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This paper focuses on the issue of exclusion from school in England. Exclusion from school is seen as indicative of behaviour that teachers find unacceptable within school, as such it represents their limits to tolerance. Aggressive, disruptive and non‐compliant behaviour features strongly in reasons given by schools for excluding pupils. The word “violence” is still applied sparingly as a descriptor for pupil behaviour. An overview of the evidence about the scale and nature of school exclusion is provided, drawing on the author's empirical research in the field. The paper also presents an overview of policy responses to the issue and how these relate to broader issues of child welfare. The paper concludes by reviewing policy tensions relating to school exclusion, particularly in relation to the social inclusion agenda.

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.

The school environment in the islands of Malta is experiencing important changes that need to be critically addressed if school improvement and, more importantly, student learning is going to be enhanced. This paper aims to present the education authorities with an introductory review which aims to contextualise the potential networking of schools within the nurturing of inclusive learning communities.

The paper argues that unless the principles of hope, faith, commitment, individual and collective worth are nurtured, networks will not on their own work to bring about desired change.

Whilst a networking reform process has been introduced no review has yet been undertaken in Malta to understand the implications, both positive and negative, that such a reform brings with it.

Implications for policy and practice include a thorough understanding of the six components behind the inclusive learning community, the various benefits, tensions and concerns that networks and networking bring with them.

This paper presents an introductory review and contextualises the network reform policy within the principles of the learning community.

Some employers contend that the college graduates they hire should have stronger communication and critical thinking skills upon arrival from their various college/university programs in which they majored. As higher education continues its efforts to meet the demands for employers, the authors contend that the benefits of participation in debate exercises can be incorporated into various courses as a teaching tool to increase facility with these soft skills. A practical application of debate in a specific organizational leadership course is presented, along with highlights of the student participants’ reflections upon the experience, and the initial signs of positive impact on these skills. Suggestions of future application of debate into curricula are also shared.

Examines the construction of the funding formula, following the 1988 Education Act, used to determine the levels of devolved budgets in three English local education authorities (LEAs). Explains that, in each LEA, a team was formed to determine the funding formula. Also explains that, as most schools pre‐local management of schools (LMS) only kept aggregate records showing the cost of education at the levels of primary/secondary sectors rather than individual school level, the LMS teams faced serious problems in defining budget parameters, identifying cost elements and attributing costs to functions. More critically, points out that while the 1988 Education Act made it clear that the new budgeting system should be comprehensive in the sense of not merely reflecting past expenditure patterns but being based on perceived education needs, the LMS teams developed funding formulae which predominantly preserved the status quo established by historical expenditure patterns. Explores both the arguments and the mechanisms which each LMS team deployed in order to produce an incrementalist budgeting system and the constraints that operated on incrementalism.

Large-scale assessment has been used in many education systems as an instrument to evaluate educational performance nationally. This practice is based on the concept of epistemic governance which encourages school accountability. This study aims to explore teachers' perspectives regarding the value and uses of national large-scale assessment (NLSA), highlighting its relevance across contexts.

Using qualitative data, this paper presents the case of the Israeli NLSA tests – the Meitzav, while examining the perceptions and actions in which teachers engage to follow-up on the test results, and the extent to which they implement pedagogical change in light of the test results.

The findings showed that teachers tend to use the NLSA test results as a pedagogical tool to improve learning processes to a limited extent. They concede that most activity involving the tests at the school and class levels is dedicated to preparation and not to pedagogical change. Some explanations are suggested.

This paper discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the NLSA testing regime for the school, curriculum and pedagogy.

Conceptualizing schools as learning organizations provides a potential avenue to meet the pressing challenges of school improvement in the USA. District and school leaders play an important role in creating and sustaining the conditions for a learning organization, yet little is known about how leadership responds to learning-resistant contexts in their mission to improve schools. This study aims to examine the relationship between the district and school leadership and schools as learning organizations. The focus is on the conceptualization of schools as learning organizations and the challenges involved in creating and sustaining conditions and processes in which to improve schools.

This paper uses semi-structured interviews with district and school leaders in the state of Georgia and data from completed dimensions of a learning organization questionnaire (DLOQ) study to analyze how district and school leaders conceptualize or make sense of schools as learning organizations and overcome challenges associated with creating and sustaining a learning organization in learning-resistant contexts.

The analysis find that participants perceive their school or district as a learning organization when the structure allows others to work together to learn and grow for the benefit of students.

This study is unique in that it adds to a growing number of studies that examine schools as learning organizations using the DLOQ and sheds light on the nature of learning-resistant contexts.