Education systems are currently under challenge to teach new skills and competencies to all their students, and to function under increasing financial constraints. The effectiveness of schools to meet these challenges is being questioned by politicians, business leaders and academics worldwide; school effectiveness has become one of the important themes of world education.

This text explores the restructuring movement, with particular emphasis on how decentralization of power has affected the quality of education. It provides a broad and international picture of educational reform.

Following substantial changes throughout the Australian education system, primary schools are no longer in the protected position of having a regulated flow of clients, a pre-determined curriculum and marginal levels of staff development.
Recent moves have brought new or increased responsibilities for all schools in areas such as:
*curriculum and policy development
*staff development
*monitoring and assessment
*the use of new technologies
*resource allocation
This book seeks to review the impact of this change on Australian primary schools, on the people who are...

This book has its origins in conversations that started when the International Council on Education for Teaching (ICET) and the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) jointly agreed to co-sponsor a World Assembly of Teacher Educators in Melbourne in July 2003, hosted by Monash University. The editors of this book were not only intimately involved in the management of the conference but had also been key figures in the Associations involved. Tony Townsend had been secretary, and on the national board of the South Pacific Association for Teacher Education (SPATE), which later became...

This book celebrates twenty years of the International Congress for School Effecti- ness and Improvement. According to Judith Chapman s report in the first issue of the Australian Network News (1989, p. 1): The initiative for ICES was taken by Dale Mann, former Chairperson (1976 85) of the Department of Educational Administration, Teachers College, Columbia University, who served as the first Chairperson (1984 85) for the National Council for Effective Schools in the United States . . . who] felt it timely to bring policy-makers, researchers and planners together. By mid-1987 eight...

For the authors in this book, there can be no valid excuses for ignorance in any aspect of education as theory/practice. That is:

- If we come to learn that all educational problems involve knowledge of complex systems and processes, then quick, simple solutions should not be an educators first or only expedient option.

- If all education requires a measure of cultural and contextual understandings, then uniform, standardized programs and lessons will not meet the needs of all children or communities.

- If educational change takes time and strenuous efforts to...

This book explores the rich contextual nature of learning and the role of school leaders and leadership development in promoting it. It concludes that inserting the preposition for between the terms leadership and learning forces a useful wider perspective.

This book has its origins in conversations that started when the International Council on Education for Teaching (ICET) and the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) jointly agreed to co-sponsor a World Assembly of Teacher Educators in Melbourne in July 2003, hosted by Monash University. The editors of this book were not only intimately involved in the management of the conference but had also been key figures in the Associations involved. Tony Townsend had been secretary, and on the national board of the South Pacific Association for Teacher Education (SPATE), which later became...

This book explores major factors impacting on teacher education in recent times. It uses examples from a broad range of international contributors who compare larger countries such as the USA, England and Australia with their smaller partners: Canada, Scotland and New Zealand, demonstrating the substantial differences existent in all three cases. They also contrast the approaches of the countries that are members of the European Union with those that are not and discuss the special circumstances of developing countries, using Malawi as a case study. The international dimension of the book...