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 New Structure of School Improvement: Inquiring Schools and Achieving Students Buckingham: Open U
A conversion kit designed to convert a standard land bus vehicle into an amphibious vehicle capable of propulsion on water including a removable roof-boat, a sealing subsection to waterproof the underside of the vehicle, attachments for waterproofing the front, rear and sides of the vehicle and a water jet power means adaptable to operate through the converted vehicle's power train to propel the vehicle on water.
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A Thesis submitted to the Department of Physics, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of 
Master of Science (Solid State Physics)