John Michael Gray

• University of Cambridge

In this article, we address three broad conjectures about what really matters with respect to school effectiveness. Our review of previous evidence prompted us to look at three sets of factors connected with classroom teachers, school policies and processes, and matters of governance. All three have featured prominently in the public arena. In part...

There have been some major changes in the basic structure of school experiences for adolescents since the mid 1970s, including more attention to attainment and examinations, a rise in exam participation and success, a major shift to comprehensive education, and a significant increase in the number of children staying on at 16 years and thus having...

Introduction Among the various things that may have changed in adolescent lives over the last 30 years are secondary school experiences. Education constitutes a vast and significant social institution with which young people are directly engaged for a great deal of time (indeed, approximately 15,000 hours; see Rutter et al, 1979). We have to start...

This article estimates the effects of school expenditure on school performance at Key Stage 4 in England, over the period 2003–07 during which real per pupil expenditure increased rapidly. It adds to previous investigations by using dynamic panel analysis to: exploit time series data on individual schools that only recently has become available; ad...

15 European countries were classified into four types in an international comparative study. The country profiles are based on indicators of the key concepts' funding, governance and choice. This research attempts to answer the question of how the quality of schooling of these types of education systems progressed as from 1995 and what explanations...

In his remarkably prescient study, The New Meaning of Educational Change, Fullan and Stiegelbauer (1991) challenged policy-makers to pay more attention to the accumulated wisdom of research. “Armed with knowledge of the change process and a commitment to action,” they argued, “we should accept nothing less than positive results on a massive scale –...

Including abstract, graph., tabl., bibl. 'Institutional context' has come to play an important role in the explanation of differences in 'effectiveness' between schools. But what is meant by such a concept differs from system to system. In this study we typify education systems based on indicators of institutional contexts such as: the financial ba...

This paper looks at underlying patterns of school effectiveness through analysing a GCSE examination data‐set over a period of ten cohorts (1993–2002) in one very large English school district. Both value added and raw score approaches were explored by employing different statistical multilevel models to examine time trends of school and pupil perf...

Schools serving young people on the margins of society face a major challenge in trying to create an environment where students can succeed. The book examines key issues in the field of school improvement. More specifically, it draws on evidence from the SFECC (Schools Facing Exceptionally Challenging Circumstances) project to explore: o the policy...

Much of the research investigating pupils’ attitudes towards school has been qualitatively‐oriented. This analysis explores the extent to which some of the differences between pupils can be rendered in quantitative terms. Drawing upon a survey of 1310 pupils in 21 primary schools, its main concern is to explore the extent to which there is a ‘gende...

The basic question we address in this paper is a straightforward one. How can ‘fairer’ comparisons be made between the results of individual secondary schools? This is a question which has preoccupied researchers of school effectiveness over much of the past decade. It is one, however, which has assumed still greater importance in the light of the...

The authors reply to a response by Bennett and Entwistle to a previous critique of Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress. A number of further objections are made to the research design, a comparison is made of eight studies cited as support for the teaching styles’ conclusions, and it is proposed that the ‘teaching styles’ findings are basically expla...

The article explores changes in the examination performance of a random sample of 500 English secondary schools between 1992 and 2001. Using econometric methods, it concludes that: there is an overall deterministic trend in school performance but it is not stable, making prediction accuracy poor; the aggregate trend does not explain improvement ove...

Based on empirical analysis using configuration theory and multi-dimensional scaling, this book provides insight into types of relationships that can be found between groups of countries with certain institutional context features, and into the quality and equity of their education system. In this volume, the authors take up the challenge of consid...

The superior performance of girls, especially in terms of GCSE examinations, continues to attract attention. Much of the debate to date, however, has focused on absolute differences in attainment rather than differences in pupil progress. Furthermore, the role of the school in contributing to the differential progress of the two sexes has been litt...

Using various official sources (such as Ofsted reports), the article explores competing conceptions of the ‘under-achieving’ school which have been operationalised in recent years. It suggests that there have been multiple, potentially conflicting definitions in policy discourse to which recent innovations have merely added a further layer of compl...

It has long been assumed that schools which were ‘effective’ with respect to one set of outcomes (usually academic performance) were generally more ‘effective’ in relation to others. This article reviews the last three decades of British evidence across a range of affective, social and other non-cognitive outcomes including: pupils’ attitudes to sc...

When we began our research we had two major concerns. First, to look at how the different countries of Europe schooled their children in terms of certain key dimensions - funding, governance and choice being the most prominent. And second, to explore whether what they did mattered in terms of their effects on pupil performance. Educational systems...

