School Performance, School Effectiveness and the 1997 White Paper

ABSTRACT

The rhetoric of the 1997 White Paper, Excellence in Education, appears to mark a ‘rediscovery’ of the role played by contextual factors in influencing the quality and performance of schools. Despite this, the policy initiatives outlined in the White Paper remain wedded to the idea that school improvement can take place largely independently of contextual constraints. This paper argues that this survival of a perspective more in keeping with New Right thinking reflects the continuing dominance of the School Effectiveness Research (SER) paradigm. Providing a methodological critique of SER, we argue that the focus on the use of prior attainment data in the measurement of the ‘value added’ by schools has deflected attention from studies of how patterns of school performance reflect underlying patterns of social advantage/disadvantage. Reviewing a growing body of work which demonstrates how schooling serves to reinforce existing patterns of social advantage, we conclude that genuine and widespread school improvement is unlikely unless contextual constraints on performance are better understood and directly addressed by policy makers.