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This volume addresses personalisation, a key education policy in England and a key issue identified by the OECD for the schools of the future. The central questions addressed are: Which are the main theoretical perspectives on personalisation? Which are the policy strategies in different contexts? Which ingredients and theories of personalisation as legitimated knowledge from abroad are locally adopted and adapted in different countries? What are the meanings and purposes of personalisation? Why does it come paradoxically to be implemented by teachers through grouping by ability? Which alliances between the public and the private sectors are proposed? Leading scholars in the comparative education field as well as scholars committed to understanding the design and substance of education processes and politics, such as Michael Fullan, Chris Watkins, Michael Peters, Michael Fielding, Giorgio Chiosso, Ruth Deakin Crick, Ferran Ferrer, and Baocun Liu, engage with personalisation from a plurality of theoretical frameworks and in relation to many national contexts. The volume, prefaced by Mark Ginsburg, presents two main perspectives which are simultaneously at work. In the first, personalisation is assessed as a recent and global education policy, in line with the current restructuring reforms of State administration worldwide. In the second perspective, personalisation is assumed to be not only a matter of recent education policy regarding school clients and their choices, but foremost a pedagogical theory, a reassembly of old and new pedagogical approaches under new reform discourses. The volume edited by Monica Mincu offers a remarkable map of the theoretical understandings which inform different educational politics and school practices. Personalisation tends to legitimising forms of autonomy and a flexible educational relationship and thus its connection to standardisation represents a salient issue of this work. Luciano Benadusi, University of Rome Moving from teaching/learning theories to theoretical, critical, historical and religious arguments about schooling and its reforms, the various contributions provide impressive insights into the possibilities and limits of personalization for school innovation. The reader is engaged in a dialogue about the specifics of personalization as a reform focus and the historical, social and comparative complexities in which such efforts are bound. Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin-Madison The volume represents a significant opportunity to engage with the possibilities of personalized/individualized learning environments. It is our duty to provide our children with such positive learning contexts, and over the last thirty years we have focused considerable effort on this area in Japan. Koji Kato, President of the Japanese Society of Education for Individual Development.

Failing to recognize the role of leaders in quality and equitable schooling is unfortunate and must be redressed. Leadership is fundamentally about organized agency and collective vision, not managerialism, since it is an organizational quality, not merely a positionality attribute. Most important, if change is to be systemic and transformative, it cannot occur uniquely at the individual teachers’ level. School organization is fundamental to circulating and consolidating new innovative actions, cognitive schemes, and behaviors in coherent collective practices. This article engages with the relevance of governance patterns, school organization, and wider cultural and pedagogical factors that shape various leadership configurations. It formulates several assumptions that clarify the importance of leadership in any organized change. The way teachers act and represent their reality is strongly influenced by the architecture of their organization, while their ability to act with agency is directly linked to the existence of flat or prominent hierarchies, both potentially problematic for deep and systemic change. A hierarchical imposition from above as well as a lack of leadership vision in fragmented school cultures cannot determine any transformation.

This paper reviews the research on successful school principalship carried out in England over the last 20 years. Drawing on evidence synthesized from the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) and related English school leadership research conducted by ISSPP scholars, this review aims to answer a conceptual research question: How do the principalship’s moral purposes and contextual understanding shape the time-sensitive, informed adoption of combinations and accumulations of strategies that lead to sustained school success? This paper identifies five research insights derived from case studies in England and elaborates on the complex, values-led layered web of interactions between the school principal and key stakeholders within and outside the school in the context of frequent social changes and policy interventions in England. Whilst the pace has been greater and more intense than in many other countries, the direction has been, and remains, similar. The body of scholarship here reviewed engages with national policies as filtered and then enacted by successful principals. While ‘effective’ principals lead to students’ success as measured by performance on national tests and examinations, our focus is upon an empirically founded definition of ‘successful’ school leadership that is located in complexity theory and encompasses the enactment of the core purposes of education that include but go beyond the functional. In doing so, it avoids ‘what to do’ formulae and the limitations of certain theoretical ‘leadership’ models, finding that successful school leaders’ work embodies a broader humanistic view of student learning and achievement, which implies the preordinance of the personal over the functional. Taken together, these research insights contribute to the ISSPP’s continued effort to refine and advance the knowledge base of successful school leadership within and across different countries.