Internationally, we observe an increase in attention to governance in general and governance of schooling specifically. Van Kersbergen and Van Waarden (2001) make this clear in their background study into "Shifts in Governance" where they claim that one of the most remarkable developments in modern societies in the past few decades has been the dev...

Experts from most of the countries' included in this study have been contacted to gain more insight into the implications of differences between public/private sector and governance on educational processes. The outcomes presented in earlier chapters and especially the ranking of the set of 13 European countries regarding the three output measures...

The article builds on earlier research suggesting that it is fairly difficult to extrapolate current trends in school performance into the future (see Gray, Goldstein & Thomas, British Educational Research Journal, 27, 2001). It explores two areas of research on school improvement which have, to date, received relatively little attention--trends in...

The analysis demonstrates that the average A/AS level results secured by English institutions from year to year are very stable. When account is taken of intake characteristics, however, correlations decrease substantially. The results show that predicting future 'value added' performance from past trends is unreliable. The implications of these én...

This article reports some of the findings from a research project on students' perceptions of education business link activity. Using a selfreport questionnaire, it contrasts student perspectives on the education business (EB) link activity in schools with ‘well-developed’ links with those having ‘less well-developed’ links. The results suggest tha...

L'article fait part des tendances actuelles de la recherche en education qui montrent un interet certain pour les theories de l'amelioration de l'ecole. On y integre les notions d'organisation apprenante, et l'auteur, dans cette analyse globale propose une typologie des ecoles apprenantes et montre les perspectives de cooperation entre enseignants,...

Despite recent advances, the research literature on school effectiveness, school improvement and educational change has relatively little to say about how schools become effective over time, and what strategies or combination of strategies work best to improve schools at different levels of effectiveness. A recent British research study – ‘The Impr...

Incl. bibl., index

Over the last 20 years the gender issues that have shaped thinking and practice in schools have changed dramatically. Today, differences in boys' and girls' performance patterns are a matter of national concern. The first part of this review provides a statistical summary of the evidence on the gender gap, highlighting how it has changed in relatio...

Incl. index, notes and bibliographical references

For more than three decades judgements of schools' quality have been dominated by the frameworks, developed by members of Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI). This article reviews the approaches employed in the national survey conducted for the Plowden Committee, subsequent surveys undertaken by HMI during the seventies and eighties and the changes br...

Incl. index, bibliographical references

It is widely assumed that some schools improve more rapidly than others. However, unlike the well‐established finding that schools differ in their effectiveness, evidence that schools improve at different rates is sparse. Using data on pupils’ examination results and prior achievements from five cohorts of pupils passing through over 30 schools in...

Incl. bibl., index.

The improvement of schools takes place over extended periods of time. Consequently longitudinal studies which track successive cohorts of pupils through their schooling are required if estimates of the extent of improvement are to be established. To date, hardly any studies have collected the necessary data. Those studies which have had appropriate...

A suitable correlation can be made to represent the simulated distillation of heavy oils starting from thennoaravimetric measurements. This method is applicable to hydrocarbons having an initial boiling point equal or greater than 200°C.The simulated thermogravimetric distillation fit was obtained from experiments with the standard compounds obtain...

The effects of school inspections on school improvement have hitherto been assumed rather than documented. This paper describes a study of the consequences of five primary‐school inspections carried out by local inspectors in different authorities. The inspections are of especial interest because they took place in the period immediately before the...

This paper describes the results of an interview study of the reactions of local education authority (LEA) chief inspectors to the OFSTED inspection model and Handbook. Although inspectors generally commended the thorough nature of the inspection approach, substantial reservations were nevertheless expressed about certain aspects, particularly the...

Individual interviews were conducted with inspectors and teaching staff involved with three primary school inspections in three different LEAs. The interviews took place some time after the end of each inspection when the findings were generally known amongst the teaching staff. The inspections differed according to the degree of negotiation allowe...

There have been major changes and developments in recent years in strategies for monitoring and evaluating schools. This paper is based on a survey of chief inspectors and describes the extent and variety of local education authority (LEA) approaches to the evaluation of schools during 1990/91. This was an important year because it immediately prec...

A recent analysis of data from Scotland found evidence of `discouraged worker' effects. More young people stayed on in full-time education post-16 in areas of high adult unemployment than in areas of low unemployment; this was particularly true for those with middling-level qualifications. Using comparable data on English young people the paper att...

