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The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse the development of school autonomy, school leadership and curriculum innovation in England over the past 40 years. It provides a baseline picture for the wider international study on school autonomy and curriculum innovation.

An initial literature review was undertaken, including policy document analysis. Interviews and observations were undertaken with participants on a pilot professional programme for school leaders seeking to develop their school curriculum.

While all schools in England have needed to adapt their curricula to reflect the new National Curriculum introduced from 2014, relatively few schools appear to have used this opportunity to design genuinely innovative curricula that respond to the changing needs of learners in the twenty-first century. This includes the academies and free schools – currently around one in four schools – which are not legally required to follow the National Curriculum. The authors posit that leadership agency by principals and their professional teams is more important than policy/legal freedoms for securing curriculum innovation. Such agency appears to depend on the capacity and confidence of leaders to shape an alternative and innovative curriculum in the face of structural constraints, in particular England’s sharp accountability system, effectively making these leaders “rebels against the system”.

The empirical findings are preliminary and based on a small convenience sample.

Given England’s position as a relatively extreme example of high-autonomy-high-accountability quasi-market school reforms this paper provides valuable insights on school autonomy and curriculum innovation that can inform policy and practice more widely.

In an era of increased autonomy and accountability in education, school principals have been given the responsibility for many tasks that used to be centralized, such as hiring and managing personnel, ensuring that the curriculum is followed and that the development of the school is on the right path. In this study an exploration is attempted into the associations among institutional context, school leadership, school climate and student outcomes.

The authors analyze data from the Programme of International Student Assessment study 2015 to identify variations in institutional context (autonomy and accountability) among education systems to determine whether and how institutional context is associated with leadership and whether education systems, in turn, are associated with school climate and students' achievement in reading. To account for the hierarchical structure of the education systems under investigation, a three-level structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was employed to analyze the data gathered on the institutions, schools and students.

No association was found between the degree of autonomy of an education system and leadership behavior; however, accountability and leadership seemed to go together. Achievement in reading competencies was greater in school systems in which principals had more autonomy. At the school level, a relationship was found between leadership and opportunities for parental involvement.

The results of this study indicate the need of strong leadership in order to have better results when there is more accountability. In this sense, the authors' findings also point to the increased importance of context-sensitive leadership skills.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze two parallel processes in the Israeli educational system: first, the idea of school autonomy, exploring its origins and its pedagogical implications and effectiveness; and second, the development of the progressive education evident mainly in the cognitive domain of twenty-first century skills (21st CS), focussing on fostering “deep knowledge” and children’s thinking skills. The manuscript explores the various “waves” of progressive pedagogies that have taken place in the Israeli school system over the years, describing and analyzing the processes that characterize them.

Based on a historical perspective, the paper describes chronologically the main developments related to school autonomy and 21st CS policy initiatives, based on a literature review and analysis of policy documents.

The review indicates that the Israeli educational system is still caught in the “centralization trap,” inhibiting major changes in the patterns of central control and degrees of freedom granted to school-level educators. As for school pedagogy, it is evident that most of the changes in pedagogy suggested by the numerous policy documents over the years have not resulted in sustainable, system-wide change. In both issues a large disparity is evident between declarations about innovative pedagogies and school autonomy and their actual implementation.

The review reflects the idiosyncratic articulation of policy plans conducted by the Ministry of Education, producing discrepancies and incongruences at the school level. Some implications of the “declarative culture” created are further discussed.

Teachers' expressing candid and natural emotions during teaching and learning processes is of vital importance for the quality and content of education. Because of that reason, it is necessary to explore factors that have a role in teachers' emotional labour. Therefore, the current study aims to test a novel model developed to explore the direct and indirect relations among distributed leadership, teacher autonomy and emotional labour.

The study data came from 1,007 teachers working at 81 state high schools located in 12 different regions in Turkey. To test the proposed model, the authors conducted a mediation analysis of structural equation modelling.

The analysis confirms that teacher autonomy is a prominent mediator in the relationship between distributed leadership and emotional labour.

This study is expected to contribute to the body of research focusing on the effects of leadership on teachers' emotional labour.

