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The Austrian Institute for School and Sport Facilities (ÖISS), responsible for providing the country with guidelines, information and consultation in the field of school building, places special emphasis on school grounds. The ÖISS works to raise awareness of the importance of school grounds not only for physical activities and recreation, but also for learning, communication and the environment.

• According to the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), principals, on average, report frequently engaging in a number of activities that are consistent with instructional leadership. However, this is not the case in every country and large proportions of them report that their training did not include any instructional leadership training or course.
• Although continuous professional development could help fill those gaps, many school leaders report a number of obstacles preventing them from taking part in such learning, including a lack of support and opportunities, and personal and professional obstacles.

PEB and the Ministry of Education of Portugal brought together 67 library and resource centre professionals, policy makers, educators and information technology specialists from 21 countries around the theme “Designing Schools for the Information Society: Libraries and Resource Centres”. The seminar, held in Portugal in June 1999, addressed how the growing use of information technology and the move toward schools as community learning centres are affecting the demand for and use of space in educational institutions, with particular reference to changes which promote lifelong learning and the creation of the information society. Below are excerpts from some of the presentations.

The eruption of violence in society is a natural phenomenon; its rise or fall depends on complex, interrelated social processes. The same applies to violence on school premises, any study of which must address the individual characteristics of young people who perpetrate violence and the specific social context of the school. Violence is a generic term, covering violence towards property as well as people.

New Zealand’s special funding system allows state schools a greater level of independence in managing their property compared to most other countries. Schools receive a fixed budget as an entitlement from the three “pots” of the educational property funding structure. The government’s unique use of accrual accounting together with a new Five-Year Property Plan agreement gives schools a high degree of certainty of the property funding available, as well as responsibility for deciding how to modernise their own buildings.

The legislative framework of the Italian education system has changed radically over the past five years. After decades of announcing, discussing, proposing and experimenting with reform, the school of tomorrow is rapidly becoming a reality. Is it possible today to construct school buildings that will easily house the reformed school that is being defined? This is probably the most urgent question that the administrators, managers and experts of local authorities are now seeking to answer.

The French government set up in 1995 the Observatoire national de la sécurité des établissements scolaires et d'enseignement supérieur, a national agency for safety in schools and higher education, bringing together the public owners of school buildings, representatives of staff and parents from public-sector schools and those under contract in the private sector, and the relevant ministries. Its mandate covers any issue concerning the safety of people, premises or equipment: solidity of buildings and fire risk, accident analysis and prevention, technology and science equipment, and major hazards.

Science laboratories in schools are expensive to equip and maintain. Specific pedagogical needs, new technology and safety requirements contribute to the costs. In an effort to get the most efficient use of facilities, some countries are rethinking school labs with a move toward more flexible approaches.

Since 1999 the Department of Education and Training in Western Australia has operated a successful security risk management programme. Its strategy is to help school principals both evaluate whether existing controls comply with security procedures and provide adequate, cost-effective levels of security to meet the risks faced by their schools.

Recent demographic, economic and political trends have placed the issue of school size at the heart of school effectiveness and efficiency discussions. The subject of school size is particularly salient in remote and rural areas where the viability of small schools has been questioned. In spite of the relevance of school size policies, the literature on this issue is quite fragmented with few studies taking a comprehensive view on the implications of school size policies. This literature review attempts to bridge different strands of relevant research and describes existing country practices in order to provide a broader picture of the benefits and costs associated with different school sizes. The paper describes the different trends that have affected school enrolment and how different countries have managed school size policies, with a particular focus on school consolidation. It discusses the consequences of school consolidation and the alternatives to consolidation when schools are facing declining enrolment. It also reviews the different mechanisms through which school size affects the quality and efficiency of schools, and the existing empirical evidence on these effects.

