School Effectiveness: Fracturing the Discourse

This book traces the development of the school effectiveness debate and raises key questions about how it has become a dominant discourse in theories of educational change today. The authors explore how school effectiveness derived from different ideologies, pressures and logics, and how it has reclassified and reformulated ideas, concerns, panics and prejudices. A central argument is that the school effectiveness movement is not new, but is a crystallisation and reconfiguration of a range of belief systems and policy interventions that have floated through education for at least three decades. The book identifies how attempts have been made to isolate and identify the crucial factors in education that promote academic achievement. There is critical analysis of how certainties about the raising of standards have shifted education from its sociocultural base.

Louise Morley is a senior lecturer at the University of London Institute of Education, where she is currently the Course Director for the MA in Higher and Professional Education. Naz Rassool is a lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Reading, where she is Course Director for the MA in Primary Education.