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The purpose of this paper is threefold: to sketch the current policy context that frames the education of migrant children in Shanghai; to explore the work lives of school leaders in the privately owned but government-supported schools; and to understand the socio-cultural and educational factors that shape the leadership practices in these schools.

This paper drew from publicly accessible policy papers and interview data with four principals leading migrant children’s schools in Shanghai.

Migrant children’s schools have received increasing policy recognition and attention. Principals of these schools have strived to adopt various leadership strategies to enhance the quality of education as received by migrant children. However, due to the institutional barriers such as hukou, multiple challenges continue to face migrant children and leaders leading migrant schools.

This is one of the first few papers that collected data from principals leading migrant children’s schools. The paper contributes to further understandings about leadership in high-needs school context and about education quality and equity in relation to programme for international student assessment success in Shanghai.

Principals' well-being worldwide is under increasing threat due to the challenging and complex nature of their work and growing demands. This paper aimed at developing and validating a multidimensional Principal Well-being Inventory (PWI) and examining the state and consequences of principal well-being.

This paper involves four independent samples of principals working in schools from Hong Kong and Mainland China. The research design consisted of four phases with four sequential empirical studies. Phase 1 was to establish the content validity (literature review and Study 1); Phase 2 was to test the construct validity (Study 2 and Study 3); Phase 3 was to build the criterion validity (re-use the data from Study 3) and Phase 4 was to test the cross-validity of the PWI (Study 4).

Based on published literature and four successive empirical studies, a 24-item PWI was created via a theoretical-empirical approach of test construction. Validity was confirmed through construct-, content-, criterion- and cross-validity testing. The PWI covers the six important well-being dimensions – physical, cognitive, emotional, psychological, social and spiritual – to present a general picture of principals' occupational well-being associated with job nature, well-being literacy, leadership and context.

The inventory will aid efforts to promote principal well-being as an essential component of schoolwide well-being, quality education and a wellness society.

During the post-COVID-19 period, this project is deemed both critical and timely so that quality education will not be sacrificed due to factors affecting principal well-being.

This theoretically and empirically validated inventory serves as a robust tool for comprehensively understanding principal well-being and a fuller exploration of their well-being literacy, drivers and outcomes.

This paper aims to explore developments over the past 25 years in the knowledge base on instruction-oriented middle leadership in schools. The authors document the trends in the literature since middle leadership began to attract scholarly interest in the late 1990s and explore the shifting structural and content patterns in the knowledge base.

The authors use a topographic methodology to analyse both structural elements and major results drawing from 147 peer-reviewed journal articles.

The authors draw on the review's outcomes to propose a model that frames a core set of middle leaders' instructional leadership practices. They also identify the personal, departmental, organizational and external influences shaping middle leadership practices and identify a lack of research conducted outside Anglo–American societies. This gap in the literature suggests the need for the increased study of middle leadership in different national settings and systems and how these influence the practice and enactment of middle leaders around instruction. There is also a need to employ a greater range of methodologies to understand middle leaders' instructional roles.

The paper lays a foundation for the future development of middle leadership for instruction and highlights signposts to guide future inquiry.

The paper contributes to the middle leader knowledge base by focussing on their enactment of instructional leadership.

Despite the continuous growth of empirical studies exploring professional learning communities (PLCs) across different education systems, little is known about PLC instruments developed and used in existing research. This article aims to capture a full picture of existing PLC instruments developed since 1990. In so doing, the authors also pay attention to the seminal work of Karen Seashore Louis in alignment with the theme of the special issue.

Based on the authors’ searching databases, the authors identified eleven PLC instruments and 26 applied studies using the PLC instruments since 1990. Following this, the authors closely reviewed the identified studies and their relationships (i.e. which one influences which).

The authors’ review illuminates the measurement domains, conceptual origins and methodological soundness of the existing instruments and captures the impact of Louis's work on the applied studies using PLC instruments.

Given that PLCs are seen as a policy measure to sustain and scale up school improvement internationally, the authors’ review provides a better understanding of what and how researchers have measured the effect of PLCs on school improvement. As the first of its kind, the authors believe that their findings can give researchers valuable ideas about how to develop and use a PLC instrument.

This study aims to describe and analyze an innovative mechanism of teacher-led, system-wide professional learning that has been widely adopted since the beginning of the twenty-first century in China – the Master Teacher Studio (MTS).

