School improvement step by step, building on your own success without using outside consultancies.

One of the most interesting and successful ways of effecting school improvement in the past ten years has been to turn intuition on its head and to start, not with the parts of the school that are problematic, but with the parts of the school that are doing well.

The argument is that almost every school has at least one department that is doing very well. Many schools of course have a number of successful departments.

The approach then is to get this department to work with another in spreading its approach, and for these departments then to link to another, as gradually the whole school is reformed.

The report: “The Improving Department” takes this simple method and shows how this approach can be implemented anywhere, without extra funding and without increasing the workload.

The report summarises research which shows that change in schools made at the departmental level can have an enormous and immediately positive effect on pupil attitudes, exam results, pupil behaviour and staff/pupil relations. In fact the research suggests that it is change at the departmental level which is the power-house for driving successful schools forward.

The Improving Department sets out the key factors which highly effective and improving departments have in common. It concludes that it is working procedures which generate major school improvement and reveals that departmental improvements can be easier to start, and are easier to maintain, than whole-school policies.

In order to help schools implement this approach the report is provided in copiable formats (as a download, on CD, or as a photocopiable book) so that two or three heads of department can each undertake to read a few pages and then come together to discuss how the ideas contained therein can be implemented within their department.

Cat No: 978 1 86083 365 6