ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s, there has been an increasing momentum in the United Kingdom, as in many other educational systems, toward educational reform directed at raising levels of school performance. The emphasis on school improvement has increased as a result of the trend in most Western countries of decentralizing the responsibility for the implementation of educational reform. Alongside this increase in political pressure for institutional renewal, there has been a growing realization that many strategies for educational change have had little impact on schools and classrooms (Fullan, 1999). Consequently, within the United Kingdom a range of government policies have emerged aimed at generating the impetus for school-level and classroom-level change.
