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Whether voluntary or enforced, increasing patterns of migration have significantly impacted schools by making them linguistically, culturally, religiously and ethnically more diverse than ever before. This increasing diversity requires school leaders to put in place mechanisms to ensure equity of participation for migration background students. Dimmock and Walker (2005) believe that school leaders need to play a vital role in promoting and sustaining an environment that embraces diversity and, by association, contributes to solving the macro problems of society. To accomplish this emerging role, there is a need for ‘new approaches to educational leadership in which leaders exhibit culturally responsive organisational practices, behaviours and competencies’ (Madhlangobe and Gordon, 2012: p. 177). This is all well and good in theory, but the current and historical context in which school leaders operate, together with the training and supports that are provided, influences, to a significant extent, how culturally responsive leadership can operate in practice. This study, which is part of a European Commission Erasmus+ funded project entitled Supporting Culturally Responsive Leadership and Evaluation in Schools (CReLES), examines these assumptions by mapping out the factors and actors that can hinder and facilitate the flourishing of such practices in four European countries, Austria, Ireland, Russia and Spain.

This chapter discusses fields of application and critical issues of the approach. Action research holds that a teaching strategy is an attempt to realize an educational idea in a concrete interactional form. As educational ideas always incorporate educational values, it does not make sense to separate instrumental questions from intentional ones. Action research is not a method of data analysis. Neither it is characterized by specific methods, but rather by integrating various methods in a methodologically consistent strategy. New developments in substantive natural scientific research as well as in philosophy of science may be interpreted as paving the way for a reincorporation of alternative research traditions’ into a ‘unified methodology’. Invention, scrutiny and application of methodological rules and criteria is a right and duty of the researcher working within a concrete project rather than a prerogative of specialized methodologists. A characteristic feature of traditional empirical research is its personal and institutional separation of reflection and action.

Across the world, teachers’ classroom assessment tasks and responsibilities are becoming more diverse due to increased migration. In this review, we address how migrant students are affected by assessment, both summative and formative, at the classroom level, with a focus on culturally responsive assessment (CRA). Previous research has shown that CRA practices mainly occur in student-centred classrooms. Furthermore, both student and teacher beliefs about teaching and learning might negatively affect migrant students’ opportunities to engage in assessment situations. Teaching and assessment practices should be negotiated and aligned with and included in classroom norms to be culturally responsive. We propose that what is generally considered a valid and reliable assessment practice might need to be adjusted to account for students’ cultural ways of knowing and participating and how this is expressed and communicated within the classroom.

Since the mid-1990, but in particular since the so-called PISA shock, German-speaking countries have seen major changes in the governance of their school systems. The author of this paper aims to explain some conceptual tools for analyzing governance changes and to give examples of research into governance changes using these concepts. He begins by clarifying the special conceptual view on education systems and on educational reforms provided by the governance perspective, then continues by giving an overview of major educational reforms during the last two decades in German-speaking school systems and explains how they are analyzed and interpreted with the help of governance concepts. He concludes by using the Austrian school autonomy policy, which allowed schools to develop specific “curricular profiles,” as an example for discussing governance changes in a multilevel governance system.

“New” school inspections are essential parts of “evidence-based governance” concepts and have been implemented by many European countries as a major strategy to assure and improve the effectiveness and quality of their education systems. However, national inspection systems vary in their composition and in their contextual features. Using online survey data from approximately 2300 principals in 7 European countries, the paper explores the role of “accountability pressure” as an element for understanding the operation of inspection systems. The results indicate that principals who feel more “accountability pressure” are more attentive to the quality expectations communicated by inspections, more sensitive to stakeholders’ reactions to inspection results, and more active with respect to improvement activities. However, also the number of unintended consequences is increasing with pressure. Inspection systems in different countries are seen by school leaders as applying differential degrees of “accountabilit...

