ABSTRACT
The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) has two major objectives: improving the quality of education in its schools and colleges, and making opportunities more equal for every pupil and student regardless of sex, race or social class. As a consequence it has been in the vanguard of school effectiveness research in the United Kingdom. The common outcome measures available for junior schools in the ILEA have been reduced recently to just one, a test of reading attainment, and only exploratory work has been done using this measure. The 1980 Education Act requires each school to publish its examination results in a standard form, but considerable detail has to be produced and the information is not easily summarized or interpreted by parents. Among secondary schools, though, common outcome measures are universally available in the form of public examination results. There are numbers of limitations to the use of examination results to judge the effectiveness of individual schools.
