The recent review of the Scottish professional standards for teachers, led by the General Teaching Council for Scotland, offered a unique perspective to interrogate participative approaches in policy-making in the Scottish education context and to provide insights and implications for future policy-making. Using one of the authors' experiences as…

Background: Inclusive research is widely accepted as an essential part of the process to democratise knowledge creation and dissemination. However, while peer review is an important part of academic publishing, the potential to include people with learning disabilities in this element of the research process has not previously been explored using…

This paper examines the use of vignettes as a research method in a comparative exploration of the provision for children with special educational needs across eleven countries. The investigation selected in-country researchers, who responded to questions with respect to children described in 14 vignettes. The questions related to school placement…

Policy cycles are initiated via a variety of context-bound causal drivers. In situations where systemic reform is desired, agenda-setting is vital to this process. This paper examines 'The National Discussion on Scottish Education', which was a sequence of stakeholder engagements promoted as a listening exercise to enable policy agenda-setting for…

There has been a long-standing call for the participation of young people in decision making in school. However, research to date has mostly focused on pupil councils and is rarely conducted in areas of socio-economic deprivation -- the contexts for this study. In national examinations, the schools chosen had higher than average attainments given…

Middle leadership is a dynamic area of policy in Scottish and Irish education to build leadership capacity. This article reports on a critical policy analysis of sequential sets of Scottish and Irish policy on middle leadership to identify codes of meaning. Two aspects are reported: (1) constructions of the purposes of middle leadership and (2)…

The Education Reform -- Joint Agreement published in June 2018 sets out the collective agreement by a commissioning group including the Scottish Government, COSLA, SOLACE, ADES, and Education Scotland. The Joint Agreement sets out agreed principles, enablers, and measures that will support and encourage the empowerment of schools in Scotland.…

This study extends our knowledge on co-creation of value in higher education. The paper examines the relationship between support, co-creation of value and students' satisfaction, as well as moderating factors including mode of study and fee status, via 979 survey responses from undergraduate students. Analysis using partial least squares found…

In the light of the Scottish Government's commitment to the principles enshrined in the Christie Commission and developing approaches worldwide to public administration, this article considers the forces at work and the major arguments for suggesting the need for increased and enhanced participation by parents in educational decision-making and…

This article reports on a study exploring a distributed perspective on school leadership through three head teacher case studies conducted in Scottish primary schools. Drawing from a sequence of in-depth, semi-structured and narrative style interviews conducted with each head teacher, as well as from a semi-structured questionnaire and sociometric…

This article draws from a small-scale study of headteachers motivated to positively impact on the quality of pupil experience by involving all staff in a distributed perspective on leadership. Each headteacher perceived leadership as involving learned processes requiring support and experience, expending considerable effort in providing a fertile…

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN, 1989), which applies to all children under the age of 18, established the overarching principles guiding pupil participation. In most European states, signatories to the Convention have enacted policies to promote the voice of the child or young person in decisions that affect them. In…

Outcomes for children and young people in their learning and in their lives often improve when they are actively involved in decision making. The increasing recognition of rights of children and young people to be heard, to have their views taken seriously and involved in decisions is expressed in national and international developments in…

Outcomes for children and young people in their learning and in their lives often improve when they are actively involved in decision making. The increasing recognition of rights of children and young people to be heard, to have their views taken seriously and involved in decisions is expressed in national and international developments in…

Outcomes for children and young people in their learning and in their lives often improve when they are actively involved in decision making. The increasing recognition of rights of children and young people to be heard, to have their views taken seriously and to be involved in decisions affecting their lives is expressed in national and…