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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the implementation of a web‐based platform integrating benchmarking and data envelopment analysis (DEA) for the Portuguese secondary schools.

The benchmarking platform is designed around a set of key performance indicators that are displayed using benchmarking graphs. These indicators are also aggregated through the methodology of DEA to provide a summary measure of performance.

The benchmarking platform developed enables schools to perform internal and external evaluation through a standard model that is based on indicators of school activities. It encourages schools' efforts of continuous improvement and increases society awareness regarding schools' context and results obtained.

The benchmarking platform can be useful for schools and general public. For the general public, there is a tool that allows the construction of user‐defined rankings online and benchmarking tools that allow the comparison of performance of a specific school with others. In addition to these features, schools have in the BESP platform a repository of historical data, and the possibility to see a set of graphs that show for some indicators their evolution over time.

This paper describes a breakthrough in the Portuguese education context. The BESP platform is the first in this context to combine DEA and benchmarking tools in a web‐based environment, designed to enable real‐time performance assessments.

Resource allocation is a key policy instrument that affects the educational achievement distribution (EAD). The literature on methods of allocation is focused mainly on equity issues. The purpose of this paper is to develop a composite funding formula, which adds to the equity-based element (i.e. a needs-based element compensating for students’ low starting points), an element of rewarding improvement in schools’ educational achievement distribution (IEAD) (i.e. raising the overall level of achievement and narrowing the achievement gap).

This formula is developed using advanced regression models as well as integrating further policy considerations. The data sets are comprised of nation-wide student-level information on longitudinal students’ achievements (8th graders of 2006, and four years later 12th graders 2010), as well as student background characteristics, and teacher profiles and school features. The Israel data serve as an interesting case study for other countries which are similarly characterized by its students’ diversity, and by its aspiration to improve its EAD and to narrow the achievement gap.

Results reveal that the variance among students’ performance is mostly explained by their past performance. In addition, other background characteristics also contribute to the explained variation in students’ performance; however, a lower contribution was found, compared with that of the previous performance. Specifically, schools’ value added contributes 25 percent to the overall 50 percent of explained variance. In other words, allocating resources to schools solely with accordance to equity issues might have an adverse effect on improvement. Yet, designing a composite mechanism that integrates both equity and improvement issues might be more effective.

Policy makers in other countries that strive to achieve improvement as well as equity in education might consider adjusting the technique developed in this work. The proposed technique might be adjusted based on each country’s nation-wide student-level data. The design of a research-based funding formula aimed at improvement in education as well as considering equity issues might be more effective, equitable, and efficient.

The main contribution of this work is the conceptual development of IEAD, as well as its measured weight in the funding formula. This work suggests an innovative method of allocation that rewards schools by allocating larger resources based on the improvement gained in the process of learning (not just on the inputs or outputs/outcomes). This research value lays in its design of a composite funding formula that takes into account, in addition to the equity component, an innovative improvement-based component. In addition to that, the value of this research lays on its policy implications. This research suggests and develops a technique for developing a research-based funding formula that might be useful for other countries aspire to improve their education.

“Planning is the key to the financial manager's success… any good plan must be related to the firm's existing strengths and weaknesses. The strengths must be understood if they are to be used to proper advantage and the weaknesses must be recognised if corrective action is to be taken… the financial manager can plan his future financial requirements in accordance with the forecasting and budgeting procedures…” (Weston and Brigham, 1979)

This qualitative study discusses the importance of effective leadership practices in connecting the macro-, meso-, and micro-contexts in which school leaders operate, considering the colonial and apartheid history of South Africa and the current era of neoliberal philosophies by exploring the degree to which school leaders in historically disadvantaged schools in Western Cape Province use an edupreneurial approach to steer their schools in new directions. The school leaders, especially in historically disadvantaged Colored schools, are expected to be more autonomous and accountable for making the school environment conducive to performance standards and improved learning results. The study uses an edupreneurial leadership approach as a theoretical lens to explore entrepreneurial agency, together with the educational leadership approach of school principals as a consequence of neoliberal policies.

This study focuses on secondary schools in historically Colored communities in Western Cape Province through semi-structured interviews with four purposively selected school principals and four teachers from four different schools in the Western Cape Province.

