Quality Schooling: A Pragmatic Approach to Some Current Problems, Topics and Issues, By David Aspin and Judith Chapman, with Vernon Wilkinson Pounds 35. 0 304 32751 4, Pounds 12.99. 0304 32753 0. School Improvement in an Era of Change, By David Hopkins, Mel Ainscow and Mel West, Pounds 35. 0 304 32608 9, Pounds 12.99. 0 304 32610 0 All in the Cassell School Development Series edited by David Hopkins and David Reynolds.

Tony Edwards on a series which gives an optimistic view of schools’ capacity to improve. There was a time, it now seems long ago, when schools were inspired and perhaps occasionally oppressed by expectations that their own best efforts would bring equality of opportunity. Then they were told that their influence was so outweighed by deeper inequalities that they hardly mattered to the life chances of their pupils. More recently, the loudest message has been that high educational standards are only achievable if schools are made to compete in something closely resembling an education market and to face unprotected the consequences of their failings.

The series to which these four books belong offers much more optimistic views of schools’ capacity to change themselves for the better, but it also reflects the extraordinary changes in what they are expected to achieve and (internationally) in the systems within which they now operate. Although nominally about “School Development”, the key words among the 14 titles published so far are quality, effectiveness, improvement - and, of course, change. Introducing the first book here, the general editors assert that “we now know enough to intervene in the lives of schools and children with a very good chance of enhancing their academic and social progress and their later life chances”.

That confidence comes from a vigorous research movement, in which both are prominent, which is committed to understanding those processes of schooling and particularly of effective innovation which were largely neglected amid the egalitarian optimism of the 1960s. Its findings include strong grounds for scepticism about reforming schools from above. As Michael Fullan commented in an outstanding contribution to the series, The New Meaning of Educational Change, it is the hubris in policy-makers to overrate their own power to reshape practice by underrating the power of practitioners to subvert initiatives or to simply carry on as before.

The emphasis of the series is therefore on the school-level conditions which promote and sustain effective innovation. The active research network to which most of the writers belong should make it possible to avoid that lack of mutual awareness and consequently unproductive repetition which mark the collections of unconnected items which sometimes pass for “series”. But although the knowledge-base for school development is certainly both substantial and growing, I doubt whether it needed so many outlets or whether those outlets are as generally indispensable reading for those committed to improving the quality of schooling as the publisher claims.

A general commitment to provide useful knowledge while avoiding over-generalised recipes is evident in Improving Education, which offers an interesting sample of this field of inquiry. Its contributors include some of the UK’s leading researchers into school effectiveness (for example, Carol Fitz-Gibbon, Harvey Goldstein, David Hopkins, David Reynolds and Pamela Sammons), but also extends appropriately to a range of practitioners because the book originated from seminars organised partly by Birmingham LEA as a contribution to the city’s Quality Development Initiative. Useful as insights into an LEA-wide project and to the kinds of guidance thought to be helpful to it, some of the outside contributors might well have been invited to revise their papers in the light of the Government’s subsequent legislative efforts to force schools to be good.

Among the contributors was the then DES official responsible for schools policy, Nick Stuart, who noted how recent had been the concern for “quality” in public debate about education. Harold Silver’s lucid, scholarly account of how schools have been judged shows how the criteria have changed over time and in relation to the schooling of different social classes. He also places in perspective the fluctuating fashion for blaming schools for their inadequacies, or attributing them to social conditions or faults in the system beyond their control. Describing the rapid emergence of the effective schools “research movement”, he illustrates the frequent tension between researchers’ long-term developmental interest and government’s wish for quick remedies to well-publicised weaknesses.

As would be expected from the author’s previous social histories of education, there is a consistent concern with who defines “quality”, controls the process of judgment, and determines the consequences. Given current preoccupations with inspection and the supposedly improving effects of freeing consumer choice, it will be tempting to seek lessons from the past. Thus the head of OFSTED might look back enviously to a time when an HMI (John Allen) could visit 150 schools in six weeks, but also reflect that the many extracts from their 19th century reports indicate a concern to assist rather than to control, and a generally humanising, broadening influence on schooling.

Although Harold Silver would rightly deplore using the past to service modern debates, it is difficult not to be drawn to old arguments against over-determining the curriculum by how it is examined and over-emphasising the more easily measurable aspects of school performance. His account of more recent times demonstrates the interaction of professional, political and popular judgments of institutions about which everyone has an opinion. It shows how the tasks of schools have become increasingly diffuse, even as measures used to assess their performance become apparently “harder”, and how inconvenient to government is the questioning of its educational remedies. Through most of the account, the voice of the consumer is faint because rarely in evidence when the providers were thought to know best. The last substantive chapter is therefore about the recent faith in markets and the power of consumer choice to secure better schools.

The complexity both of school objectives and school processes has convinced David Aspin and his co-authors that quality schooling “is not amenable to enquiry by traditional empirical methods, and that it is therefore dangerous to draw practical conclusions from the supposedly hard facts and objective conclusions which those methods produce”. Their alternative, “post-empirical”, approach is introduced by a sceptical examination of key terms in the contemporary “quality debate”. Starting with “talk about quality” is sensible when so much of it is being conducted in the new discourse of quality audit, stakeholders, performance indicators and so on.

Drawing on OECD evidence, the authors uncover some substantial common ground between countries (for example, in governments’ promotion of self-managing schools), as well as sharp differences in achieving a balance between central and local decision-making, private choice and public interest. But the style of this opening analysis is rather wordily philosophical in its demonstrations of how very different meanings are conveyed in the “same” words. The subsequent reporting of an extensive Australian study of how “quality schooling” is perceived by various constituencies relies too often on reporting what “one official felt,” “an administrator considered,” or “one principal tackled vigorously”. From these various expressions of individual experience emerge glimpses of the dilemmas of balancing competing claims to educational priority. But the book displays the diffuseness for which Michael Fullan criticises much of the writing about educational reform, and from which he exonerates the last of the books here.

Introducing School Improvement, he describes it as both fine-grained, theoretical and practical. The praise is largely justified. Though it includes a thorough review of what is already known, its more original chapters report a school improvement project involving schools from three LEAs which has the notably ambitious title Improving the Quality of Education for All. School-level developments are described in detail - for example, teacher collaboration in classroom observation and in experiments in teaching and learning, constructive staff appraisal, and the involvement of pupils and of parents in reviewing the curriculum and school organisation - and illustrated by participants’ “vignettes” how those initiatives worked out. In an “era” of schooling apparently shaped by an official theory that if everything is changed (preferably without consultation) then everything will get better, the book asserts against that “faddism” the benefits of schools initiating, implementing and carefully evaluating change.

Each of the “theory” chapters draws lessons for practice from research evidence “already sufficiently robust to guide improvement”. They are unusual in the close attention given to methods of teaching and learning, often neglected by studies of organisational effectiveness which stop outside the classroom door, and by a concern to show what a successful school “looks like from the inside” rather than “factorise” its characteristics so as to lose the interaction of culture and structure. The account of the Project, in which the book’s authors are both participants and researchers, continues that theme in its emphasis on a whole school “moving forward” together. Using frequently the metaphor of a journey, what has been learned from the project so far is presented as a guide to fellow travellers through “a particularly radical and turbulent context” for school improvement.

Tony Edwards is professor of Education at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.