This chapter focuses on meanings of decentralization in the context of post-socialist reforms in Romania. The main purpose is to examine the circulation of decentralization reform in what is generally considered to be a highly centralized country. Drawing on policy analysis and in-depth interviews and focus groups with teachers and school administrators, the findings reveal contrasting perspectives and hybridized ideas about the meanings of decentralization reforms in Romania. These reforms should be seen in the context of larger trends toward marketization (McGinn & Welsh, 1999). With the emergence of discourses on modernization and a “return to Europe,” Romanian political culture has offered a complementary, legitimizing base to the decentralizing reform of administration and education. In line with the recent history of these reforms, most interview participants view 1998 as the peak of real “institutional autonomy,” followed by a decline or even a slow recentralization in subsequent years. They also refer to “self-assigned” or “reclaimed” autonomy, which every teacher can adopt “in their own class, once the doors are closed.” Significantly, most agree that the latter type is essentially the same as in the communist period, prior to the 1989 political changes. We will thus investigate the contrasting perspectives expressed by scholars, teachers, and in policy documents, as well as the hybridized ideas which together result in various visions of reform. The analysis of post-socialist changes, both as real and imagined processes, leads us to conclude that the Romanian education transition should be seen as a complex process which has followed unanticipated trajectories and has led to multiple destinations (Silova, 2009).

The purpose of this paper is to provide national information on school autonomy, leadership and student achievements in Finland.

The paper is a literature review on Finnish studies focusing on school autonomy, leadership and student achievement. The studies have been reviewed on the basis of a content analysis.

There exists a shortage of studies connecting school leadership to student achievements. School leadership in Finland has been investigated in previous research, especially from the perspective of shared or pedagogical leadership, but vast majority of the studies have focused on teachers and educational staff, not directly on students. An evident reason for this is inaccessible information on school-based data and the nature of education being a “public good”, which is supposed to meet the same standards across the country.

This review will provide the international audience a deeper understanding in the school autonomy and leadership development in Finland.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the efficiency performance of public sector-funded schools in Spain.

Using school-level data from Program for International Student Assessment 2012, cross-sectional models were estimated using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Technical efficiencies of public sector-funded schools (public schools and centros concertados), and their determinants were estimated using a one-step maximum likelihood procedure. SFA models include both a stochastic error term and a term that can be characterized as inefficiency; the non-negative technical inefficiency effects are assumed to be a function of school characteristics.

The results show that greater school autonomy and school responsibility for resource allocation are associated with efficiency improvement. Subsidized private schools (called centros concertados) were more efficient than public schools. The former are free of bureaucratic constraints that encumber public schools, and they are able to control many more decisions at the school level (e.g. they select their own teachers).

This paper shows the value of school autonomy for educational performance. The author defines school autonomy as the operational empowerment of the principals and teachers. Therefore, the government could grant greater autonomy to public schools (school-based management), since school autonomy is a driver of efficiency. Further, teachers’ morale is also an environmental driver of efficiency. Schools tend to be more efficient when teachers work with enthusiasm or value academic achievement. And this is more likely to occur in private schools, even though teachers are hired (they are not civil servants) and have a lower salary than public school teachers. The lack of motivation of many teachers in public schools may be in the absence of incentives – there is no possibility of promotion and everyone is guaranteed a wage increase every three years –and in the bureaucratization of the public school system.

Analyzes the development of the external evaluation models of schools in Portugal. Gives special emphasis to the current situation and role of inspection with a constant retrospective view of the administration of the educational system. Reveals that the Portuguese education system has been changing, with more autonomy being placed on schools which places importance on the evaluation process. Concludes that the evaluation process should be developed as a way of controlling the educational system.

Principal instructional leadership and teacher participation in decision-making are conceptualized as shared instructional leadership (SIL) – a management philosophy that positively impacts student academic performance. However, the statistically meaningful relationship between SIL and student performance remains controversial as SIL functioning is influenced by various fundamental school conditions shaped by education policy, including high-stakes accountability, school autonomy and teacher professionalization. The authors examined the relationship between three SIL policy configurations and promising student performance: inclusion, exclusion and insensitive to SIL.

The authors used fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on data obtained from the Program for International Student Assessment (2015) results, including principals' responses to leadership questions and school conditions shaped by policy, and student science scores in 64 countries and areas.

The role of SIL in student performance varied among the three configurations, and the condition of teacher professionalization in the configuration was consistently associated with high student performance.

SIL can create conditions for continued professional development of the teaching workforce in conjunction with school conditions shaped by policy.