School Works, a not-for-profit company in the United Kingdom, has developed a secondary school design process which enables communities to create unique school buildings that cater for their own particular needs. At the heart of this process is the basic principle that it is the people who work and learn in a school building every day who really understand its ethos, its needs, its strengths and its weaknesses, and that truly involving the school community will generate an innate sense of ownership and respect for the buildings. School Works has put its participatory process into practice at an inner-city school in London.

Instructional leadership is the set of practices that principals use in relation to the improvement of teaching and learning. It is a strong predictor of how teachers collaborate and engage in a reflective dialogue about their practice. In most countries and economies, the majority of principals act as instructional leaders, though one-third rarely engage in any of this type of action. Distributed leadership is the ability of schools to incorporate different stakeholders in their decisionmaking processes. This type of leadership appears to advance the creation of a shared sense of purpose within schools. Nearly all schools involve their staff in decision-making processes, but they differ concerning the opportunities that are offered to students and their parents/guardians to be involved in school decisions. Principals who acquired instructional leadership competencies through training, or in a separate course, are more engaged in instructional leadership actions in their school than principals who have not participated in such training.

Many international comparisons of education over the past 50 years have included some measure of students’ opportunity to learn (OTL) in their schooling. Results have typically confirmed the common sense notion that a student’s exposure in school to the assessed concepts, operationalized in some sort of time metric, is related to what the student has learned as measured by the assessment. What has not been demonstrated is a connection between the specifics of what students have encountered through schooling and their performance on any sort of applied knowledge assessment such as PISA. This paper explores this issue in 2012 PISA which, for the first time, included several OTL items on the student survey. OTL demonstrated a significant relationship with student performance on both the main paper-and-pencil literacy assessment as well as the optional computer-based assessment at all three levels – country, school and student. In every country at least one if not all three of the constructed OTL indices – exposure to word problems, formal mathematics topics, and applied mathematics problems – demonstrated a significant relationship to the overall PISA measure of mathematics literacy as well as the four sub areas of change and relationships, shapes and space, quantity, and uncertainty and data. Additionally, results indicated that variability in OTL was related to student performance having implications for equality of opportunity.

Schools are perfect hubs for social and emotional learning, but are they ready for this task? To address this question, this Spotlight reports previously unpublished findings from the OECD’s Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) and discusses their implications for education policy and practice. Both an active promotion in schools and extensive learning opportunities for teachers on relevant topics provide a fertile ground for an effective social and emotional education. They boost teachers’ self-efficacy and use of active learning pedagogies, as well as quality relationships at school. The Spotlight also points to important differences for teachers of 10- vs. 15-year-old students that can explain higher skills at a younger age. Younger students benefit more often from key elements of an effective social and emotional education in school, i.e. the evaluation of their social and emotional skills and teachers teaming up with parents to reinforce skill promotion. Teachers of 10-year-olds are also more intensively trained and requested to promote social and emotional learning in their work.

Prakash Nair of the United States proposes the list below for evaluating how a school measures up to the most important requirements of the 21^st century. It addresses architects, administrators, head teachers, pupils and others responsible for or interested in the design of a new school or the renovation of an existing building.

These four articles relate to science and technology infrastructure for secondary and tertiary institutions. The first article presents a view on approaches to teaching science in school and illustrates ideal science facilities for secondary education. The second piece reports on work underway to improve the Science Complex at the Université du Québec à Montreal. The third describes a secondary level vocational training centre devoted to new technologies in Quebec. The fourth article visits an Australian science and mathematics specialist school.

In 2015, for the first time in its history, PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) asked teachers to describe the various aspects of their working environment and teaching practices. This paper examines how teacher, student and school characteristics are related to science teachers’ satisfaction in 19 PISA-participating countries and economies.

The findings show that the most satisfied science teachers tend to be those who are initially motivated to become teachers. The results also highlight the positive relationship between science teachers’ satisfaction and teacher collaboration, good disciplinary climate in science classes, availability of school resources, and the opportunity to participate in professional-development activities.