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We explore the effect of selective schooling, where students are assigned to different schools by ability, on adult health, well-being and labour market outcomes. We exploit the 1960s transition from a selective to a non-selective secondary schooling system in England and Wales. The introductio3n of mixed-ability schools decreased average school quality and peer ability for high-ability pupils, while it increased them for low-ability pupils. We therefore distinguish between two treatment effects: that of high-quality school attendance for high-ability pupils and that of lower-quality school attendance for low-ability pupils, with mixed-ability schools as the alternative. We address selection bias by balancing individual pre-treatment characteristics via entropy balancing, followed by ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. Selective schooling does not affect long-term health and well-being, while it marginally raises hourly wages, compared to a mixed-ability system, and school aspirations for high-ability pupils. Cognitive and non-cognitive abilities measured prior to secondary school are significantly and positively associated with all adult outcomes.

In light of contemporary critiques of New Zealand comprehensive schooling published mainly in the popular press, it is timely to re‐examine the origins of and the rationale for the widespread adoption of this model of education. The comprehensive schooling philosophy, it was recently alleged, has produced a situation in which ‘as many as one in five pupils in the system is failing’ and where ‘there is a large group at the bottom who are not succeeding’. This group was estimated to include some 153,000 students out of the total current New Zealand student population of 765,000. In this context, however, Chris Saunders and Mike Williams, principals of Onehunga High School and Aorere College in Auckland respectively, have noted that having underachieving students in secondary schools in particular is not a recent phenomenon. A large ‘tail’ of poor performing high school students has long been a cause of concern, Williams suggests.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a symbolic-interpretative research on the leadership culture and its subcultures in one unified comprehensive school in Finland.

The research is a phenomenological, qualitative case study. Its methodology is based on triangulation.

The leadership culture of the unified comprehensive school studied in the present research seemed to be based on equality, communality, appreciation, flow of information and humor. Besides examining the general leadership culture of the school, an attempt was made to study the possible subcultures of the school by examining the six subject groups into which the teachers were divided in the school on the basis of the teachers’ education and tasks. These subject groups formed the subgroups of the research. If a subgroup's interpretation of the leadership culture of the school differed significantly from those of the other subgroups, the subgroup was considered to have a subculture of its own. Only one such subculture was found, that of the mathematic teachers. It, too, although being clearly a subculture of its own, included several common features with the main leadership culture of the unified comprehensive school.

The study is the first one in Finnish schools where leadership culture is conceived as a constantly reforming outcome of the meaning and interpretation processes which form themselves through the social structures of the school in connection to the leadership actions at the school.

In this article I examine one film, Puberty Blues, directed by Bruce Beresford in 1981. According to the Australian Film Commission, the film is number forty four of the top Australian films at the Australian Box Office from 1966 to 2005 having earned over three million dollars. The view put here is that this film throws light on the history of the comprehensive coeducational high school at a particular moment. The article maintains that Puberty Blues pursues a damning representation of the ineffectual and irrelevant nature of school life for the students it features. This unsettling film shows the comprehensive coeducational secondary school, itself a product of a middle class vision of the civil society, to be failing in its promise of extending ‘respectable’ and materially aspirant middle class values to youth. It is suggested that the decline in patronage of the public coeducational comprehensive school by the middle class and aspiring others may in part be attributable overall to the powerful negative images of schools such as those in Puberty Blues that have widely circulated in Australian and Anglophone popular culture, especially in feature film. It also hypothesises that the middle class flight from the comprehensive high school may be in part attributable to the fact that some of their children may have ‘deserted’ the schools first.

Gamified and engaging school-based alcohol social marketing programs have demonstrated effectiveness; however, wide-scale dissemination of these programs is limited by their resource-intensive character. The purpose of this paper is to address this limitation, a brief alcohol social marketing pilot program was derived from a comprehensive alcohol social marketing program to compare effectiveness.

