School improvement is much sought and often claimed. However, it is questionable whether overall achievement in countries such as the USA or England has improved by any significant amount over thirly years. Several school improvement programmes have been claimed as successful, but evaluations, even where they exist, are generally poor: based on the perceptions of participants, lacking any counterfactual or reporting selectively. Accounts of improvement in individual schools are numerous, but are inevitably selective; the attribution of causality is problematic and (...) knowledge of the conditions under which such phenomena are likely to be replicated is limited. School effectiveness research also has yet to identify specific strategies with clear causal effects. In short, many claims of school improvement are illusory. Nevertheless, there are some improvement strategies that are well-defined, feasible and robustly shown to be effective. In future, we need greater clarity and agreement about what constitutes success. Evaluation must be taken more seriously, and its results treated more critically. (shrink)

We argue that the privatisation of education needs to be understood through an ethical lens, and suggest a broad framework through which privatisation policies and practices might be ethically audited. These policies and practices -- it is suggested -- are creating new ethical spaces and new clusters of goals, obligations and dispositions. Whatever the merits of our particular reading of these changes, we would call for an urgent public debate on these questions -- one that looks beyond broad ideological questions (...) to consider the effects of privatisation on the nature of the services provided. (shrink)

Using various official sources, the article explores competing conceptions of the 'under- achieving ' school which have been operationalised in recent years. It suggests that there have been multiple, potentially conflicting definitions in policy discourse to which recent innovations have merely added a further layer of complexity. Using a simple conceptual framework comparing judgements made within 'standards' and 'progress' frameworks for evaluating schools' performance, it highlights the very limited range of conditions where judgements made within one tradition would complement those (...) made within the other. As the educational system begins to turn increasingly to use of so-called 'value-added' approaches as a way forward, the implications of these analyses for policy development, particularly in relation to the alleviation of social and educational disadvantage, are considered. (shrink)