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How schools work glossary
27 terms from C15, How schools work: leadership, organisation and culture — each defined in the primer's own words. Every term the primer teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
C15 · Schools and systems
How schools work: leadership, organisation and culture
“A school decision is made by the principal.”
Every term below is defined in the words of how schools work, primer C15 of understanding the context of education, and opens the primer at the slide where it is taught. 2 terms are also defined by another primer in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole context glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
|---|---|---|---|
| C | |||
| Co-curricular activities | Organised activities outside the academic timetable, such as sport, uniformed groups, performing arts, clubs and societies. In Singapore a CCA is compulsory for all secondary school students and strongly encouraged elsewhere (Ministry of Education, n.d.-c). They occupy staff time as well as student time. |
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| Community partnerships | Working arrangements between a school and organisations around it: employers, charities, faith and community groups, universities and government agencies. They bring resources and reach, and they also bring coordination costs that usually fall on one member of staff. |
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| D | |||
| Decoupling | Meyer and Rowan's (1977) term for the gap organisations keep between the formal structures their environment expects and what they actually do day to day. Decoupling protects legitimacy and makes inspection ceremonial. | ||
| Distributed leadership | An account of leadership as a practice stretched over leaders, followers and the situation, rather than a set of posts (Spillane et al., 2004; Spillane, 2006). It describes how leadership happens; it is not by itself a recommendation to delegate. |
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| F | |||
| Five essential supports | A coherent instructional guidance system, professional capacity, strong parent-community-school ties, a student-centred learning climate and leadership that drives change; Chicago schools strong on most were ten times more likely to improve (Bryk, 2010). |
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| H | |||
| Heads of department and subject heads | Middle leaders responsible for a subject or faculty: schemes of work, standards, staffing of classes, budgets for materials and the professional learning of their teams. Departmental effects on students can exceed school-level effects (Leithwood, 2016). |
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| I | |||
| ICT committees and coordinators | The people and groups in a school that decide which digital tools are used, how devices and accounts are managed, and who supports them. Titles and powers vary widely; in many schools the role is held by a teacher alongside a full teaching load. | ||
| Instructional leadership | Leadership exercised through the core work of teaching. Hallinger's (2003) model has three dimensions: defining the school's mission, managing the instructional programme, and promoting a positive school-learning climate. |
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| K | |||
| Key personnel | The named middle posts between school leaders and teachers. In Singapore these include heads of department, school staff developers, year heads and lead teachers (Ministry of Education, 2024). Other systems use different titles for a similar layer. |
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| L | |||
| Lesson study | A Japanese form of teacher-led inquiry in which a team studies materials, plans a research lesson together, observes it live and refines it. Evidence outside Japan is mixed, and what travels badly is usually the detail of the process (Fujii, 2014). |
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| Loosely coupled systems | Weick's (1976) description of organisations whose parts are "responsive, but that each event also preserves its own identity and some evidence of its physical or logical separateness". Schools are the standard example. | ||
| M | |||
| Middle leaders | Staff who lead a team while still teaching: heads of department, subject heads, year heads, phase leaders. Reviews describe them as bridges between organisational levels whose roles are defined locally and studied surprisingly little (Lipscombe et al., 2021, 2025). |
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| P | |||
| Parental engagement | Deliberate work to involve families in children's learning, from home reading to structured communication. The association with attainment is well established; the causal evidence is thinner, and effects are clearest with younger children (See & Gorard, 2015). |
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| Professional capital | The individual skill of teachers, the quality of their relationships, and the judgement built by exercising it; it accumulates slowly and can be spent quickly (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). |
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| Professional learning communities | Teams of staff who work together on practice with a focus on student learning, shared enquiry and results (DuFour, 2004; Stoll et al., 2006). The label spreads faster than the practice, so the useful question is what the team actually does, and when. |
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| R | |||
| Relational trust | Trust between people in roles, grounded in "respect, personal regard, competence in core role responsibilities, and personal integrity" (Bryk & Schneider, 2003). It is a working condition rather than a mood. C05 The trust among teachers, leaders, parents and students that makes shared improvement possible. See primer C15, How schools work. |
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| S | |||
| School autonomy | The decision rights held at school level; across 42 countries it affected achievement negatively in developing and low-performing systems and positively in developed and high-performing ones (Hanushek et al., 2013). C18 The set of decisions a school may take, and how freely. Across OECD countries about a third of decisions taken at school or local level are taken in full autonomy; the rest sit inside a framework set by a higher authority (OECD, 2018). |
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| School budgets | The money a school controls and the money it does not. Typically a mix of a per-student allocation, staffing paid centrally, restricted grants and locally raised funds, each with its own rules about what it may buy and when it must be spent. | ||
| School calendar | The year as published: terms or semesters, vacations, examination windows, reporting dates, camps and events. It is fixed well in advance, which makes it the first constraint on any change (Ministry of Education, 2025b). |
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| School climate | The experienced quality of school life. A major review organises it around safety, relationships, teaching and learning, the institutional environment and the improvement process (Thapa et al., 2013). Climate is usually measured by survey. |
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| School clusters | In Singapore, geographical groupings of mainstream schools whose cluster superintendents develop, guide and supervise the school leadership teams (Ministry of Education, n.d.-b). |
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| School culture | The shared assumptions, norms and habits that make a school recognisable. Schein (2010) distinguishes three levels: visible artefacts, espoused beliefs and values, and the basic underlying assumptions that are rarely stated and hardest to change. |
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| School improvement planning | The cycle in which a school sets priorities, allocates resources and reviews progress, usually annually. Its value depends on whether the priorities reach departments and timetables, or stop at the document. |
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| School self-evaluation | A school judging its own performance against a framework, often with external validation. Singapore's School Excellence Model is one example, adapted from a business excellence model and used for self-appraisal since 2000 (Ng, 2003). |
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| School staff developer | One of a Singapore school's key personnel, who plays an active role in guiding the school's professional learning teams (Academy of Singapore Teachers, n.d.-a). |
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| T | |||
| Timetabling | The allocation of teachers, classes, rooms and periods across a week. It encodes priorities: which subjects get double periods, which teams share free periods, and whether a group of teachers can ever meet at the same time. |
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| Transformational leadership | Leadership aimed at the organisation's capacity to change: vision, motivation, developing people and redesigning structures. Leithwood and colleagues (2020) group successful practices into setting directions, building relationships and developing people, redesigning the organisation, and improving the instructional programme. |
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