‘Being responsible for your decisions or actions and expected to explain them when you are asked’ (Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries).

Accountability may be vertical (top down) or horizontal (e.g. school-to-school or peer-to-peer support systems). It may include compliance with regulations, adherence to professional norms and/or be driven by outcomes. The purpose of accountability is widely accepted as one of strengthening the education system (Brill, Grayson, Kuhn and O’Donnell, 2018).

Accountability starts with governments, as primary duty bearers of the right to education … Governments should therefore take steps towards developing credible and efficient regulations with associated sanctions for all education providers, public and private, that ensure non-discrimination and the quality of education … No approach to accountability will be successful without a strong enabling environment that provides actors with adequate resources, capacity and information to fulfil their responsibilities (SDG-Education 2030 Steering Committee, 2018, p. 2).

‘The freedom for a country, a region or an organization to govern itself independently’; ‘The ability to act and make decisions without being controlled by anyone else’ (Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries).

In education, autonomy may include local-governance autonomy, school autonomy and teacher autonomy (the extent to which teachers can make autonomous decisions about what they teach to learners and how they teach it). Also important are parent autonomy (around curriculum, school performance) and learner autonomy (giving learners control over their own learning process) (adapted from ‘autonomy’ in the Glossary of Education Reform).

Learners vulnerable to exclusion encompasses all learners whose educational experience is ‘impacted upon by a number of pressures, forces, levers, discriminations and disadvantages’ (European Agency, 2021b, p. 6). These learners may or may not fall into categories of special needs and a special type of provision may or may not be available to support them (European Agency, 2022c, p. 34).

Resilience is the ability to prepare for, work through, respond to and mitigate unforeseen challenges.

Challenges may damage individuals, institutions and communities, but they also create opportunities to rebuild from a stronger base, and even reach a higher level of operation. Resilience does not just mean survival and recovery; it means thriving in a new reality (Brende and Sternfels, 2022) and operating proactively rather than reactively.

The field of education must be sensitive to individual, community and societal challenges both within and outside the system. Here, resilience refers to the ability to find solutions to these challenges, adapting to new situations by organising, planning and implementing educational processes.

This refers to all those in key leadership roles in schools and learning communities. Such leaders may also be referred to as headteachers, school directors or principals. There are various stages of school leadership, including teacher, middle and senior leadership. In this role, they focus on enlisting and guiding the talents and energies of teachers, learners and parents to achieve common educational aims.

Leading a school involves both leadership and management. It is important to acknowledge that school leaders need a balance of these two processes. Leadership is focused on values, vision and the future, whereas management is concerned with making the present work (West-Burnham and Harris, 2015) (European Agency, 2020, p. 42).

This covers different types of specialist provision services, specifically:

• in-school provision, which ensures assistance to learners who are in mainstream classrooms, or partially out of mainstream classrooms (special classes, units, programmes, inclusion classes, and parallel support, i.e. one-to-one provision by specialised staff);
• external provision to schools aiming to empower them to act inclusively (resource centres, networks of special schools, networks of mainstream and special schools);
• external provision to schools through individualised support to learners enrolled in mainstream settings (physiotherapists, speech therapists) with the support of education, health or welfare authorities;
• external provision to learners, such as special schools dedicated to learners requiring intensive support, under the responsibility of education, health or welfare authorities (European Agency, 2019b, p. 10).

(See also ‘External specialist provision’)

This refers to policy-makers, education professionals, school leaders, learners/peers, families and the members of the community (European Agency, 2019b).