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Territory-wide system assessment (TSA) was launched and administered by Hong Kong (HK) Education Bureau (EDB) since 2004. Since then, parents and teachers have been questioning its need, value, uselessness, effectiveness, harm for schools, teachers and students. In 2015, the issue blew up with Kau Yan School’s principal boycotting the tests. A series of discussions in the public and media and different surveys were then carried out widely in HK. After review, EDB announced in 2017 that the revised version of TSA be extended to Primary 3 students in HK. The purpose of this paper is to propose that TSAs for Primary 3, Primary 6 and Secondary 3 need a further review to judge their need and uselessness.

This paper reviews the educational policy governing the administration of the TSA. Primary and secondary data from focus group meetings, press interviews (Bogdan and Biklen, 1982; Miles and Huberman, 1994; Ouiment et al., 2001) and public reports would be analyzed. Besides, participant observation (Nosich, 1982; Sou, 2000; Sou and Zhou, 2007) and theoretical reasoning (Nosich, 1982; Sou, 2000; Sou and Zhou, 2007) have been applied for the critical review of this controversial test. The contrast study on the conflicting views of stakeholders in the education industry would bring up some insights of this controversial educational policy in Assessment for Learning.

Conflicting and contrasting perceptions from TSA to basic competency assessment (BCA) among stakeholders of education and government include governmental stakeholder – EDB’s awareness; EDB stressed that TSA is a low-stakes assessment which does not need extra practice for students; non-governmental stakeholders including legislative councilors’ perception, school principals’ perception, teachers’ perception, parents’ perception and students’ perception. Facing the opposition and grievances of different stakeholders, EDB announced in January 2017 that the revised version of TSA: BCA, be extended to HK in May 2017. Parents and legislative councilors were angry and they ask for a review or even cancellation for Primary 3 TSA.

This original study will initiate more thorough revisions and discussions for the TSAs for Primary 3, Primary 6 and Secondary 3 in HK, as a quality educational management step. While TSA for Primary 3 has been reviewed and substantially “revised,” the community at large still asks for further revision for its needs, uselessness and harm for parents, teachers and students. Since the underlying causes of students’ suicides are not fully identified, the problem of over-drilling practices for TSAs for Primary 3, Primary 6 and Secondary 3 needs to be satisfactorily resolved. Thus, TSAs for Primary 6 and Secondary 3, like that for Primary 3, should be reviewed for probable revision.

In the context of debates on the role of social partners in shaping anti-crisis policies, the article explores the developments of social dialogue in Poland following the outbreak of the pandemic. The central research question is whether the crisis has helped to revitalise social dialogue or has it further revealed its weaknesses that were apparent before it.

The paper is based on the combination of literature review and the analysis of primary data derived from 22 expert interviews with the representatives of trade unions, employers and ministries collected in 2020–2021 in four essential industries (education, health care, social care and logistics).

The analysis suggests that the pandemic led to reinforcement of “illusory corporatism” in Poland, deepened mistrust among social partners and triggered a shift to informal channels of influencing policymaking. The weakness of the social partners and the strong position of the right-wing populist government meant that fears of recession and a health crisis were insufficient to develop “crisis” corporatism. While business interests were represented better than labour in policymaking, limited labour-friendly outcomes have been achieved as a result of workers’ mobilisation and unilateral decisions of the government rather than tripartite social dialogue.

Based on original empirical research, the article contributes to the discussion on the impact of the crisis on social dialogue under patchwork capitalism. It points to the role of strong governments and informality in circumventing tripartite structures and the importance of essential workers’ mobilisation in response to the lack of social dialogue.

This paper aims to examine and discuss learning conditions for teachers, in the context of choice and decentralisation reforms.

This article is based on analyses of 30 interviews with Swedish upper secondary teachers focusing on their experiences of their conditions for learning.

This paper shows how teachers at upper secondary level identify their subjects as the most important to learn more within. Secondly, we also show that spatial and temporal aspects of organisation of work seem to influence the conditions for subject learning, where the interviewees in many ways contrast their own view to how they describe their work being organised.

Our findings may have currency for other professional groups with similar governance-contexts, and teachers in other similar governance-contexts.

These findings indicate the need to further develop workplace learning strategies founded upon the understanding of schools as workplaces, taking occupational values into account. Furthermore, these strategies should be seen as a core Human Resource Management issue, as they can potentially enhance the work environment, thus increasing the profession’s attractiveness.

We show that spatial and temporal aspects of organisation of work seem to influence the conditions for the sought after subject learning, and that the teachers and the school management seem to identify with different and clashing ideals in terms of what, when, how and with whom to learn.

This study aims to determine how school-based management (SBM) capacity developed through international cooperation functioned to overcome challenges during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Nepal.

The research structure was designed based on the success case method. The researchers conducted a questionnaire survey of head teachers to understand schools’ responses during the COVID-19 pandemic period, identified likely success-case schools, held workshops at the likely success-case schools and conducted in-depth interviews with head teachers and school management committee (SMC) members to understand how SBM functioned and contributed to the success cases.

Storytelling from the success-case schools provided reliable evidence that the localised approaches of SBM are effective for planning and implementing suitable responses at school. The reviews of the head teachers showed that both head teachers and teachers had strong leadership and understood the importance of collaboration with teachers, SMC members, Parent Teacher Association (PTA), guardians and students. Although the research could not show clear evidence of a causal relationship between their achievement and Japan’s project input, the success-case schools clearly benefited from the head teachers’ appropriate execution of SBM with their strong leadership as well as the collaborative efforts of the stakeholders.

