Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Educational Management, Volume 27, Issue 5.

Welcome to issue five of 2013 which is different, in the sense that there is a paper that would normally have ended up as a “special” but the pagination available was insufficient to do this, therefore it comes as a longer, first paper in the issue. It is a new and important study reported by Prof. Reynold Macpherson of New Zealand. Other good works run alongside this paper from Israel and the USA.

In Dr Macpherson's paper he evaluates three school-based integrated health centres (IHCs) three Cornish schools established by a partnership led by the Duchy Health Charity and the Prince's College of Medicine. This study was the result of an innovative three-year evaluation to report the process, findings and implications of IHCs established in the three secondary schools in Cornwall by the school-based IHC partnership.

The evaluations involved annual case studies to apply data progressively regarding five areas: the use, users and operations of each IHC, students’perceptions of the user-friendliness of the IHC's, indicators of the general health and well-being of students and their sexual and mental health, students’exposure to crime, substance abuse and poverty, and students’ academic achievement, attendances and exclusions.

The results are summarised in the abstract and shows steady or improving trends. It also reaffirms the uniqueness of the project involving several agencies, not always easy in practice with several funding streams and pressures. Above all student ownership of the project was critical.

There were five practical implications to the project in ensuring its success using standardised tools annually to screen general health, mental health and overall well-being; council data were needed on school catchments regarding sexual health issues, exposure to crime, drug abuse, violence and poverty;relating health data to schools’ value-added educational progress; enhancing the role of the student information management system in providing integrated intelligence for evidence-based practice, planning, interventions and development; and separating the line management and annual evaluation of the IHC's.

The uniqueness of the study lies in its partners of charitable, private and public organisations, also the uniqueness of the evaluative process using qualitative and quantitative data. The American, Canadian and New Zealand experiences have not highlighted the student experience and engagement in the same way as this scheme has and the model offered highlights the integrity and reciprocity of relationship between students and professionals.

In the second paper, Chen Schechter and Mowafaq Quadach of Bar-Ilan University,Israel contribute a paper, “From illusion to reality, schools as learning organisations”. The authors state that the notion of organisational learning is“murky” and difficult to comprehend and is not therefore translated into sustained operational structures and process in schools. The purpose of the paper is to “lay out” the mysterious concept of organisational learning and to suggest an alternative framework for schools to develop as learning organisations.

Aubrey Wang (St Joseph's, University, Philadelphia), Alyssa M. Walters (Denver public school district) and YeowMengThum (Northwestern evaluation association,Oregon), have collaborated on “Identifying highly effective urban schools:comparing two measures of school success”. The purpose of the paper is to provide an empirical comparison of two measures of school success – a value added assessment system and the federally mandated system of adequate yearly progress – to identify highly effective schools in the USA and to explore the predictive relationship between evidence-based decision making and school improvement.

The next joint paper is from Shannon Alpert of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Richard Hartshorne of the University of Central Florida, who examine assistant Professors’ project management practices. Project management is seen as important in many businesses but not always so in HE, although the use of the process could improve efficiency. This study examined factors that enabled, motivated and/or inhibited Professors’ use of standard project management processes and tools in their research projects.

Brian RobertsEditor