Purpose: To improve school organisational performance and innovativeness, and meet diverse student needs, school leaders should be innovative, risk-takers and proactive, thus applying entrepreneurial practices/strategies and market mechanisms. This study aims to investigate, from a schoolteacher's perspective, the degree of entrepreneurial…

Purpose: The paper aims to examine to what extent and why parental involvement as well as characteristics of ethnic school population influence social skills scores (social position, behavioural skills) of students. Design/methodology/approach: The study used the COOL5-18 database (2010) that included 553 Dutch primary schools and nearly 38,000…

There is a global trend towards including children with special needs in mainstream schools instead of placing them in special schools. However, the numbers of students in special schools varies greatly among regions due to variations in educational systems, funding arrangements -- and the incentives that are associated with these arrangements --…

In many countries, policy makers struggle with the development of value-added indicators of school performance for educational accountability purposes and in particular with the choice whether school context measured in the form of student composition variables should be included. This study investigates differences between 7 empirical studies…

Background: In the Netherlands, as in many other countries, there are indications of an inclusive school policy for children with Down syndrome. However, there is a lack of studies that evaluate to what extent this policy has actually succeeded in supporting the mainstreaming of these students. Method: For the period 1984-2011, the number of…

Despite the growing introduction of inclusive education, children with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) are barely included. Because an underlying factor here may be the attitudes of those directly involved, the present study focuses on the attitude of parents and relating variables concerning experience with individuals with…

Purpose: While in everyday practice, school leaders are often involved in social relationships with a variety of stakeholders both within and outside their own schools, studies on school leaders' networks often focus either on networks within or outside schools. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which principals occupy…

There is little empirical evidence describing how school principals respond to the changing socioeconomic position and ethnic identities of the urban population. In this paper such empirical evidence is presented in respect of three primary school leaders in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The schools selected were identified as…