The research tries to clarify the influence of the effects of SBM capacity development projects by analysing the changes of head teachers and teachers through the storytelling aspect of the success case method with in-depth consideration of actual school responses during the emergency period of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In times of crisis like COVID-19, teachers' readiness for class opening and their response to problems they encounter are critical. This study focuses on Quezon Province teachers' readiness and problems with the upcoming school year 2020-2021 to better understand this issue and develop an intervention plan. A descriptive-quantitative method was applied in the study, and cluster sampling was applied to select the sample. "Ready" was used as a verbal expression, and the overall mean score of 2.85 reflects readiness. There was a positive outlook on the teachers' profession, and they said they were ready to perform their duties and responsibilities under the new normal imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the teachers' difficulties were described as "Not a problem at all" by the overall mean score of 1.74. Teachers expressed concern about the impact and compromise on their time management caused by the reproduction of modules. Even more worrisome was the fact that teachers seemed to be struggling to access online seminars and training because their internet connection wasn't stable or good enough. Teachers may benefit from the intervention plan outlined in this paper in order to address the challenges they are currently facing.

The aim of this policy brief is to summarize the key priorities and recommendations made by ARC delegates and thought leaders who came together virtually between March 2020 and November 2021 to find ways to support students, parents, teachers, and school leaders in their respective educational communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Educational management's main task is to achieve learning quality outcomes in acquiring knowledge, scientific skills and social values. This study aims to provide a background on Egyptian thought development in educational management from 1990 to 2020.

In this study, we used the descriptive method to collect and interpret data. This method aims to describe an object of phenomena after data collection, analyze it, identify the conditions and relationships between variables and monitor the challenges arising from Egypt's educational system's problems.

The results showed the following: (1) the trend toward decentralization of educational management is not fulfill during that period and (2) the district and directorate administration continued to receive administrative instructions from the managerial ladder's highest authorities. The Ministry of Education was in control of policy decision-making processes and administrative and financial responsibilities. Many decisions and laws hinder decentralization, such as centralizing examinations, curricula and teachers' recruitment and transfer.

The challenges of developing educational management are related to the shortage of modern management methods in administrative leadership, organizational behavior and decision-making, such as human relations and decentralized administration. Also, the insufficient material resources, managerial competencies and educational, intellectual stagnation among many leaders and administrators.

Many K-12 teachers teach difficult topics as part of their curricula, and discussions of difficult topics are common across grade levels and content areas. As teachers increasingly engage with difficult topics in their classrooms, the need for high-quality professional learning experiences has also grown. In response, the purpose of this article is to introduce an emerging partnership between the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State and the Red Lion Area School District (Red Lion, Pennsylvania), conceptualized from the outset with an explicit focus on intentionally engaging in collaborative, inquiry-based professional learning surrounding difficult topics in formalized curricula and within educational practice.

The article briefly describes how the partners came together, then provides a high-level overview of how they approached their first year of collaboration. Next, the partners’ adaptation of inquiry-based professional learning is outlined. The article concludes by discussing lessons learned from the first year of partnering and implications for scholarship in the areas of school-university partnerships, inquiry-based professional learning, and difficult topics.

The article observes that it took educators participating in a difficult-topics inquiry community an entire year to begin shifting ownership of inquiry to K-12 students. It illustrates how school-university partnerships can be used to support difficult-topics inquiry and raises new questions about the role of difficult topics in partnership work.

The article contributes an original example to the literature that demonstrates how inquiry-based professional learning focused on difficult topics can provide a powerful basis for forming a school-university partnership.

There is a growing consensus in education that schools can and should attend to students’ social-emotional development. Emerging research and popular texts indicate that students’ mindsets, beliefs, dispositions, emotions and behaviors can advance outcomes, such as college readiness, career success, mental health and relationships. Despite this growing awareness, many districts and schools are still struggling to implement strategies that develop students’ social-emotional skills. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by examining the social-emotional learning (SEL) practices in ten middle schools with strong student-reported data on SEL outcomes, particularly for African American and Latinx students.

Case study methods, including interviews, observations and document analysis, were employed.

The authors identify six categories of common SEL practices: strategies that promote positive school climate and relationships, supporting positive behavior, use of elective courses and extracurricular activities, SEL-specific classroom practices and curricula, personnel strategies and measurement and data use. Absence of a common definition of SEL and lack of alignment among SEL practices were two challenges cited by respondents.

This is the first study to analyze SEL practices in outlier schools, with a focus on successful practices with schools that have a majority of African American and/or Latinx students.

The study aims to analyze the different types of risks related to the use of technology and determine their positive or negative influence on teachers' motivation and behavioral intention to use digital tools.

The research is based on survey data from 200 teachers in the Romanian preuniversity education system. The data analysis followed a four-step approach, using a partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) model for hypothesized relationships among research concepts and a PLS prediction-oriented segmentation (POS) procedure.

This study showed that increased risk awareness influences both motivation and, consequently, the intention to adopt digital tools in the preuniversity education system.

The scope of research remains constrained with regard to the examined population, considering the substantial number of teachers within the preuniversity education system. Another limit lies in the basic classification of identified risk types.

School managers should design a strategy to increase the level of motivation for integrating digital tools in the educational process.

Little scholarly attention has been devoted to investigating the risks associated with digitalization in the preuniversity education system. In addition, no prior research has been conducted to assess the influence of risk perception on people's motivation and intention to use digital tools in preuniversity education.