Contributors find a range of answers from a selection of countries. How does the national context encourage - or inhibit - “distributed leadership”? What part do LEAs or school districts play? And what’s the role of business? The answers are sometimes surprising.

Look, for example, at the fascinating chapter on Celebration school, set up by the Disney Corporation on land it owns outside Orlando. It started with a radical vision of the shape of education in the 21st century and rapidly changed course. Now it’s “neo-traditional”. In the clash between school reform and Disney’s perceptions about real estate value, that was probably the only possible outcome.

So why, when there there’s so much of it about, does change so rarely happen? It’s cause and effect, argues David Hopkins (who also contributes to Riley and Louis’s book) in his School Improvement for Real (RoutledgeFalmer pound;19.99). “Too many short-term remedies for profound problems,” he says, too much “tinkering at the edges”: if change doesn’t make a difference to learning, it’s a waste of space. For the most part, his argument is familiar. It draws heavily on Michael Fullan’s work, for instance, and on the Improving the Quality of Education for All (IQEA) programme, but it strikes some useful blows.

The constant focus on targets and short-term outcomes acts to narrow and impoverish both learning and teaching, Hopkins tells us; many school-based improvement efforts have to swim against “the tide of regulation”; we need to challenge the one-size-fits-all approach. In the context of this term’s White Paper, Schools Achieving Success, this makes for interesting and provocative reading. School leaders with time on their hands (do they exist?) will find it helpful.

How do we know that improvement is happening? Performance Management for School Improvement: a practical guide for secondary schools by Jeff Jones (David Fulton pound;18) is, its author says, an important part of the answer, and here is a short, down-to-earth and useful guide to what the Government expects of schools in terms of the new requirement. It outlines how schools can use performance management to get the best out of what they already do well and to identify the areas where they need to do better, covering objective-setting, observation, monitoring and evaluating.

Benchmarking for School Improvement by Anthony Kelly (RoutledgeFalmer pound;19.99) takes the question further. You can only be certain that you’re improving, Kelly argues, if you measure your performance not only against your own previous standards but also against those that are being achieved by your competitors or by comparable but non-educational organisations. This is a book that tells you in detail how to do it. Critics would say that it comes close to saying that if it can’t be measured, it’s not improvement. And what about context - to Riley and Louis, the really crucial factor? Kelly defends himself on both counts. Schools into benchmarking will want to read him.

And what would Basil Bernstein have made of this: the prophetic sociologist who brought generations of students at the London Institute to an appreciation of the vital importance of “context” - family, class, language - in children’s learning? A Tribute to Basil Bernstein, 1924-2000 (London Institute of Education pound;16, order on 020 7612 6050, email bmbc@ioe.ac.uk) is the record of a gathering of pupils and colleagues to celebrate the life of a prophetic teacher. Bernstein’s genius was to be a thinker of the unthinkable. That, of course, is deeply unfashionable and makes this book, a stimulating and highly relevant read, all the more valuable.

MICHAEL DUFFY