Over the last four years, initial teacher education in Wales has been fundamentally reformed. The stimulus for those reforms were concerns about the quality of current provision, but more importantly a recognition by the Welsh Government that if their wider reforms of curriculum and assessment were to succeed, then teachers themselves had a key…

This article outlines the findings from a contemporary study of teacher-parent collaboration in inclusive education in primary and secondary schools in Malaysia. Recent inclusive education policy developments within Malaysia have increased teachers' accountability to effectively meet the needs of all students. This article draws upon recent…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to outline how collective capacity building is supporting system-wide reform in one country. It seeks to outline the way in which professional learning communities within, between and across schools are creating an infrastructure for improving professional practice and raising standards.…

Teachers might be working significantly more with one another, but principals are not. Superintendents might bring principals together for district meetings or even to expose their performance results to colleagues in public, but principal collaboration is too often trumped by district control. Even worse, more and more schools and their…

In England, federations are defined as groups of schools that have a formal agreement to collaborate with the aim of raising achievement and promoting inclusion and innovation. This paper presents a number of findings from the case study strand of a 3-year study investigating the impact of 37 federations (see Lindsay et al., 2007). Maximum…

This article explores the process and practice of knowledge creation within development and research (D and R) networks. It focuses upon D and R networks in England that are currently engaged in collaboration and innovation. Early evaluative evidence suggests that D and R school networks offer "spaces" for collaborative working, mutual…

Only in the last few years have researchers in the United Kingdom focused their attention upon improving "failing" or "ineffective" schools. While there is much contemporary interest in schools in difficulty, few research studies have focused exclusively upon leadership practices and approaches. This study's prime aim was to…

Outlines findings from study funded by the National College for School Leadership that explored effective leadership in a group of secondary schools in challenging circumstances. Highlights the key characteristics and features of leadership approaches adopted, and argues that the heads in the study operated a shared or distributed model of…