ABSTRACT
One of the most influential educational discourses of the 1990s is ‘school effectiveness/school improvement’.41 It is important to keep the two separate, though attempts have been made to draw them closer together (Gray et al., 1996).42 School effectiveness research has its origins in a general dissatisfaction with the ‘deterministic’ and ‘pessimistic’ view of schooling which suggested that schools, teachers and education generally have little effect on the different ways different pupils perform in schools. Other background factors are more influential and there is little schools can do to counteract their effects. Though leading practitioners (ie. Sammons et al., 1995, p. 80) recognise that school effectiveness findings cannot provide a blueprint for school improvement, they argue that ‘such research provides a valuable background and useful insights’. Though this assertion seems to offer a way forward, it is important to note here that it operates in a purely polemical sense, and this is partly because the nature of the relationship is not made sufficiently explicit for any reader to act on it so as to produce any useful outcomes. What is needed is an understanding of the relationship between sets of precepts about educational effectiveness developed by non-practitioners and practical knowledge or phronesis which guides the actions of practitioners. Furthermore, we may also need to surface the implicit power relations which operate between researchers making claims about what an effective school is and practitioners concerned to modify and improve their pract ice in the l ight of specifications about how they should behave.
