Editorial.

It is indeed a pleasure to welcome readers to the first issue of the Australian Journal of Education for 2013, and the first to emerge under the banner of SAGE Publications. While the editorial functions of the AJE will remain at the Australian Council for Educational Research, the sales, distribution and marketing of the AJE will be handled by SAGE. We look forward to a long and fruitful association with SAGE and see this as the start of a new era of growth in circulation, enabling us to offer authors greatly increased exposure for their work.

In due course, the submission and review process will be migrated from the BePress system currently in use to the SAGE online manuscript submission and peer review system, SAGE Track. To ensure continuity, we will continue to process articles submitted through the AJE website (http://research.acer.edu.au/aje) and will redirect submissions to SAGE Track as that becomes necessary.

The National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is a key element of the National Assessment Program used by governments, education authorities and schools to determine the extent to which Australian schoolchildren are meeting important educational outcomes. But not all students are assessed under NAPLAN, and in particular, students with additional needs may be exempted, or adjustments may be made to the assessment procedures to enable them to participate. Consequently, information about the achievement of these students (predominantly those with learning disabilities, emotional and behavioural disabilities and autism) is lacking. Ian Dempsey and Michael Davies see this as leaving Australian educational authorities unaccountable for these students. By linking data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to NAPLAN data, they estimate that more than a third of students with additional needs did not participate in NAPLAN. Because LSAC data contain information about disability, they were able to present information, albeit incomplete, about achievement levels among these children. Given the likely importance of information about disability in school funding policies, Dempsey and Davies rightly draw attention to the need for better information about the achievement of these children and make the case for NAPLAN as a vehicle to achieve it.

A recent special issue of this journal (Volume 55, No. 1,2011) highlighted the leadership demands faced in small and remote schools in many countries. In this issue, Aaron Drummond and John Halsey look at the job demands faced by school leaders in rural, regional and remote areas of Australia. It will be no surprise to learn that they found remote schools to be more demanding than regional and rural schools. Of particular interest will be the aspects of their role that make their roles more demanding, the type of preparation they receive and the steps that state and territory education departments might undertake. This knowledge is important not just to lessen the demands on these important school leaders but also to increase our capacity to attract and retain experienced school leaders in rural and remote areas.

Many students in rural and remote areas leave home, at least for a part of their schooling, and attend boarding schools in regional centres or capital cities. The role of boarding schools in Australia is different to that in other countries, and little researched. Julie Hodges, Jeanie Sheffield and Alan Ralph have assembled information from a very broad range of sources to paint a picture of boarding schools in Australia and how they fit into the educational landscape. There have been decreases in the number attending boarding schools, but not necessarily in the number of boarding schools, as Australia is unusual in that most boarding schools have a large proportion of day students as well as a boarding "house." The scene is changing as the economy (and particularly the rural economy) changes and as schools begin to take in more students from overseas. Hodges, Sheffield and Ralph document these changes and paint a fascinating picture of a world that is unknown to many, perhaps most, Australians.

Increasingly in recent years, "school choice" has come to be promoted as a virtue and a key to improving schooling. While school choice has always been mitigated by parents' economic power, government policies have tended to move in the direction of increased school choice, both between and, increasingly, within school sectors. In this issue, Wu Xiaoxin takes us to a situation (in China) in which the official government policy discourages school choice and describes how social capital, or the closely related Chinese concept of guanxi (meaning 'connections' or 'relationships'), has become a key factor in parents' capacity to exercise school choice. Case studies in three schools are used to document how parents use their guanxi to get their sons and daughters into the 'best' schools. Readers elsewhere may well wonder about the relative importance of money and guanxi in determining school choice in their own countries, and will appreciate the remarkable frankness shown by the respondents in this study.

From the micro to the macro, we close this issue with two articles looking at the big policy issues in Australian education today. Jessica Gerrard, James Albright, David Clarke, Doug Clarke, Lesley Farrell, Peter Freebody and Peter Sullivan look at the issues involved in researching the impact of a major curriculum reform, the Australian Curriculum, from systems all the way down to classrooms. This is the beginning of an evolving story, and we hope this paper will provide readers with a framework for observing and thinking about curriculum reform in general, as well as for following the progress of this important national project.

While the provision of education in Australia is constitutionally a state responsibility, the Australian Curriculum is but one example of the steadily increasing involvement of the Australian government in educational policy-making. Malgorzata Klatt and John Polesel trace the growth of commonwealth government involvement in another field, vocational education and training. Although the case for this involvement is made in terms of ensuring the necessary investment in human capital through skill development, it is seen in this paper as part of a global trend, in which central governments use their political and financial authority to claim increased power and control over matters that they deem important to their countries' economic and social development.

It is with pleasure that we welcome existing and new readers to this rich and varied set of offerings.

DOI: 10.1177/0004944113481896