This study provides an account of the agendas, participation and influence of management, teachers, students and parents at a primary school in Tigray, Ethiopia. A literature review revealed gaps in the knowledge of these stakeholders’ involvement in school leadership structures in the current national policy context. A broader review of the major traditions of school research informed the design of this ethnographic case study. Fieldwork at ‘Ketema School’ took place over an eight-month period in 2014, and involved participant observation, informant-led interviews, and the collection of institutional documents. Data collection focused on the meetings of various bodies, and the activities of a single class in Grade 6 and 7. Inductive analysis of the case data was supported by Atlas.ti. The study reveals a convergence of understandings about the purposes and processes of the school consistent with the state-authorised model of schooling for national development. Structures and processes of surveillance and control incentivise and normalise compliance with government directives. These include positions of distributed leadership and mechanisms of mutual surveillance and internal accountability through which teachers and students share responsibility for supervising peers and colleagues. For example, the student leaders of the ‘one-to-five’ networks perform an academic support and behavioural control function in relation to their peers; and gim gima is a practice of public critique used for exposing misconduct. Meetings and other participative spaces enable members of the school community to share their views on conditions in school according to their interests and priorities; however, these forums are dominated by management agendas, and school-level decisions are restricted by a strong external policy context. This study extends knowledge of school leadership practices in Ethiopia and informs wider debates around community participation, accountability and school autonomy in developing countries. Recommendations are made for sharing and strengthening democratic practices and for future research.

Quantitative pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic and disease progression models are the core of the science of pharmacometrics which has been identified as one of the strategies that can make drug development more effective. To adequately develop and utilize these models one needs to carefully consider the nature of the data, choice of appropriate estimation methods, model evaluation strategies, and, most importantly, the intended use of the model. The general aim of this thesis was to investigate how the use of pharmacometric models can improve the design and analysis of clinical trials within drug development. The development of pharmacometric models for clinical assessment scales in stroke and graded severity events, in this thesis, show the benefit of describing data as close to its true nature as possible, as it increases the predictive abilities and allows for mechanistic interpretations of the models. Performance of three estimation methods implemented in the mixed-effects modeling software NONMEM; 1) Laplace, 2) SAEM, and 3) Importance sampling, applied when modeling repeated time-to-event data, was investigated. The two latter methods are to be preferred if less than approximately half of the individuals experience events. In addition, predictive performance of two validation procedures, internal and external validation, was explored, with internal validation being preferred in most cases. Model-based analysis was compared to conventional methods by the use of clinical trial simulations and the power to detect a drug effect was improved with a pharmacometric design and analysis. Throughout this thesis several examples have shown the possibility of significantly reducing sample sizes in clinical trials with a pharmacometric model-based analysis. This approach will reduce time and costs spent in the development of new drug therapies, but foremost reduce the number of healthy volunteers and patients exposed to experimental drugs.