Centralisation is a recurrent theme when the organisational structure of contemporary higher education institutions is on the agenda. This may be in large part because of the unsolicited effects of decentralised organisational structures. The aim of this study is to explore how professional support staff at higher education institutions perceive…

Purpose: To improve school organisational performance and innovativeness, and meet diverse student needs, school leaders should be innovative, risk-takers and proactive, thus applying entrepreneurial practices/strategies and market mechanisms. This study aims to investigate, from a schoolteacher's perspective, the degree of entrepreneurial…

This book presented the methods and modalities of effective school inspections, summarizing the current evidence base and discussing issues of validity and reliability of school inspections in relation to school effectiveness research. In our book we have focused on inspections of single schools which are currently dominating the landscape of both…

Prepared for a Strategic Education Governance learning seminar, this working paper analyses the ways in which the Dutch government tried to reach overarching goals in education, in a system characterised by a high degree of distributed autonomy of education institutions and the participation of multiple actors, and consequently a government highly…

Science educators are confronted with the challenge to accommodate in their classes an increasing cultural and linguistic diversity that results from globalization. Challenged by the call to work towards valuing and keeping this diversity in the face of the canonical nature of school science discourse, we propose a new way of thinking about and…

This policy profile on education in the Netherlands is part of the new Education Policy Outlook series, which presents comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Building on the substantial comparative and sectorial policy knowledge base available…

Designed to provide assistance to countries in developing centralized services to their libraries for nonbook materials, this pamphlet contains examples from five countries that have succeeded in establishing such services. Those examples include: (1) "The Central Library Service for AV-Materials in Denmark" (Suzanne Hemmeth…

Education support structure in the Netherlands is designed to ensure responsiveness to schools' needs and to avoid emergence of self-serving bureaucracy. National Institute for Curriculum Development was founded in 1975 to work with teachers and colleges of education to develop new curricula and instructional materials. Regional agencies located…

Education in European countries has been characterized by a tendency toward decentralization and deregulation. The Dutch Ministry of Education commissioned the University of Twente to perform a comparative study of actual and future shifts in tasks, responsibilities, and authority in education in several European countries. This book presents…

Treatment of some issues in a new Dutch plan for foreign language instruction is compared to treatment of similar issues in the United States. The Dutch plan assumes that centralized, national planning is essential, with the various segments of the foreign language instructional system being assigned interlocking roles and responsibilities.…

In many European countries, external as well as internal social, economic and political changes have brought about a marked need for professional training of managerial staff in education. This article is one in a series that springs out of a British Council sponsored conference held in the Czech Republic in 2003, organized jointly by the…

The role of institutional self-evaluation is considered in the context of transition from central regulation to self-regulation in various higher education systems in Europe. A distinction is made between external steering, where regulations and decisions are made by a central state authority, to self-steering, where decisions and regulations are…