In Japan, as elsewhere in the world, school leadership is increasingly difficult to enact because of the escalating demanding directives that are imposed on schools. As such, the government has been pro-viding head teachers with various resources to help them perform their leadership responsibilities. Teacher evaluation is a case in point. Thus, by utilising quantitative data from a national survey and qualitative data from interviews with head teachers and teachers, this article describes the reorienta-tion of school leadership, with a particular focus on the role of a new teacher evaluation system in this process. The new teacher evaluation system offers better facilitation and empowerment for head teachers to recognise and reward teachers’ efforts, including convincing sceptical teachers, and even enforcing recalcitrant teachers into working towards organisational goals. However, the power the new teacher evaluation system grants to head teachers does pose some problems as well. Teachers are increasingly placed in disadvantaged positions vis-à-vis head teachers. Therefore, the need to improve teacher evaluation practices for the purpose of empowering teachers as well as head teachers is ad-dressed in this article.

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he aim of this research is to clarify the actual condition of additional support needs (ASN) and how teachers recognize ASN and conduct practice for supporting pupils with ASN. As a result of the conclusion of the Salamanca statement which aims to include all pupils in main-stream classes and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, establishing inclu-sive educational systems has become a trend throughout the world. However, there is no clear definition of inclusive education and each country constructs its inclusive educational system depending on their historical and cultural backgrounds. In Scotland, the government has pro-moted mainstreaming as inclusive education, which makes all pupils go to mainstream schools regardless of special educational needs, since the parliament was founded. By the promotion, the number of pupils in special schools are decreasing and previous research deal with Scottish case as good practice of inclusive education. Although previous research says ASN is recog-nized as a base of inclusive education in Scotland, it lacks the perspective of how teachers rec-ognized ASN and make inclusive practices for pupils with ASN. In this research, we reviewed government’s documents about inclusive education and ASN, and observed two primary schools. The reason why we choose two schools is that terms of ed-ucational needs is affected by each school’s backgrounds such as free school meals; then we choose symmetrized two primary school from economical backgrounds. As a result of surveys, not only the number of pupils with ASN, but also that of other kind of needs is increasing ; young career, family backgrounds as well as disability, immigrants and de-velopmental disorder and so on. In addition to that situation, most of pupils with ASN are learning in mainstream classes. In our observation, teachers also recognized the terms of ASN, however they thought that ASN is not enough for understanding all pupils’ needs. Therefore, teachers assess all pupils whether they are able to learn in class effectively and they capture pupils needs by not only the term of ASN but also their assessment. In conclusion, ASN let teachers know the difference among pupils in class and teachers notice pupils’ needs which “may” need additional support for learning. For future research, we need to explore teachers’ support for inclusion, and how do teachers think about dilemma of differ-ences, which is strengthened by expanding teachers’ support for pupils with ASN.

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David Lodge (1935-) is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975) is based on his own academic life at Birmingham and experience at the Berkeley as visiting Associate Professor in 1969. The teaching of writing fiction and producing new literature in universities hadn’t been popular in the UK until 70s, but expansion of higher education brought the situation that many writers stayed in university as students or academic staff. Their observations and thoughts at that time still remain in their novels. The purpose of this article is to explore the Lodge’s comparative framework that construct the Changing Places’ imaginary world. Through this case study of interpreting fiction, I tried to identify the limitation of the interpreting fictional text as the data of comparative education. In the first half of this article, I described Lodge as the cultural observer and comparatist. His novel Changing Places has been read as a story that has certain connection with the real world of 1969. The latter is a practical part of an interpretation of fictional text as comparative educational literature. Changing Places is about a story of academic life of the UK and the US. It has two protagonists and both of them are the professors of English. Their universities have an annual professional exchange scheme and they are chosen for this program. The characteristic features of social and vocational life in each country were made amusing by the foreign observer. This study revealed the following two characteristics in Lodge’s comparative strategies. First, he emphasized the cultural differences between the UK and the US, but this story is about a possibility of exchange still. Cultural differences are mentioned as a kind of interruption on the discussion of the educational borrowing, but in this story, remarkable differences aren’t necessarily fatal for exchange. This framework of comparison suggests the reconsideration when we see and try to control the differences. Second, comparisons by Lodge is not fixed by the single binary opposition. Describing people and their culture as the collection of contrasts enable the author to capture the changing world as it is.

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