This paper drew from policy documents, published Chinese literature relating to MTSs and personal fieldwork experience in Shanghai, Guangdong and Zhejiang province.

The article first outlines the context framing the system change, including its policy background and evolution, and then the MTS's purpose, formative process and structure. It finally examines major teacher learning activities and the leadership roles of the MTS hosts (leaders).

This study contributed to the knowledge base of system teacher leaders and how they lead cross-school leading.

The MTS initiative described in this article shows the power of central system leadership to spread and embed effective teacher learning practices at schools.

This article provides implications for understanding and practicing teacher system leadership to support teacher professional learning in different societies.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of empirical studies on principal leadership in Singapore. It seeks to provide a general picture of Singapore principals’ leadership qualities, styles, and roles.

This is a systematic review of empirical studies, using a “bounded” approach with a focus on the main findings of the reviewed studies. In all, 36 studies were selected for the interview. The findings of these studies were open coded, synthesized, and clustered into different themes.

The review revealed several qualities, characteristics, styles, and enacted roles of Singapore principals. While there are similarities between Singapore principals and principals elsewhere in the world, the review brought out some features unique to Singapore principals.

This review contributes to the growing literature in comparative research on principals’ leadership and their enacted roles, and concurrently functions as a guide for further research on school leadership in Singapore.

This paper is an initial attempt to discuss the American institutionalist movement as it changed and developed after 1945. Institutionalism in the inter-war period was a relatively coherent movement held together by a set of general methodological, theoretical, and ideological commitments (Rutherford, 2011). Although institutionalism always had its critics, it came under increased attack in the 1940s, and faced challenges from Keynesian economics, a revived neoclassicism, econometrics, and from new methodological approaches derived from various versions of positivism. The institutionalist response to these criticisms, and particularly the criticism that institutionalism “lacked theory,” is to be found in a variety of attempts to redefine institutionalism in new theoretical or methodological terms. Perhaps the most important of these is to be found in Clarence Ayres’ The Theory of Economic Progress (1944), although there were many others. These developments were accompanied by a significant amount of debate, disagreement, and uncertainty over future directions. Some of this is reflected in the early history of The Association for Evolutionary Economics.

MR. ALLAN BARNS‐GRAHAM, of Craigallian, Milngavie, has sent us a copy of a letter, addressed by him to the Secretary of the Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society and printed in pamphlet form, which contains a number of points of considerable importance. MR. BARNS‐GRAHAM observes that Bran and “Thirds” play a most important part in the rearing and feeding of cattle, pigs, and poultry, and in the production of milk; that these two products ought to be used to a much greater extent than they are now; that large quantities are annually exported from this country; and that the supplies ought to be jealously guarded. He expresses the hope that the Agricultural Organisation Societies of Great Britain and Ireland will in no way encourage the manufacture of condensed milk—on the ground that it is not in the interest of the public health, nor in the interest of agriculture to encourage the manufacture of any article of food which can be made to keep indefinitely by artificial means. This appears to us to be a somewhat strange position to take up, unless the author's intention is to condemn the practice of keeping food products by means of chemical preservatives—in which case we agree with him. But the proper preservation of many food products by legitimate and harmless methods, not involving the use of chemicals or of other objectionable devices, is surely permissible and valuable to the community. Properly prepared and sterilised condensed milk is a very useful commodity if it is what it purports to be. In this connection we may say, however, that condensed milk containing large quantities of added sugar ought not to be sold as “condensed milk,” but as “condensed sweetened milk,” or “condensed milk and sugar”—the proportion of added sugar being prominently disclosed; while, in our view, the sale of “condensed sweetened; ‘separated,’ or ‘machine‐skimmed’ milk” ought to be prohibited altogether.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process and the personnel skills required for converting a non-MARC database file into a MARC file for uploading to both OCLC and a local catalog. It also examines the various decisions that need to be made when mapping from one file structure to another.

Applied–Database record conversion.

While MARCEDIT is a remarkably powerful tool for cataloging and database maintenance purposes, dealing with non-MARC records requires additional programming skills and tools for the successful completion of a file conversion project.

Discusses the importance of converting locally produced databases, especially those with bibliographic content, to national and international standards to significantly increase their discoverability.

Provides an overview of file conversion issues and considerations.