Does the influence on academic progress, which a school exerts on its pupils’ achievements in public examinations, differ for pupils of differing levels of ability? The study on which this paper is based used data from a number of English local education authorities (LEAs) and showed that, in general, when finely‐differentiated measures of pupils’...

This article reviews major British studies of differences between ethnic groups in examination results that have appeared in the decade since the Swann Committee was given the task of assessing the education of children from ethnic minority groups. The extent to which the studies illuminate the relative importance of social background, community cu...

A study of a sample from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales compared socioeconomic background and achievements in fifth-year examinations of Afro-Caribbean, Asian, and White adolescents. In addition to differences between groups, considerable within-group differences associated with gender and socioeconomic status were found, perhaps even...

A decade or so ago, the choices facing British 16 year olds seemed relatively straightforward; either they stayed on in education or they left to enter the youth labour market. The subsequent rise in youth unemployment and the consequent series of government?led responses have complicated the picture. But how complex has the post?16 transition from...

For much of the eighties progress in the UK towards the establishment of comprehensive frameworks for judging schools’ performance has been patchy. In the late eighties, however, a variety of proposals have been made for remedying these deficiencies and the creation of systematic frameworks for performance evaluation look a realistic possibility fo...

Examination results for fifth-year pupils in six different local education authorities are analysed with a view to establishing what differences in their performance can be assigned to the schools they attend. Using multi-level models it is shown that, whilst in general the differences between schools are relatively small, the actual size in examin...

This chapter discusses various ways by which the application of multilevel approaches to the study of school effectiveness might enhance the understanding. Their application, to date, would certainly appear to promise better, albeit more conservative, estimates of the extent of differences in effectiveness potentially attributable to schools themse...

Sixteen‐year‐olds still have the option of leaving school and seeking their fortune in the youth labour market. In practice, an increasingly large proportion have found themselves either staying on in full‐time education post‐16 or leaving school and joining the Youth Training Scheme. By the mid‐1980s some three‐quarters were engaged in some form o...

The National Youth Cohort Study is being conducted by members of Social and Community Planning Research, London in collaboration with the Division of Education, Sheffield University over the period 1985-1990. It is funded by the Manpower Services Commission, the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Employment. The views and opi...

This paper investigates the ways in which HMI evaluate the performance of secondary schools in public examinations. It examines the 35 ‘long’ reports (i.e. those covering full inspections) published in the first year in which reports became publicly available, 1983. Four evaluative frameworks are identified as having been employed, and the manner i...

The claims of educational expenditure on the public purse are large and, until recently, have been growing. In a period of increased concern for accountability in the public sector it is not surprising to find attention increasingly directed to this rather neglected aspect of the education service. Two recent publications by the Department of Educa...

A number of recent studies have questioned the conclusion that ‘schools don't make a difference’. A brief review of earlier studies suggests a number of key questions which would result in significant increments to our knowledge and understanding of issues of school effectiveness. More recent studies are then examined in the light of these criteria...

This paper provides some estimates of the probable limits of secondary school effectiveness measured in terms of public examination results. Using data from several British local education authorities, the analysis demonstrates that knowing something about the intakes to secondary schools, either in terms of measures of social background or prior a...

How can teachers become more closely involved in researching educational issues of national concern? Until recently efforts to involve teachers have been largely confined to individual classrooms. The paper: (a) describes some experience of an alternative paradigm through which teachers, amongst others, have been given access to a major national su...

A programme of collaborative research has been attempting to decentralize control over the process of research into Scottish education. Teachers and other practitioners have been involved in analysing data collected in surveys of Scottish school leavers, and stored in the Scottish Education Data Archive. Some of their analyses have been published i...

Neville Bennett's Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress has attracted widespread attention for its major conclusion that formal teaching styles foster greater pupil progress than more informal ones. The present paper examines the adequacy of the research on which this claim is based. It concludes that, at best, no valid conclusions can be reached on t...

Almost a decade has passed since the Plowden Report recommended positive discrimination in favour of the educationally disadvantaged. In the meantime efforts to secure its implementation have met with limited enthusiasm. The initial optimism with which programmes were launched has been quickly dampened by waves of pessimistic conclusions from Ameri...

In the first chapters we selected the concepts we will use for the comparative analysis of education systems in Europe. Now the current situation in each country will be presented. This cross-country analysis concerns those schools involved in the provision of full-time compulsory education, which, in general, are primary and lower secondary school...

Abstract This paper contributes to evaluation of two major features of government schools policy: we analyse jointly the performance effects of increasing expenditure and the institutional innovation of “specialist” status. The education production function literature finds no consistent relationship between school resources and school outcomes. Ac...