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The myriad challenges facing school principals in the United States have been well documented, including limited opportunities for distributed leadership, inadequate training, and a lackluster pipeline for new leaders. Recently, the Fordham Institute teamed up with the London-based Education Foundation to seek a better understanding of England's recent efforts to revamp school leadership. This joint effort led to a white paper, "Building a Lattice for School Leadership"; the short film, "Leadership Evolving: New Models of Preparing School Heads"; a fall 2014 conference that brought together nearly forty experts on school leadership from both countries; and a new report, Developing School Leaders: What the U.S. Can Learn from England's Model, that reflects the discussions at the fall conference. This paper: (1) Summarizes the key elements of the English system, as well as systems for training and credentialing leaders at several levels; (2) Describes how changes in leadership development reflect broader education-policy shifts and how the English system currently benefits from a combination of top-down and decentralized models; and (3) Examines potential implications for American public education and poses questions for policymakers and educators to consider. There are obvious and significant differences between the two systems. With about twenty thousand schools, England has roughly the same number as California and Texas combined--all within a nation the size of Wisconsin. England's central government in Whitehall makes most of the big education-policy decisions. Given the much larger and markedly more decentralized U.S. system, direct policy transfusions are unlikely. Yet England's view of school leadership, combined with local models of support and development, may nonetheless provide a useful roadmap away from the present U.S. system. "School Leadership: Lessons from England" is appended.

This paper provides an account of the main approaches, debates and evidence in the literature on the role of workforce skills in the innovation process in developed economies. It draws on multiple sources including the innovation studies discipline, neoclassical Human Capital theory, institutionalist labour market studies and the work organisation discipline. Extensive use is also made of official survey data to describe and quantify the diversity of skills and occupations involved in specific types of innovation activities. The principal debates within the literature are outlined and evaluated. These debates centre on the definition of "skill"; the idea of generic "skills for innovation"; the contribution of skills supply in promoting innovation; the apparent paradox of simultaneous skill shortages and "over-qualification" in the workforce; the notion of "high or low-skill equilibrium"; how industry and training systems balance the demands for workers to acquire firm-specific skills of immediate value in the market against more general skills and knowledge that may be relevant to a broader range of firms and technologies over a working life; the role of different work organisation systems in promoting and utilising workforce skills and whether technical change is fundamentally biased towards demanding higher level workforce skills. The paper identifies a number of major findings in the literature. First, the predominant form of innovation in firms is incremental, and this points to the central role of the broader workforce in the generation, adaptation and diffusion of technical and organisational change. Second, achieving high academic standards within a country for the largest proportion of school students not only supports high participation in post school education and training but creates a workforce with greater potential to engage productively with innovation. Third, the extent to which a firm's workforce actively engages strongly determined by particular work organisation practices. Finally, there are large differences across advanced nations in workforce skill formation systems, especially for vocational skills. Such differences result in large disparities across nations in the share of their workforce with formal vocational qualifications, and in the level of these qualifications. The resulting differences in the quantity and quality of workforce skills are a major factor in determining the observed patterns of innovation and key aspects of economic performance. (Contains 7 tables, 1 figure and 40 endnotes.)

Australia's innovation capacity is, in part, reliant on its teaching workforce--to teach and promote new technologies to industry. This pilot study examines how vocational education and training (VET) teachers, in particular TAFE (technical and further education) teachers, maintain the currency of their skills and knowledge base. It also explores their role in the development and diffusion of innovative practices and new technologies in the manufacturing sector. Despite the lack of recognition of TAFE teachers in national innovation policies and programs, they do provide a technology diffusion function. However, there are impediments to maintaining the currency of teacher skills and equipment, including inadequate capital expenditure on equipment, an aging teaching workforce and reduced access to professional development and return-to-industry programs. Appended are: (1) Questionnaire for TAFE teachers; (2) Questionnaire for survey of companies; and (3) Industry association survey. (Contains 5 tables.)

Multinational corporations are significant in the global economy, and increasingly important to national economies. Based on a literature review and 12 case studies of multinational corporations operating in Australia, the study finds the quality of the domestic VET-skilled workforce is ranked equal third in importance, out of fifteen factors, when deciding to invest in Australia. To make the VET system more attractive to foreign investment, the multinational corporations in the case studies recommended better overseas publicity of the training system, and improvements to literacy, numeracy and production knowledge of lower-level workers in manufacturing. Research instruments are appended. (Contains 7 tables and 1 figure.)

This document was produced by the authors based on their research for the report "Group Training in Australia: A Study of Group Training Organisations and Host Employers", and is an added resource for further information. [Full Report available at ED493992.] Support Document 2, titled " Group Training and Host Employers in Australia", is also available at NCVER's website. The first chapter of the present document describes the survey methodology and provides an overview of the research results. Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive analysis of the previous research on Group Training (GT) and highlights the gaps in the knowledge base which this study is intended to fill. The results of the telephone survey are presented in detail on a thematic basis in Chapter 3. The survey results are supplemented with data from other empirical studies of Group Training Companies and qualitative information from participants in the GT system. The Conclusion, Chapter 4, summarises the key policy implications of the research for the governance of GT in Australia, which are identified throughout the report. The survey data, additional statistical analysis of the data and the survey instrument are presented in the Appendix. (Contains 20 tables and 16 figures.)

Australia's competitive success with innovation-based products and services is an influential factor to its long-term prosperity. This study examines the role of vocational education and training (VET) and occupations in innovative industries and firms. The authors find VET is vital to developing knowledge and practical skills across a broad range of occupations, and people in vocational occupations are among principal sources of ideas for technological innovation. Further, innovative firms reported a high level of satisfaction with public and private training, which the authors conclude is due to the high level of consultation between firms and TAFE. However, firms identified the need for employees to develop generic skills, such as working in teams and developing problem-solving and communication skills, as an opportunity for the VET sector to meet unmet demand. (Contains 29 tables and 2 figures.)

This volume is a companion to "Innovation Agents: VET Skills and Innovation in Australian Industries and Firms. Volume 1". The detailed report of the project is contained in Volume 1 while Volume 2 contains the appendices: (1) Data tables for construction of the composite index of innovation; (2) Case study interview schedule; and (3) Case study results. [For "Innovation Agents: Vocational Education and Training Skills and Innovation in Australian Industries and Firms. Volume 1," see ED493916.]

This study explored the hypotheses that (1) young children told (labeled) directly that they were "patient" by adults would demonstrate more subsequent self-control than children given an irrelevant label, and that (2) adult tester expectations regarding the children's self-control would influence only the subjects given the irrelevant label. The self-control of 22 preschool boys and 26 preschool girls was assessed in a task in which each child's accumulation of candy rewards was made contingent upon the child waiting across a period of time to receive the candy. The longer children waited for the candy, the more candy they received. Preschool children directly labeled beforehand as "patient" demonstrated significantly longer delay of gratification than did preschoolers hearing a remark irrelevant to the task. While children not directly labeled as "patient" were somewhat more sensitive to adult expectations than were labeled children, no significant effect of tester expectancy, main or interactive, was found. The results were interpreted in terms of label-induced changes in the preschool children's self-perceptions which influenced their behavior regardless of tester expectancy. (Author/MP)