ABSTRACT
One of the ‘roads’ that I signposted in chapter ten was that of school improvement, which I described as a productive offshoot of the research on school effectiveness. By the mid 1990s it was clear that school improvement had developed its own distinct paradigm. In the publication on which this chapter is based, Louise Stoll and I tried to spell out the common and the differing characteristics of the two fields. Louise Stoll had been a field officer on the School Matters project. As a direct result of this experience, she had been seconded to a school district in Ontario which was about to begin a major programme of school improvement. The secondment was so successful that she worked for five years in Canada and was involved in a series of school improvement ventures before returning to England and to an academic post at the Institute of Education. The tutorials for her doctoral thesis—which I supervised and which was based on the work she had undertaken in London and in Canada—were frequently held in airports and at international conferences as our paths crossed. Because of her work experience, Louise Stoll was able to provide a unique link between the school effectiveness tradition of London and the school improvement and educational change studies that Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves and others were developing in Toronto.
