ABSTRACT
The last 20 years have seen an explosion of research in the field of school effectiveness. From a position of considerable marginality within the educational research communities of most societies, what has been called the school effectiveness ‘movement’ is now increasingly recognized as an educational subdiscipline, with its own professional association (The International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement), its own journal and own annual meeting. Also, the findings of the discipline have achieved very ready acceptance and take up within the political system of the UK, and also more generally within schools themselves, where the notion of being given ‘good practice’ on which to build has been enthusiastically supported (see Reynolds, 1996, for a survey of these developments, and Reynolds, Creemers, Hopkins, Stoll and Bollen, 1996, for an overview of the field currently).
