ABSTRACT
As noted in the last chapter, Desmond Nuttall, Pam Sammons, Sally Thomas and I had become increasingly interested in the question of differential school effectiveness. We had participated in a series of seminars on school effectiveness research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Both the review prepared for the series (subsequently published in Sammons et al., 1996a) and the seminar discussions focused on the need to ‘unpack’ the notion of consistency of school effectiveness and to address, in particular, the three themes that were introduced in the last chapter: consistency in promoting different educational outcomes; stability over time; and differential effects. We had also applied for funds to carry out a large-scale study of secondary schools capable of providing data which could answer these questions. The need for such research had been highlighted by the debate over the British government’s policy of encouraging ‘league tables’ of schools’ raw examination results in order to provide indicators of performance and to aid the identification of so-called ‘failing schools’. In 1993, therefore, we embarked upon an ESRC-funded 30-month study. Desmond Nuttall tragically died early in the project, but the work was continued by Pam Sammons, Sally Thomas and myself. The project was superbly led by Pam Sammons, who had worked with me on the School Matters study some fifteen years earlier: Sally Thomas was responsible for the multilevel modelling analyses. The project resulted in a formal report to the ESRC, a series of journal papers and a book— Sammons, Thomas and Mortimore, 1997a). This chapter is drawn from all these sources.
