serious teacher misbehaviour and provides an analysis of the strategies used to deal with these cases along with highlighting some of the issues that accompany such cases including the influence of gender and the importance of relational trust.
The final two articles turn our attention to two very different education systems, Indonesia and Pakistan. In the first of these articles, the authors report an analysis of a survey of 475 teachers across six Lampung school districts. The findings suggest that teachers perceive school principals should adopt a more transformational style of leadership and a more rational approach to decision-making. The final article explores large-scale reform in Pakistan. The authors draw on data from a study exploring the perceptions of teachers and school leaders to highlight some of the tensions associated with importing ideas and reform strategies from one system to another.
While some of the findings reported in these final two articles may not be surprising, firstly, they foreground the relative lack of empirical evidence in these contexts and secondly, they raise important questions relating to the ‘travel’ of policies and concepts around the globe. While much has been written on these issues, from very different positions, we still struggle in understanding the complexity and extent to which (or not) research findings, policies and practice can be transferred or adapted to meet the needs of educational systems at very different phases of development which are underpinned by contrasting assumptions, values and beliefs.
Christopher Chapman
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK