ABSTRACT
It was a foggy February morning when a large cream envelope dropped though the door to brighten our day. ‘We’ were a group of university researchers and LEA (local education authority) School Improvement Officers who had been waiting for just such an opportunity. It had been 4 years since we had formed a partnership with the primary intention of developing a critical mass of teacher practitioner researchers in local schools as a vehicle for school improvement. Despite having engaged a sizeable cohort of primary and secondary schools in a variety of small research-based projects, we had not yet attracted funding to enable us to pilot rigorously what we had already learnt.
