ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on schools as contexts for learning. It looks at how school organisation, teacher professional communities and school leadership may support and spread good classroom practices across the whole school. The chapter considers the importance of broader policy frames and funding support for schools to achieve equitable learning outcomes. It also considers a number of school-level and systemic interventions proposed by researchers and policy makers—specifically, notions of school organisational capacity, teacher professional learning communities, and leadership for learning. It suggests that instead of approaching these as ‘solutions’, it is more useful to engage with them as ways of foregrounding the most important work of schools, namely learning. The findings of the Coleman Report stimulated a wave of educational research from different theoretical and political perspectives. The organisation of schools, with their separate classrooms, age and subject groupings, and departmental configurations, form the physical and social architecture for teachers’ work.
