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The purpose of this study is to explore educational policy directions in the Maldives to continue learning in public schools during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and identify policy changes that could improve the preparedness of the schools for future pandemics.

This qualitative study is descriptive in nature with an analytical methodology of document and interview data analysis. The purposively selected participants for the interviews included senior officials of the Ministry of Education, school leaders and teachers of public schools in the Maldives.

This study identified significant policy changes for public schools in the Maldives during the COVID-19 pandemic. These were early response and timely policy directions to continue education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Another finding was the effective change communication of the educational policies for its implementation. Following the policy changes, the teachers were trained for online teaching, hence increasing their competency in information and communications technology. As a result, this led to resilient teachers who were determined to provide education through the challenging times of the pandemic. Hence, it is evident that the school system of the Maldives will emerge stronger beyond COVID-19.

The education policy changes for public schools in the Maldives during the global COVID-19 pandemic have merits for education practices beyond the pandemic.

The purpose of this research is to examine the largely ignored executive development needs of the reformed twenty‐first century public sector by executive education providers in business schools.

The paper is predominantly conceptual exploring the current debates on the effectiveness of public sector management and the requirements for more relevant management and executive education through a literature review. The antecedents of the current position are explored. Hypotheses are developed about the provision of executive education for the public sector within business schools. In the absence of previous investigations in this field, a preliminary survey is conducted employing the Financial Times top 60 ranked executive education, 2006, to test the hypothesis and underpin more in‐depth research.

The findings demonstrate that almost two‐thirds of the sample did not provide any executive education to the public sector, and most of the provision on offer was for specialised silos within the sector, or borrowed from existing private sector programmes. There was no support found from the sample for public sector new network governance or leadership challenges discussed in the paper. Findings also supported the view that there is a shortage of evidence‐based research for many of the executive programmes that are being offered.

This paper is the first to explore the status of the field under investigation and provide a conceptual framework; whilst the preliminary empirical research has been an initial surface fact‐finding study to establish the level and size of the problem, this has been achieved. This paper will now underpin a rigorous empirical research programme to explore the subject matter in greater detail.

The findings support the hypothesis that executive education providers within business schools are failing to address the management development needs of senior executives in the public sector. The paper concludes that there are huge opportunities being missed by business schools both by their management faculty, to investigate and understand the problems of the sector, and by their executive education centres to co‐design and deliver programmes to assist the sector to transform and develop effectively to meet the challenges posed by a more globalized, complex, networked world. The paper invites them to engage.

This paper investigates a subject that has been identified by the Academy of Management as important. It requires further research but has hitherto not received much attention from the research community.

More than five years have passed since A Nation at Risk was published in 1983 by then‐Secretary of Education Terrance Bell's National Commission on Excellence in Education. Those years have seen the publication of an enormous body of both primary material, composed of research reports, essays, and federal and state reform proposals and reports; and secondary material, composed of summaries and reviews of the original reform reports and reports about effective programs that are based on reform recommendations. This annotated bibliography seeks to identify, briefly describe, and organize in a useful manner those publications dealing with K‐12 education reform and improvement. The overall purposes of this article are to bring organization to that list, and also to trace relationships and influences from the federal initiatives to the states and professional associations, and from there to the school districts and individual schools.

This paper reports a policy research project intended to clarify the accountability processes and criteria that should be used to collect data, report and improve the quality of learning, teaching and leadership in Tasmania. Its outcomes informed the design of a new three‐year school review process that seeks to integrate local governance, school planning, action research evaluation, external reviews, and systemic performance monitoring. Behind the recommended policy is a touchstone set of processes and criteria that comprise a theory of mutual and educative accountability. This theory represents an attempt to reconcile centralism with pluralism, exhibits liberal, democratic and limited forms of community government, anticipates educative forms of leadership, and values communitarian over collegial and individualistic forms of professionalism.

This article examines why Universal Primary Education (UPE) has shifted from being a developing country challenge more broadly in the last half of the 20th century to become largely a sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) challenge today. It discusses a number of national and education sector system-wide challenges that have constrained the implementation of UPE in SSA more so than in other developing regions.

This article reviews the literature and policy documents on a wide range of developing country issues, and discusses why most SSA countries have faced unparalleled challenges in achieving UPE.

