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…

Academic governance and leadership are two inter-related concepts that set the tone and direction for the development of higher education at the system as well as institutional levels. This article examines the academic governance and leadership in Malaysian higher education by focusing on two national higher education strategic initiatives: the…

This paper explores issues of social justice in relation to the practice of two principals from two Australian public schools. The stories of these principals are set against a policy backdrop in Australia that has seen renewed emphasis on school autonomy reform, on the one hand, and heightened external accountability and compliance, on the other.…

Quality assurance in higher education has been introduced in Vietnam to improve the quality of the entire sector. Academics are considered key players in the reform plan of the Vietnamese government. This paper discusses the development of the Vietnamese quality assurance approach in higher education reform and how it could be further developed to…

Hungary is on the road towards an illiberal state. On this journey, the Hungarian government, with the Parliament at its service, is reinterpreting the concept of fundamental rights. Under the slogan of effectiveness, new regulations are being adopted which secure more power, influence, rights, and tools for the state. This paper aims to present…

This historiography of Hungarian higher education focuses on the evolution of academic freedom and institutional autonomy at Hungarian institutions of higher education. Through an exploration of trends in higher education policy, structure, and funding, the evolution of institutional autonomy and academic freedom provided a framework for…

In England the balance of responsibilities between national and local government for the governance of education is changing. Relationships between schools are shifting and new structures, groups and alliances are being created in response to national policy. The article is part of a project to understand how the new local education landscapes are…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze two parallel processes in the Israeli educational system: first, the idea of school autonomy, exploring its origins and its pedagogical implications and effectiveness; and second, the development of the progressive education evident mainly in the cognitive domain of twenty-first century skills (21st…

In contrast with that basic understanding of university autonomy, in most continental European countries, such as France, and also in Japan, the government has tightly controlled universities, in terms of both their organization and activities. In these countries, the concept of "governance" is often lacking, as institutions were not…

Following his previous article in this journal on the centralisation of power in English education post the 1988 Education Reform Act ("The Era of Centralisation", "FORUM", 50[2], pp. 255-261), the author considers the apparent turn to school autonomy central to the Conservative Educational Revolution. He argues that the power…

Based on a comparison of school external evaluation processes in three countries (England, France and Switzerland), this article questions the possible quality turn in the governance of European educational systems. Using materials collected through qualitative methods (91 interviews, surveys of literature and observations) during a sociological…

Program evaluation, the evaluation of the performance of a unit of an organization (rather than of specific persons within that unit) against criteria that are consonant with the goals of other units in the organization, is currently the most important mechanism for the increased coordination, or coupling, of various hierarchical levels in the…

The centralization of authority in public higher education from a local campus to the multicampus system and from local governing boards to state mechanisms is discussed. Dissipation of staff time in meeting bureaucratic requirements and faculty uneasiness with centralized planning and long-distance decision-making are described. (MLW)

The number of decision-makers in higher education has increased, and resolution of issues has gravitated toward the state level. Since World War II the trend has been toward centralizing authority in state higher education coordinating and governing boards. Issues such as access and aid to higher education or statewide collective bargaining…