In the current context of intensified moves towards educational deregulation, the configuration of the Italian middle school and its relationship to education governance is an interesting case. Historically, it represents a unique example of the successful 'decision-making' model of the welfarist era. Despite some internal constraints, at the end of the 1970s it was considered a progressive model of schooling for its time. At present, however, internal institutional processes and path-dependencies have rendered its comprehensiveness relatively formalised and weak. A key finding of this article is that ideas, such as the 'two people' theory, have played a crucial role in shaping actors' strategies and goals, while references to world models, in particular the English model, have mediated the reception of global policies. Cultural factors, such as the role played by families, are deeply linked to structural issues and inequalities. An ethnographic account depicts a welfarist institution whose internal processes and links to the wider society may be seen as an example of Italian modernity that 'speaks for itself'. Fieldwork clarifies the role of the teachers in mediating a path-dependent and cultural reproduction pattern. I argue that partial deregulation is a major source of inequalities at the middle school level, engendered by both new and old mechanisms, which further intensifies a selective path in education. This analysis will show how global deregulation trends meet local and enduring path-dependencies.

Schools around the world are diverse and there are a variety of progressivist initiatives in place that aim to promote quality and equitable pedagogy and overcome formalist paradigms. Country contexts present different challenges based on factors such as the type of governance, teachers’ autonomy, and pedagogical cultures. Most critical, however, is the unequal distribution of leadership opportunities. Beyond conflicting or contrived possibilities in school leadership arrangements and cultures, it should be recognized that certain contexts lack effective leadership as an organizational quality. Nevertheless, school principals are able to create coherent environments, offering space for debate and clarification of what equity and equality mean in terms of curriculum delivery, as well as supporting school-level structural facilitations and adaptations. This is a conceptual paper, at the crossroads of different research strands. It focuses on governance mechanisms and leadership tasks and skills in pedagogical and organizational school cultures. It argues that well-articulated school organization is needed, not only in terms of autonomy, but also with the possibility to collaborate, develop professionally, and engage locally in order to achieve equitable student-oriented teaching. The aim is to investigate the feasibility of supporting personalized and adaptive teaching strategies at the school level, in a variety of country contexts.

In this manuscript an improved sorbent based on modified exfoliated carbon nanoplatelets, applied in the removal of ammonium from aqueous samples, is presented. This sorbent showed better efficiency in comparison with the previous one obtained in our group for ammonium removal, the values of the maximum sorption capacity being improved from 10 to 12.04 mg/g. In terms of kinetics and sorption characteristic parameters, their values were also improved. Based on these results, a sorption mechanism was proposed, taking into account ion-exchange and chemisorption processes at the surface of the oxidized exfoliated carbon nanoplatelets. Future applications for simultaneous removal of other positive charged contaminants from natural waters might be possible.

In a rapidly changing world, students' success depends upon the schools' capacity to deal with their specific instructional needs. Thus, effective teaching plays the role of a unique protective factor that may reduce and even close the achievement gap. Two broad questions structure this study: What is the research contribution to teacher quality and improvement? What elements of teacher quality support school improvement? As one driver of school improvement, teacher quality is especially pertinent for underperforming students, while school improvement is much more likely to emerge through collective capacity building. More specifically, I will argue that research-derived knowledge is key to ensuring both effective learning processes and whole school improvement.

[...] starting from the common sense premise of the lack of support, many teachers rightly state their lack of time and competence to undertake intercultural education from an anthropological perspective. [...] scholarly works too, while undertaking a unique theoretical perspective, such as the anthropological one, cannot speak to reality in the proper way and thus promote a balanced and comprehensive conception of intercultural education and practically oriented to affirmative actions.

The volume, prefaced by Mark Ginsburg, presents two main perspectives which are simultaneously at work. In the first, personalisation is assessed as a recent and global education policy, in line with the current restructuring reforms of State administration worldwide. In the second perspective, personalisation is assumed to be not only a matter of recent education policy regarding school clients and their choices, but foremost a pedagogical theory, a reassembly of old and new pedagogical approaches under new reform discourses.