Schools in challenging circumstances: A reflection on what we know and what we need to know

A collection of papers looking at school improvement in schools facing challenging circumstances is very welcome. The field of school improvement has been criticized, with some merit, for sometimes giving the impression that school context is not that important, and that any school can, with appropriate action, improve significantly. Most advocates of school improvement do recognize the importance of the social context of the school, but, as several of these papers point out, we are still learning to understand how context affects the work of improvement. In that sense, these papers illustrate both the significant contributions that have been made by the school improvement literature and the challenges still facing this field. The papers in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to school improvement. Harris, Chapman, Muijs, Russ, and Stoll look at improvement efforts and results in eight schools in a de-industrialized area of England. These schools had all shown several years of increases in externally measured student outcomes and reported a strong focus on literacy and numeracy, extensive use of student data to drive change, and extensive teacher professional development. The paper by Reynolds, Harris, Clarke, Harris, and James also reports on school improvement work with eight schools in England, focusing in this case more on the process of engaging schools as external consultants and creating effective internal commitment to