Schools located within communities experiencing high levels of social dislocation, educational disadvantage and student disengagement from learning are working under "adverse conditions". These schools face particular challenges when it comes to stabilising and sustaining wholeschool change aimed at improving students' learning outcomes. In this article, schools are understood as known to us through their technologies of power, which produce the practices, relationships and techniques of schooling. One such technology is a site of pedagogical practice, such as a classroom, and one of its effects is learning. In schools working under adverse conditions, a default mode of schooling that emphasises surveillance and control tends to dampen the kind of learning that leads to success at school. The following discussion explores the possibilities for disrupting this default mode that are opened up when learning is amplified through multiplying the sites of pedagogical practice. This approach differs from reform efforts that seek to replicate successful external reform efforts. Rather than grappling with the question of how to transplant or bring particular reforms to scale, the central question of this article is how to amplify learning that leads to success at school and make it a more likely effect in schools working under adverse conditions.