The conference was attended by Prof Rika Joubert, Dr Jean van Rooyen and Prof Johan Beckmann and by Adv Justus Prinsloo of the Dean’s office and was titled “Mind the gap: Creating social justice through education policy”. Prof Johan Beckmann and Adv Justus Prinsloo read a joint paper on the training of role players in disciplinary hearings, Prof Johan Beckmann read a paper on the ownership of schools and Prof Rika Joubert and Dr Jean van Rooyen read a paper on promoting social justice throughreflective principal training.

Themes that permeated the symposium included the following:

• The issues of trust versus accountability
• Early childhood development and education
• Leadership training
• School and student support systems
• Retaining children and youth in the system
• Vocational education
• The globally good teacher
• The different manifestations of distributed leadership in schools and systems
• Parent-school relationships
• Policy stability, renewal and implementation
• The creation of a unified national vision for education
• Early childhood education and development
• The role of clear and simple legislation in education

Prof Beckmann was one of the four directors who started ISER in 2004; that is Prof Lars Bjork from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Prof Jukka Alava from the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland and Prof Junhua Zhang from the East China Normal University in Shanghai. In recognition of their contributions, Profs Beckmann and Alava (who are both retiring) received the Directors Leadership Award for outstanding performance in furthering international research, education and cultural understanding.

Prof Joubert and Dr van Rooyen are stepping into the shoes of Prof Beckmann as Directors of ISER and will organise the 2014 symposium, to be held in South Africa from 4 to 10 June 2014.

Members of the conference delegation visited the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare in Helsinki. Adv Prinsloo and Prof Beckmann also paid a short visit to Trondheim in Norway and also had discussions with the County Education Council about possible co-operation between the County and South African schools in the field of vocational education.

A European Policy Network on School Leadership (EPNoSL) seminar was held concurrently with the first two days of ISER and Dr Keshni Bipath and Dr Sharon Mampane accepted invitations of the chairperson of EPNoSL to work with this influential group in future.