A sample of 115 14–16-year-old adolescents from six secondary schools participated in the brief alcohol social marketing pilot program. Program effectiveness was assessed using repeated measure analysis on adolescents’ knowledge, attitudes, social norms, self-efficacy and intentions to binge drink. Results were compared with the comprehensive social marketing program and a control group.

The brief pilot program produced statistically significant outcomes for the same measures as the comprehensive program across attitudinal variables, descriptive norms and opportunistic self-efficacy.

Converting existing social marketing programs into brief alternates is more cost-effective and, in this case, demonstrated better outcome effects. However, findings are limited as in-depth comparisons were hindered by changes to content across program modes. No process for converting comprehensive programs into brief alternates was identified prior to this study, and therefore a number of considerations for program alteration were derived from program facilitator experiences.

The findings provide initial evidence that a brief version of an existing comprehensive program can be an effective alternate to more resource-intensive programs under more cost-effective circumstances for program developers and facilitators.

The San Mateo Union High School District serves five communities in the San Francisco Peninsula. The organizational structure of the district is designed so that each school can reach beyond its own curriculum to satisfy the needs of all its students. Though each school offers all of the programs for which the number of students is sufficiently large, particular schools within the district are designated to offer special programs for which the number of students is too limited or the specialized facilities and equipment required are too costly for offering at every school in the district. Since the adoption of the “zero‐reject” comprehensive principle the drop‐out rate has been reduced from approximately fifteen per cent to under two per cent.

Until recently the most contentious, if not the most important issue on the educational stage was comprehensive re‐organization. Apart from dying rumbles from Surrey and the swamplands, it has over the past year or so passed from contention to reality. Its acceptance was not achieved overnight and has been due to long and strenuous efforts of local education authorities committed early to advancing on the 1944 Education Act. As an example and as a pioneer, the ILEA and its predecessor were responsible in large part for the system's present acceptability and the authority is now benefitting from the foresight of some twenty years ago. Long past the experimental stage, the comprehensive schools in London prove daily the comprehensive advantage and have evolved a detailed system of organization which each new foundation adds to.

‘Comprehensive re‐organization is in a state of unstable equilibrium, like the tides of Liverpool Bay.’ Mr N. A. Pannell, chairman of Liverpool Education Committee, said. Since his party's return to office in the local elections of last May there had been no massive changes yet made in council policy — indeed, a long way ahead, ideally all new schools might be comprehensive. Any objection that he had was not to the purpose‐built school but to the bodged‐up amalgamation of separate schools, some distance apart, and in unsuitable buildings.

Part of Bristol's quiet revolution in the educational field are the two comprehensive schools. Greenway boys' and Pen Park girls'. Originally secondary modern schools, they became comprehensive in the 1950's — somewhat before the government came round to their present way of thinking. Both the schools are in Southmead, ‘reputedly a bad neighbourhood’ said Miss MacBean, head of Pen Park.

This paper seeks to construct and describe a nutritionally balanced school meal model for a comprehensive school. The aim of the model is to illustrate an holistic view to school meals based on the pupils' needs.

The paper introduces Maslow's hierarchy of needs and eight theoretical views to school meals. The empirical data were collected in 2007 from the pupils (168), their parents (82) and the school officials (42) of four comprehensive schools in Finland by using a structured questionnaire which included open questions. Consequently, a description of a nutritionally balanced school meal model for a comprehensive school was constructed.

A constructed model for serving school meals consists of the following views: pupil's needs; nutrition, food choice and waste views; well‐being and energy; education; social‐ecological environment and school meal environment, as well as maintaining good health and preventing health problems. The model is structured according to the theoretical views as well as suggestions from the pupils, parents, and experts. Also the subjects responsible for the activities are included.

The constructed nutritionally balanced school meal model can be utilized as a standard model when serving school meals in a comprehensive school.

The model may act as a reference model for the school catering organisations and the school officials when decisions related to school meals are made.