This article provides an evaluative account of its authors' involvement in three major national improvement initiatives. Set in the context of three of the countries that make up the UK, these developments were focused in particular on the promotion of educational equity. Unusually, the analysis provided compares evidence collected from an insider…

Purpose: Historically, the school effectiveness and improvement movement has focussed its attention on "within school" factors associated with effectiveness and improvement and on the individual school as the primary unit of analysis for improvement and scrutiny purposes. More recently, research has focussed on school-to-school…

School-to-school collaboration has been central to many improvement efforts over recent decades. In an attempt to promote both improvement and equity current developments in England have included changing formal governance arrangements to promote collaboration for improvement through "federations" and "chains" of schools.…

The idea that schools can impact positively on student outcomes is a crucial driver in the rise of interest in school improvement research and practice. This review focuses on school self-evaluation for school improvement. School self-evaluation can be a fundamental force in achieving school improvement and this review establishes what the key…

Educational systems around the world are experimenting with new forms of schooling. One example is the emergence of independent state-funded schools (ISFSs). In the USA these have taken the form of Charter Schools. In Sweden chains of Free Schools have been established and in England Academies and most recently Free Schools have been placed at the…

Educational effectiveness research (EER) has accumulated much knowledge in the areas of school effectiveness research (SER), teacher effectiveness research (TER) and school/system improvement research (SSIR). Yet many schools and educational systems are not making enough use of the material and their insights. The article reviews evidence of…

Recent reforms in England include the aim of converting every school into an "independent state funded school," an academy, and giving the strongest schools more responsibility for initial teacher education, offering professional development programs, and supporting the improvement of less successful schools. School leaders are…

This study adopted a quantitative methodology involving a matched sample of federated and non-federated schools and utilising multilevel modelling techniques to explore the impact of federations on student outcomes. The sample involves a total of 50 school districts and 264 schools. These are grouped into 122 federations; 264 comparator schools…

Background: Formalised networks have become integral features of many education systems. Some networks have emerged organically as practitioners have sought to share and improve practice while others have been systematically planned and supported by policy makers in an attempt to raise the overall effectiveness of entire systems. However, despite…

Background: In recent years, there have been a number of policies aimed at improving educational standards in England, particularly in urban and challenging contexts. Many of these attempts have been underpinned by the principle of collaboration, where schools work together to generate and share knowledge across institutional boundaries. Purpose:…

Globalisation of world trade, international media, technological innovation and social change are creating opportunities and challenges that today's pupils will inherit and build on. A pupil's academic, technical and social capacity will define their success or failure. Therefore, educational outcomes and well-being for young people across…

This article draws on findings from two English research projects exploring collaborative reform for schools in difficulty. Initially, the article provides a brief policy overview of some of the key policy drivers of educational reform in England during the past decade. This contextual analysis is used to provide background for the exploration of…

This article outlines the findings from a small-scale research study that explored how a group of secondary schools in challenging contexts had improved and raised attainment successively over a 5-year period. The study points to the importance of external factors and how they influence a school's ability to improve and to sustain improvement. The…

This article focuses on improving schools in difficult or disadvantaged contexts. It explores the contemporary policy discourse and intervention strategies aimed at improving schools in such circumstances. It argues that contemporary approaches to improvement are unlikely to succeed because the approaches adopted are not sufficiently…

This article reflects on lessons learnt from recent research and evaluation work in secondary schools operating in urban and challenging contexts in England. It is suggested that there is a common process that effective leaders follow in order to generate and sustain tangible improvements. Central to this argument are the incremental devolution of…