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This chapter uses findings derived from interviews with 13 Ontario (Canada) secondary school principals to identify conditions that contribute to emotional labor, experienced in their work. Five workplace conditions that heighten participating principals' emotional labor emerged from the interviews, including advocating for students, work intensification, navigating their local policy context, managing workplace conflict and crises or tragedies in the school community. The findings suggest a need to clarify legislated expectations and responsibilities placed on principals to accurately reflect their work and counter the impact of work intensification. Principals could benefit from additional supports to deal with the impact(s) of work intensification, shepherding the school through crises or navigating shifting policy contexts and conflicts in the workplace. Rather than treating the symptoms that result from emotional labor, concrete efforts are needed to change the culture of the principalship in order to maximize the impact of leadership on student achievement.

The impact of the NHS reforms, and the resulting purchaser‐provider split, has refocused attention on the relationship between management and medicine in acute hospitals. It is timely to assess the explanatory power of various theoretical models regarding the management‐medicine interface. Argues that this interface is currently rather fluid and that a dynamic and adaptive model is best suited to understanding the way in which doctors and managers develop their relationship within the changing policy context. Two examples illustrate these shifting boundaries.

Our chapter examines the ways national developments in Australia and New Zealand over the past two decades reflect distinctively antipodean understandings of educational leadership and management. Our interest is twofold. We are concerned about the extent to which these understandings are reflected in strategies designed to enhance the quality of school leadership. We are also concerned about the extent to which these strategies represent progress towards achieving ‘sustainable’ school leadership. We define sustainable leadership in terms of both building leadership capacity within the organisation and embedding lasting organisational change (Fink & Brayman, 2006; Hargreaves & Fink, 2006; Spillane, 2006). The concept used here implies both models of distributed or shared leadership and leadership succession.

The purpose of this paper is to explore empirically the dynamics by which austerity, a “moment” of neoliberal policy reform enacted through strategies of market-driven governance (MDG), provides the conditions for the insertion of capitalist-market logics into the charity sector. Demonstrating altered funding structures permits a political and socioeconomic reconfiguration of poverty, it asks what this means for charity work.

The paper draws upon data from 12 months ethnographic fieldwork in a charity in England. It explores the permeation of competition and profit as logics of capitalist-markets.

The paper finds that capitalist-market rationales are enacted within the organization. Charity is subordinated to business and profit permeates the site, thus changing the way that poverty is acted upon. In this context, workers are engaged in “labors of negotiation” which ultimately impede a reconfiguration of poverty into profit via their everyday situated labor. This reveals the symptomatic activities of upholding an ethos of public care in the production of charity work and within a context of MDG.

This paper makes an empirical contribution to the debate on contemporary charity working under austerity. It makes an important conceptual contribution by adding to the emerging literature on MDG (Varga, 2016); by repositioning du Gay’s (2003) analysis of public reform into alternative empirical and analytical conditions; and by building upon Adams’ (2013) work around the replacement of an ethos of public care with one of private profit.

School-level leaders are suffering. They are experiencing a well-being crisis after years of working long work hours, managing an unrelenting workload, and navigating shifting policy contexts. School leaders that are experiencing work intensification and highly stressful work environments can suffer personal and professional consequences. On a professional level, school-level leaders are immersed in intensified work environments that mute the power and potential increasingly associated with their role. This chapter describes challenges that threaten school-level leaders' productivity, job satisfaction, happiness and well-being, such as work intensification, burnout, stress as well as loneliness and isolation. In these ways, the emotional aspects of their work can influence school-level leaders' ability to lead happy and healthy lives, while also having the supplementary effect of making the position less attractive for the next generation of school leaders. Research conducted in jurisdictions around the world is discussed throughout the chapter to demonstrate that the well-being crisis experienced by school leaders is an international phenomenon. I also use this discussion of the challenges facing contemporary school-level leaders to encourage them to reconnect with the reasons why, and the emotions they felt, when first pursuing a position in K-12 school-level leadership.

Finland's performance in PISA has created considerable interest in the country's education system, to ascertain what has made Finland so successful in the survey. In reference to the phenomenon, this chapter discusses cross-national attraction, policy borrowing, the effect of Finland in PISA, and its influence on education policy. This chapter explores at length the theoretical background of cross-national attraction and policy borrowing, also investigating cases that have already occurred. It discusses Finland's role as the new object of cross-national attraction and eventual policy borrowing. The chapter incorporates research into the reasons for Finland's success in PISA, the possibilities of policy transfer from Finland, and delves into the likelihood of policy implications as a result of Finland in PISA. This cross-national attraction denotes the first stage in policy borrowing; however, comparative educationalists, for years, have warned about the uncritical transfer of education policy. Research in Finland has revealed many reasons for the country's PISA success stem from contextual factors: those related to historical, cultural, societal, and political features of Finland. Therefore, policy borrowing from Finland needs to heed warnings of past comparativists. The new phenomenon of Finland in PISA has generated much curiosity from those in education, educational policy, and politics. Policymakers are keen to incorporate Finland's educational features into their education systems. PISA and Finland's performance in the survey influence educational policy. This illustrates the importance the warnings of past and present comparative educationalists in order to prevent uncritical policy borrowing.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: to sketch the current policy context that frames the education of migrant children in Shanghai; to explore the work lives of school leaders in the privately owned but government-supported schools; and to understand the socio-cultural and educational factors that shape the leadership practices in these schools.

This paper drew from publicly accessible policy papers and interview data with four principals leading migrant children’s schools in Shanghai.

Migrant children’s schools have received increasing policy recognition and attention. Principals of these schools have strived to adopt various leadership strategies to enhance the quality of education as received by migrant children. However, due to the institutional barriers such as hukou, multiple challenges continue to face migrant children and leaders leading migrant schools.

This is one of the first few papers that collected data from principals leading migrant children’s schools. The paper contributes to further understandings about leadership in high-needs school context and about education quality and equity in relation to programme for international student assessment success in Shanghai.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the arrival of Colombo Plan Scholars in New Zealand and consider ways in which their experience helped to bridge distances between “east and west”, as well as to create connections that traversed geographical and cultural boundaries.

It draws on contemporary newspaper articles to ascertain how public talk about the Colombo Plan programme shaped initial engagements between New Zealand and the scholarship holders. The paper then analyses archival files from the Department of External Affairs to present an overview of the university courses undertaken by Colombo plan scholars. The final section of the paper draws on oral and archival sources to examine individual encounters between former Colombo Plan scholars and New Zealanders.

The paper argues that while the public aims of the Colombo Plan focused on the containment of communism and the development of post‐colonial connections in the South East Asian region, individual encounters between Colombo Plan scholars and New Zealanders played a role in changing social attitudes in what had been a deeply mono‐cultural society.

The paper draws on previously unpublished archival and documentary evidence and oral sources to examine a unique aspect of the history of international education.

Among the critical issues facing special education today is the lack of highly qualified and well trained professionals who are capable of working with the increasing numbers of students with diverse needs referred for special education supports and services. In both the popular media and the research literature, experts are attempting to delineate the numbers of schools and programs without trained, certified special educators and are attempting to predict how many more special educators will be needed in the next three to five years to come (Boe et al., 1998; Garnes et al., 2002; Goodnough, 2003; Hammond, 2003). Suffice to say, the field of special education is facing a critical shortage of teachers. There are three general goals to be achieved. As a field, we have been challenged to find high quality potential special educators from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. We need special educators equipped with more effective teaching strategies for a very diverse student population. We are engaged in an international pursuit to retain and improve the teacher efficacy and quality in inclusive settings given a changing educational policy context.