During recent decades many school systems in Europe have undergone extensive changes in their governance structures. The guiding image of this ‘modernisation’ was an idea of evidence-based governance of schooling: ‘New school inspections’ have been a recurrent feature of such modernised governance systems in most countries. In this chapter the case of the development, implementation and replacement of ‘team inspection’, an example of such a ‘modernised’ inspection system in the Austrian province of Styria, is explained and analysed based on documentary analysis and interview data. This case is illuminating in at least two respects: Firstly, school inspection is certainly a ‘travelling policy’ which has been taken up by different national school systems. While on a general level many features of national inspections seem to recur again and again, they may take on different meanings when embedded into different national and cultural frameworks. The Austrian case allows for examination of what happens when elements of ‘evidence-based governance’ are embedded into a system of long-standing centralist bureaucratic school administration. Secondly, a number of countries have recently changed their original formats to introduce another ‘new generation of inspections’. The Austrian case allows cross-national comparison of reasons and principles underlying these changes.

The Austrian ‘school autonomy policy’, which allowed schools to develop specific ‘curricular profiles’, is taken as an example for discussing processes and effects of school decentralization policies. Data from school case studies (based on qualitative interviews and document analysis) are used to analyse and interpret the processes by which schools and teachers take up policy innovations and translate it into action and structures on school and classroom level. These policy changes and the resulting governance regimes are examined from a perspective on changing modes of ‘action coordination’ between actors on different levels of a school system and from an attention to processes of ‘re-contextualization’ in multi-level governance systems. The main result is that the Austrian decentralization policy – although not explicitly based on a market approach – boosted principles of competitive coordination between schools. In consequence, it resulted in processes of differentiation and hierarchization of schools...

School inspection is used by most European education systems as a major instrument for controlling and promoting the quality of schools. Surprisingly, there is little research knowledge about how school inspections drive the improvement of schools and which types of approaches are most effective and cause the least unintended consequences. The study presented in this paper uses interviews with inspection officials and a document analysis to reconstruct the “program theories” (i.e. the assumptions on causal mechanisms, linking school inspections to their intended outcomes of improved teaching and learning) of Inspectorates of Education in six European countries. The results section of the paper starts with a summary of the commonalities and differences of these six national inspection models with respect to standards and thresholds used, to types of feedback and reporting, and to the sanctions, rewards and interventions applied to motivate schools to improve. Next, the intermediate processes through which these inspection models are expected to promote good education (e.g. through actions of stakeholders) are explained. In the concluding section, these assumptions are critically discussed in the light of research knowledge.

During the last two decades the school systems in the German speaking countries have seen profound changes: Schools have been given new tasks and new room for manoeuvres, performance standards and state-wide testing of performance have been introduced, new inspection systems have been established, national education reports are written in many countries, new institutions for evaluating and promoting the quality of education have been built up. These changes and reforms may be also understood as changes in the way education systems are coordinated and governed.

Inspection is employed by most European education systems as an instrument for controlling and promoting the quality of schools. Yet there is little research knowledge about how inspection drives the improvement of schools. The study reports on surveys to principals in primary and secondary education in six European countries to attempt to clarify how school inspection impacts on the improvement of schools. Based on an analysis of principals’ perceptions the evidence suggests that inspection primarily drives change indirectly, through encouraging certain developmental processes, rather than through more direct coercive methods. Inspectorates that set clear expectations and standards have an impact on the increased utilization of self-evaluation and on developing the capacity of schools to improve in a variety of ways.

Action research has been recognised for its breadth as a field of research practice and its depth as a discourse of theoretical insight. It does not have one neat, widely accepted definition. Points to some reasons for the difficulty of formulating a generally accepted definition of action research, and argues why action research should not be confined but should be both clarified for communication and open for development. The discussion stems from a working definition developed with participants in an international symposium that serves as a classic definition of action research. Presents several alternative approaches to resolution and argues for a judicious mix of pragmatism and flexibility in approaching the definition issue.

This paper gives an historical overview of the development of action research, its theories and practices in German‐speaking countries. It analyses what the main topics and biases have been and the specific ideological, cultural and political contexts which may have contributed to the shape and development of this research tradition. Information is drawn from three sources: the authors’ personal experience as action researchers: an analysis of relevant literature; and an analysis of written responses to three sets of questions sent to 61 researchers in Germany. Austria and Switzerland. The arguments of the paper are structured in the following way. Firstly, there is a review of the main ideas from seminal papers published at the end of the 1960s: action research is located in the student movement with which it shares the critique of traditional social science and the aim of improving society. Secondly, the ‘Marburg Primary School Project” (MPSP) is outlined to give an idea of the practice of Germ...