ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to review the research, theory and practice of School Effectiveness and Improvement (SEI) and to indicate its limitations for sustainable improvement. SEI seemed to a great extent to be confined and inhibited by being grounded in a faulty or at least inadequate management paradigm based upon a limited understanding of how organizations work on the basis of dynamically structured relations. SEI has been operating comfortably within the confines of a theoretical framework in which the primary mode of explication is analysis. The chapter explores in greater depth new ways of understanding schools as organizations and see how far SEI can be incorporated into the new paradigms and methodologies of Dynamical Systems Theory. Signs are beginning to appear that researchers in the field of SEI are realizing that complexity science is an important dimension. SEI research has progressed through a number of stages and into increasingly sophisticated and ambitious investigations of schools and their effectiveness.