Evaluating the Impact of a Raising School Standards Initiative
Concern about the quality of schooling in disadvantaged urban areas has been especially marked throughout the United Kingdom during the 1990s. This led to the instigation of a major school improvement project in Northern Ireland, known as the Raising School Standards Initiative, that was intended to help schools address significant disadvantage and under-achievement amongst their pupils. The project, based on the knowledge base of the school effectiveness tradition, was designed to target a small number of secondary schools and their main contributory primary schools. The project sought to improve the quality of school management, the pupils’ standards of literacy and numeracy, the levels of qualifications, links with local industry, parental involvement in schools, attendance and punctuality, and to deal with problems of discipline in class. The improvement strategy selected can be seen as an attempt to integrate a ‘top down’ external approach (distal) with a ‘bottom up’ (proximal) strategy developed within individual schools. This chapter describes selected aspects of the full evaluation: the launch and selection of schools and the process of ‘action planning’. It also looks at the impact of the project on management, teaching and learning and educational standards. It concludes with findings which will have implications for other initiatives which seek to raise school standards in the urban context.
The differential improvement of schools causing concern in England
Inspection and performance data show that the least effective schools in England are more likely to sustain the improvement they make after inspection than those that are relatively more effective. This paper discusses the relative improvement of two categories of schools causing concern and illuminates some factors associated with their improvement, focusing on the greater progress of the least effective group. The estimate that approximately one million pupils have benefited from substantial improvement of most of the weakest schools reflects the government's policy of identifying the schools where 'special measures' are needed and requiring action to be taken to improve them.
Good elementary education
Abstract The aim of this study is to identify good elementary education standards that would contribute to the elimination of inequalities in the implementations regarding the utilization -and making it utilized- of the right to elemetary education. Being a descriptive one, this study attempted to identify the definitions and explanations of the right to education in universal documents by a review of literature. The study then attempted to explain the drawbacks concerning the protection and the utilization of the right to education. The study proposes some standards such as accessibility, content, operation so as to eliminate the obstacles hindering the utilization of the right to elementary education.