and other societies, dating from the field's origins in the 1970s. Issues include its history, methodological and theoretical advances, scientific properties of school effects, processes at school and classroom level behind these effects, the somewhat limited translation of findings into policy and practice across the world, and future directions for research and practice in EER and for all of the discipline more generally. Future research needs are argued to be a further concentration upon teaching/teachers, more longitudinal studies, more work on possible context specificity, exploration of the cross-level transactions between schools and their teachers/classrooms, the adoption of "efficiency" as well as "effectiveness" as outcome measures, and a renewed focus upon the education of the disadvantaged, the original focus of our discipline when it began.

The aim of this paper is to describe actions designed to foster interdisciplinary research efforts at a major university in the UK. The study employed a descriptive mixed method case study approach to collecting and analysing the data used to draw its conclusions. One hundred and twenty-seven academic staff responded to the survey. The results of the survey were verified by 25 interviews with heads of colleges, heads of schools, research coordinators, research team leaders, and team members. These interviews were supported by document review to support the findings. Leadership is important at the college and university levels if interdisciplinarity is to thrive. According to the data, this seems to have not yet occurred at this particular institution. The university has done well with most of the big structures that enrich and support interdisciplinarity. However, 'small' structures such as clarity of meaning, motivation of staff, misalignment of old structures, time and workload, and loss of identify have impeded the move to university wide interdisciplinarity. A series of three recommendations are made to move the interdisciplinary project forward: stay clear on focus, extend the benefits of serendipity to more people, and remember that one size does not fit all.

This paper considers what has been learned from reviewing the full set of papers in this special issue. It considers some of the major factors that have impacted on education, and subsequently teacher education in recent times, namely rapid technological change and increasing globalisation and movement from one country to others and then focuses on how standards, for schools, for the people in them and for teacher education, have been used to drive improvement in many parts of the world. Key issues that have emerged from this special issue are first, whether or not teaching is a craft or a profession, which has implications on how teacher educators view themselves, as practitioners or researchers.Second, what is notable in a number of countries in this issue is the lack of trust being shown by politicians and communities to both teachers and teacher educators and this concluding paper considers why this is so and how it might be changed.

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This article identifies the major themes that emerge from the five selected articles in this special issue. Collectively, they demonstrate some trends occurring in the area of school leadership, but also show that individual countries are looking at these trends in different ways. It is an example of what might be called thinking globally but acting locally. The major trends that have been identified include the use of market terminology in educational settings, increased accountability and responsibility for school leaders, the move towards various strategies for distributing leadership beyond the principal and the increasing importance placed on the task of school leaders when it comes to promoting teaching and learning.