ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the relationship between the meanings currently attached to notions of school effectiveness, and those constructed in previous educational discourse frameworks. This approach derives from Giddens’ (1979:70) view of intertextuality which states that although ‘every process of action is a production of something new, a first act…all action exists in continuity with the past, which supplies the means of initiation’. In doing so, it aims to emphasize the relational nature of education. That is to say, that it is constituted in different sets of historically derived social relations that are circumscribed and sustained by power networks, practices and processes embedded in society and culture.
