Research on school improvement has accumulated an extensive list of factors that facilitate turnarounds at underperforming schools. Given that context or resource constraints may limit the possibilities of putting all of these factors in place, an important question is what is necessary and sufficient to turn a school around. We use qualitative…

In this paper, we investigate how professional cultures and situated, material and external contexts relate to dynamic low- and underperforming schools in Scandinavia, particularly how the leadership is constructed through the leader, the followers and the situation. The first school studied was a low-performing school in Norway called…

This article explores external facilitation for school improvement; more specifically, it examines the practical work of external facilitators. It is based on a Swedish case in which facilitators at the Swedish National Agency for Education support low-performing schools. The article aims to develop knowledge about how external facilitators in…

Research on school improvement has accumulated an extensive list of factors that facilitate turnarounds at underperforming schools. Given that contextual or resource constraints may limit the possibilities of putting all of these factors in place, an important question is what is necessary and sufficient to turn a school around. We use a…

While the family is a critical determinant of educational achievement, methodological difficulties and the availability of data limit estimation of the family contribution in school effectiveness models. This study uses multilevel modeling to estimate the proportion of variation in student educational achievement between families, family-level…

The main purpose of this paper is to examine perspectives of successful and effective leadership as well as successful and effective schools in an effort to uncover the governance interventions which produce one or the other characterization. This examination is undertaken through the utilization of two guiding frameworks: the…

A growing body of research has emphasised the importance of school leadership for quality improvement in schools, which reinforces the importance of school leaders' continuous professional development in working life. However, less is known about the professional development of experienced principals. Against this background, the purpose of this…

Improving school effectiveness is a priority for many countries. The Swedish instrument "Pedagogical and Social Climate in School" (PESOC) has been widely used for measurement of school improvement. Since pedagogical leadership is an important component of school effectiveness, this study aimed to describe the psychometric properties of…

The extensive reforms of Sweden's education system during the last few decades have resulted in deregulation and individualization of schools. In upper secondary education, a distinct flexible course structure with multiple options was introduced in order to enhance school effectiveness and equity. This study departs in some of the previously…

This paper derives efficiency scores for around 8,500 schools in 30 countries, using Programme for International Student Assessment 2012 data and a nonparametric approach called data envelopment analysis as method. On average, achievement scores of schools can be increased by 27%, holding inputs constant. Efficiency scores vary considerably both…

Why do some schools bring forth high achievement levels, whereas others do not? To understand the mechanisms behind school success, one must examine schools as organizations and the social relations and interactions among their members. By integrating the literature on educational effectiveness and sociological institutionalism, this article…

This study applies a model of school organisation developed by one of the authors to investigate school improvement processes leading to a whole school approach in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) literature. The model is operationalized to a survey instrument and distributed to Swedish upper secondary teachers. The instrument provides…

Entrepreneurship in school is a widespread issue within the school system and it is therefore important to problematise teachers and their role when entrepreneurship is emphasized in their school practice. The teachers in this study, from the secondary and upper secondary levels, were all participating in a Swedish three-year school improvement…

Scholars in the field of conflict resolution in schools theoretically argued that minor distractions and disturbances are conflicts. In the present study, we refer to them as emerging conflicts. The study has been carried out within the phenomenographic research tradition and used semi-structured interviews. We addressed the professionals -- the…

Decreasing performance in several core subjects among students in Sweden and the increasing segregation of schools are urgent issues in relation to equity in education, which has been a long-term goal in Sweden. The aim of this study is to identify factors in the school environment associated with student performance in PISA in mathematics at…