School leaders are faced with serious moral challenges on a daily basis at schools, which often result in them making poor moral choices. In a situation of moral decay in schools, reports in the news media create the impression that school leaders often fail to demonstrate the necessary values advocated by the Moral Regeneration Movement and the Manifesto of Values, Education and Democracy. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore school leaders’ understanding and reasoning regarding values and morality. For the purposes of the study a number of possible lenses, such as cultural relativism, religious beliefs, ethical subjectivism, classical utilitarian theory, Domain theory, and the ethic of justice, ethic of care, ethic of critique and the ethic of community, were identified and used in analysing the way school leaders reason about moral dilemmas. A design located within hermeneutic phenomenology was used in the study with the aim to understand school leaders’ understanding and reasoning regarding values and morality. A combination of quantitative and qualitative data gathering techniques was used in a concurrent mixed method design using a single questionnaire. The sample for the study consisted of educators enrolled for a formal management training programme. This group was largely homogenous in terms of religion, language, culture and was mainly from rural areas of Mpumalanga. Seventy-three participants took part in the study. It emerged from the data that the espoused theories used by school leaders could be related to the lenses identified in the literature. The school leaders’ espoused theories were mainly based on the ethic of justice and the ethic of care and were aligned to their preferred value orientations. At the espoused theory level, school leaders revealed a strong moral orientation. Further research is indicated to study school leaders’ theory in action. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Education Management and Policy Studies / unrestricted

This paper deals with the impact of prematurely canceled foster care on a deve-lopment of a child. It gives an overview of the system of care of endangered children in the Czech Republic. It also presents the current legislation which is the basis of the surrogate family care in the Czech Republic. In 2013, an amendment of the Social and Legal Protection of Children law came into force, which the legislators built up on the experi-ence with professional foster care in Slovakia. Its goal is to reduce the number of chil-dren in children's institutions. The paper further includes a thorough analysis of develo-pmental needs of a child. Foster parents have to accept the fact, that they decided to take in a child with an unfulfilled attachment bond. Premature cancellation of foster care can bear witness to the fact that a foster family cannot create an attachment bond to the child and does not provide a sufficient amount of support for its development. The pa-per takes into consideration the dangers the juveniles are challenged with as a result of an unsuccessful foster care. Based on the interviews with many directors of children's homes in the South Bohemian region, negative impact of the canceled foster care on children has been noted. New questions suitable for further research in this region have emerged out of the interviews. Host care is one of the possibilities to provide children with a family educational model in children's home. The directors agree that it is the first-rate personality of a foster parent that is crucial for a first-rate foster care, i.e. a foster parent who can open her- or himself to the child and grant him or her his or her own family affectionate environment. The problem of unsuccessful foster care can be minimized only by genuine acceptance of a child and unconditional love for him or her.