ABSTRACT
The establishment of those factors within schools that are associated with their effectiveness status has been virtually the ‘Holy Grail’ of SER in many countries of the world since the inception of the discipline in the 1970s. In the USA, Edmonds (1979a, 1979b) and others explicitly hoped to discover what it was that some schools possessed-the ‘validity’—to routinely spread into the schools of black and disadvantaged children-the ‘reliability’. In the United Kingdom, part of the reason for the ready acceptance of the SER paradigm across the contemporary political spectrum has been its promise that ‘good practice’ could be discerned, within a system that continues to exhibit considerable variability in school and teacher quality (see Reynolds and Farrell, 1996 for a review of this evidence and Creemers et al. (1996) for empirical data on the United Kingdom).