SSA governments should take the opportunity offered by their post-pandemic “build back better” efforts to fundamentally reset education policies to address the key causes of this major development failure. The overarching objective must be to develop education systems that are more inclusive, equitable and responsive to national development needs by better serving the large population groups, parts of society and economic sectors that currently derive little benefit from public education spending. This article highlights the urgency and challenges associated with achieving this objective.

Although the main responsibility lies with SSA governments, this paper stresses that the global community will be affected in many ways by how effectively this crisis is addressed. Therefore, this effort merits sustained global support including through more catalytic use of aid.

The main aim of this study is to investigate the role of fathers and mothers in the intergenerational educational persistence for sons and daughters under two dimensions that characterize the clusters of countries: redistributive policy and governance.

Data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility (GDIM), hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components and panel regression are used in this study to estimate intergenerational educational correlation and to investigate its determinants related to the parents’ and descendants’ education variables in 93 countries grouped in four clusters. The empirical analysis is differentiated by gender combinations of parents and descendants.

In the clusters of countries characterized by high inequalities and poor governance, our findings show that the role of the fathers is stronger than that of the mothers in educational transmission; fathers and mothers are more influential for the daughters rather than for the sons; parental educational privilege is the main driver of intergenerational educational persistence; there is an inverse U-curve in the association between educational inequality of the parents and educational correlation for the sons. Differently, in the countries characterized by high income, low redistributive conflict and better governance, the role of the mothers is stronger and education mobility for the daughters is higher than that for the sons.

The authors’ results remark on the importance of social welfare policies aimed to expand a meritocratic public education system including schooling transfers for lower social class students and narrowing the gender gap in educational mobility between daughters and sons. Social welfare policies should also be oriented to spread high quality child care systems that help to foster greater women equality in the labor market, because the strength of educational persistence depends on the position of the mother in the economic hierarchy.

The distinctiveness of the paper can be found in the fact that this study investigates the parental role differentiating by gender and coupling hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components with panel regression models. This allows us to have a sample of 93 countries aggregated in four groups defined in two dimensions: redistributive policy and governance. Amongst the determinants of educational transmission, we consider not only education’s years of the parents but also other determinants, such as educational inequality and privilege of the parents. We also identify the effects of investment in human capital and educational inequalities for the descendants on education mobility.

This chapter discusses the challenges of safeguarding academic freedom during leadership transitions and organizational change in universities. Examples from a large public university illustrate current challenges and provide perspective for proactive measures to protect academic freedom. While the context and details are unique to the institution featured in the chapter, the lessons gleaned from each vignette offer valuable insight to faculty and university leaders who are motivated to better understand and uphold the principles of academic freedom and, more broadly, protected speech with higher education. To support academic leaders in achieving these goals, a conceptual framework for shared leadership through shared governance to support academic freedom is presented. The chapter concludes with recommendations for leveraging shared leadership to foster a university culture that supports of academic freedom.

The purpose of this paper is to argue and explore how local meaning-making processes of leaders also occur in embodied and affective registers. The paper aims to introduce the theoretical concept of affect to studies of local public leadership.

The paper reports from an ethnographic study of local leaders managing educational institutions in Denmark. The paper takes a constructivist or interpretive approach where it is acknowledged that data is not just out-there ready to be collected and reported but is constructed and interpreted in particular manners as part of the complex encounter between researcher and field.

The paper zooms in one particular instance where a leader breaks down in tears and where the tears seem to evoke a particular affective atmosphere. Thus, the paper shows how, just below the elite narrative of a need for stronger, individual and more evidence-based management, we find a myriad of meaning-making processes that transgress distinctions between the corporeal, affective and discursive.

As an ethnography conducted in a local setting, the paper avoids broad generalisations. The findings reflect the theoretical ambition of discussing the role of embodiment and affect in local leadership as much as the studied setting.

The study testify to how policy implementation can take many unexpected turns as local leaders interpret and make sense of policy ambitions in many different ways. Moreover, it testifies to how leaders are informed by embodied experiences and affective atmospheres in their sense-making processes.

The paper is one of the first attempts in public leadership to discuss the role of embodiment and affect in local public leadership.