Education and training programs should focus on cultural values and practices to enhance the efficacy of these schools. Furthermore, an entrepreneurial mindset and spirit are aspects that can be encouraged in a culturally sensitive manner. The edupreneurial leadership approach in developing countries has a distinctive nature.

This study contributes to forging an understanding of how neoliberal trends influence school leadership practices in developing countries, especially the leadership work of school principals across public schools in the Western Cape Province in South Africa.

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.

It has become an article of faith to believe that the root of the British industrial malaise lies in low productivity. The apparent permanence of a poor productivity record in Britain was brilliantly chronicled by Corelli Barnett in his recent article in ICT on ‘The hundred year sickness’. The government, industry, and commentators point to the unfavourable comparisons between British industry and our foreign competitors. The car industry seems to be the favourite example for this masochistic mode of analysis.

This research investigates the impact of managerial practices implemented by Italian school principals on students' outcomes, using micro-data provided by the National Evaluation Committee for Education (INVALSI) for 2013/14 school year.

Employing an educational production function, the authors regress a set of student and school's characteristics, enriched by information from a questionnaire filled by school principals to estimate student's score at grade 8 (last year of junior secondary school), also taking into account student's prior achievement (at grade 6 – first year of junior secondary school).

Indicators about managerial practices have positive coefficients, but low statistical significance. Stronger associations between management variables and test scores are detected for low-SES schools.

The research presented here is particularly innovative in the Italian context, where little evidence exists about the impact of managerial skills in education, though institutional reforms are leading towards a strengthening of school principal's leadership role. In this paper, the authors move a first step by describing managerial practices and their diffusion in different schools and geographical areas within the country. The authors focus the attention on the role of managerial practices (what principals do) and not on the managerial skills (what principals are able to do).

The evidence is strong that the instability of teacher rosters in urban school settings has negative consequences for student learning, but our concern is with the opposite phenomenon: What is the value added to the organization when a school's teaching roster is stable over time? Our theory of teacher corps stability hinges on the claim that the stability of a teacher corps over time is a sine qua non that, under certain conditions, permits formation of the social capital needed to catalyze school effectiveness.

We test this claim using longitudinal data from 72 schools in a large, urban southwestern US school district. We first identified a subset of 47 schools with either chronic teacher turnover (high, stable turnover) or a stable teacher roster (low, stable turnover) via school-level HLM growth modeling techniques. These classifications were then used as a covariate in a series of HLM growth models investigating its relationship to growth in structural, relational and cognitive social capital over time.

Our findings sustain a claim of the importance of teacher corps stability. In our sample of urban schools, we found robust increases in the relational and cognitive dimensions of social capital over time in those schools with stable rosters. Furthermore, schools with chronic turnover were declining significantly in relational social capital, but no appreciable growth in structural social capital was found in either stable roster or chronic teacher turnover schools.

Given the nature of teacher corps stability and its relationship to key organizational outcomes, school leaders play a central role in realizing teacher corps stability within their school. A certain amount of this effort must necessarily be focused on retaining a stable corps of quality, happy, committed teachers. However, building social capital concerns the active engagement of all actors; thus, school leaders need to think beyond retention to how the teachers that remain can play larger leadership roles in this process.

Few studies have examined the positive benefits that can emerge in schools where the majority of teachers remain year after year. Collectively, the study findings suggest that teacher corps stability can provide fertile conditions for the development of social capital that has the potential to enhance school effectiveness and that its staff can leverage for school improvement.

This study aims to investigate the organisational structure to exploit data analytics in the educational sector. The paper proposes three different organisational configurations, which describe the connections among educational actors in a national system. The ultimate goal is to provide insights about alternative organisational settings for the adoption of data analytics in education.

The paper is based on a participant observation approach applied in the Italian educational system. The study is based on four research projects that involved teachers, school principals and governmental organisations over the period 2017–2020.

As a result, the centralised, the decentralised and the network-based configurations are presented and discussed according to three organisational dimensions of analysis (organisational layers, roles and data management). The network-based configuration suggests the presence of a network educational data scientist that may represent a concrete solution to foster more efficient and effective use of educational data analytics.

The value of this study relies on its systemic approach to educational data analytics from an organisational perspective, which unfolds the roles of schools and central administration. The analysis of the alternative organisational configuration allows moving a step forward towards a structured, effective and efficient system for the use of data in the educational sector.