Due to COVID-19, many countries implemented emergency plans, such as lockdown and school closures. This new situation has significantly affected families, namely, the involvement required to support children’s learning at home. The current study aimed to analyze Portuguese parents’ perceptions of their home-based parental involvement in their children’s learning during the lockdown and school closures in 2020 due to COVID-19. An online survey, using a closed-ended questionnaire, was employed. Variables included parents’ sociodemographic and COVID-19 related characteristics; students’ sociodemographic characteristics; distance learning context; parental involvement; and students’ autonomy. Data were collected from a sample of 21,333 parents with children from elementary school to secondary education, and statistical data analysis was performed using IBM SPSS Statistics 26. Findings revealed that Portuguese parents supported their children during the pandemic mainly through the monitoring of attention in classes and task realization. However, several variables appear to significantly determine parental involvement time, which is higher when students attend public schools, when they are less autonomous and younger, when parents’ level of education is lower, when the child is a boy (except in secondary education where gender is not relevant), and when the online school time is higher. Findings highlight the need for a significant investment of time from parents, particularly of primary school children, making it difficult to cohere work or telework with school activities. Implications for policies, schools, families are discussed in order to promote children’s learning and success.

Strategy and strategic leadership are critical issues for school leaders. However, strategy as a field of research has largely been overlooked within the educational leadership literature. Most of the theoretical and empirical work on strategy and strategic leadership over the past decades has been related to non-educational settings, and scholarship devoted to these issues in education is still minimal. The purpose of this scoping review was to provide a comprehensive overview of relevant research regarding strategy and strategic leadership, identifying any gaps in the literature that could inform future research agendas and evidence for practice. The scoping review is underpinned by the five-stage framework of Arksey and O’Malley. The results indicate that there is scarce literature about strategy and that timid steps have been made toward a more integrated and comprehensive model of strategic leadership. It is necessary to expand research into more complex, longitudinal, and explanatory ways due to a better understanding of these constructs.

In times such as this pandemic, where the spread of COVID-19 has resulted in school shutdowns, emergency remote learning was implemented in several countries and different educational settings. School closures made it challenging for special education teachers to support their children with special needs and families. This research aimed to identify the support provided by Spanish teachers in special education schools to children with intellectual and developmental disabilities who exhibit challenging behaviour and the support given to their families. Data were collected from 22 teachers from seven special education schools by using focus group interviews. Thematic analysis was used to identify, analyse, and report patterns within the data. The results show that teachers deployed many different interventions to provide adequate support to their students and families, such as delivering materials to families, communicating in diverse ways, providing academic or functional tasks, and working with other services. Despite these efforts, teachers also reported difficulties when providing support to students and families. Therefore, future research needs to continue exploring experiences during COVID-19 to inform more accurate educational practices, especially considering children with special needs.

School psychologists can support schools in implementing inclusive practices. In Portugal, the Decree-Law 54/2018 has set the country on the path to inclusive education based on whole-school approaches. This policy shift demands a change in school psychologists’ practices to be agents for systems change versus traditional roles (such as assessing and counseling students). An e-learning training course was developed and implemented by nine psychologists through a partnership between the Ministry of Education and the Portuguese Psychology Association, focused on the Multi-tiered Systems of Support framework for constructing inclusive schools. The main aim was to empower school psychologists to support adequate, inclusive, and multi-tiered intervention responses in their schools, resourcing a collaborative and supervised approach. From all Portuguese regions, 327 psychologists participated in the training from October 2020 to April 2021. This article focuses on the trainers’ experiences of training, collected through a focus group, reflecting on the challenges, opportunities, and necessary improvements for future training in school psychologists in Portugal on this topic. Trainers have identified organizational and pedagogical aspects as critical to the training delivery and quality that should be addressed in future training courses for school psychologists.

Schools in various parts of the world adopt plans or projects to improve the quality of school processes and students’ learning. Therefore, it is important to understand the processes of strategic planning such as teachers’ participation on decision making related to school plans. Apparently a limited number of studies have hitherto been conducted on teachers’ participation in strategic planning. The purpose of this paper is to examine teachers’ participation in decision making and strategic action planning in Portuguese schools. A survey employing self-administered scales was taken. Teachers' participation, other stakeholders’ participation, planning, and decision making, professional development, plans’ importance and validation, and ownership were the dimensions considered. Data were collected from 804 Portuguese teachers. Participants reported moderate to high levels of participation in strategic action plans, but they also reported moderate to low levels of participation in overall school decisions, plans’ importance and validation, sense of ownership and recognition of relevant opportunities for professional development. These results indicate that participation and collaboration are essential determinants of plan and action success in educational contexts. The participative nature of decision making and strategic planning seems to underscore the relevance, value and adequacy of schools’ plans from the perspective of teachers. However, differences in these dimensions related to teachers’ experience and professional roles also point to lower levels of participation from some teachers, which may hinder their involvement in school actions and improvement. This study suggests the need to explore the dominant types of participation and collaboration in Portuguese schools and to analyse the importance of other variables.

This study examines Portuguese teachers' attitudes towards inclusive education and how teachers' self‐efficacy towards inclusion and other sociodemographic and professional variables relate and predict teachers' attitudes. In total, 539 Portuguese teachers participated. Sentiments, Attitudes and Concerns about Inclusive Education scale, Teacher Efficacy for Inclusive Practices scale and a sociodemographic questionnaire were used to collect data. The results indicate that teachers' attitudes towards inclusion were generally positive. However, teachers‐related variables (e.g., teachers' self‐efficacy, teaching experience, previous training, and knowledge about educational laws and policies) influence teachers' attitudes in a complex and dynamic way. Implications for policies, practices and research are presented.