This article presents a model of teacher research supported by academic partners to develop a better understanding of the barriers to education faced by young people growing up in poverty. It critiques politicians' demands for teachers to "close the gap" for ignoring the cumulative intergenerational effects of deprivation. The…

For many years, England has been the epitome of high-stakes accountability, often playing leapfrog with the USA. It represents an extreme of centralized surveillance, with schools organized as a quasi-market and supervised through a punitive combination of external inspection, the use of test data to name and shame schools, and ultimately closure…

This article uses the concept of paradigm, with examples from various fields, to examine some defining features of School Effectiveness and School Improvement. The situation of schools serving areas of poverty and associated deprivation is seen as a challenge to these paradigms. The struggle to understand and intervene in these schools is…

This article reports on a pilot study examining the possible impact of the very different structures of Scottish and Norwegian schools. It compares the situation in Scotland, as in other parts of the UK, where lower secondary classes normally have 12-15 teachers, each for one to three hours, and the Norwegian school, where a team of five or six…