School‐Industry twinning

The Non‐statutory Guidance for Information Technology Capability identifies the information technology (IT) co‐ordinator as key in implementing IT across the whole school, and defines the role as a member of the management team with policy and personnel rather than technical skills. This paper presents evidence from a survey of secondary school coordinators across an English local education authority and shows that they deal principally with technical management of the resource. They are allocated a low managerial status, despite being expected to produce and implement a whole school strategic policy. The discussion highlights that IT management requires complex curricular managerial skills, and recognition within school management structures.     

Strengthening Basic Education: an EU-China joint project in Gansu Province

Since 1986 when the National People's Congress ratified the Compulsory Education Law, China's achievement of nine-year compulsory basic education for its huge school-age population has been rapid and successful. However, the rate of achievement has grown unevenly across the country, reflecting the different economic development patterns of the more prosperous Eastern coastal China and poor Western and rural areas. As quantitative targets were gained for most of the country, attention turned to the quality of basic education and the increasing gap between the more advanced and less developed areas. Shortage of resources for improving the situation in the poorest areas led the Chinese government to seek assistance from international donors, including the European Union. This article describes a joint European Union-China project undertaken to improve the quality of compulsory nine-year education with the ultimate goal of reducing poverty in one of the poorest Western provinces, Gansu. It outlines the policy context and summarises the project's organisation, strategies and outcomes. It identifies the main issues that arose during its implementation and examines the inter-cultural dimension of collaborative work on this project.     

Enhancing the Effects of Modeling Through Role-Play Practice

The effects of yoking role-play practice to modeling treatments designed to teach the rudimentary counseling skill of reflection of feeling were investigated. Twenty-eight novice counselors-in-training were randomly assigned to one of the four treatment conditions: written model, videotape model, written model plus role-play practice, and videotape model plus role-play practice. Effectiveness was measured by ratings of students' oral responses to 16 videotaped client vignettes. The multivariate analyses revealed that although there were no significant differences between the two modeling conditions without role-play practice, there were significant differences between students who received an opportunity to role-play practice and those who did not. From the results of the analyses, it was concluded that role-play practice significantly enhanced the effectiveness of the written model but not the video model. These results are discussed in terms of counselor skills training.