Improving Schools from the Inside Out
Towards Self-Improving School Systems
Lessons from a City Challenge
By Professor Mel Ainscow CBE
Inequality and fragmentation in England’s schools system requires a new model to tackle the problem from the inside, according to a new book by Professor Mel Ainscow CBE, of The University of Manchester.
Towards Self-Improving School Systems: Lessons from a City Challenge documents how research carried out by a team of academics in the Manchester Institute of Education was used to shape a highly acclaimed city-wide improvement initiative involving over 1,100 schools.
Drawing on over ten years of research carried out with his colleagues at the Manchester Institute, Mel Aisncow, Chief Advisor to the £50m Greater Manchester Challenge, presents a new way of thinking about system change.
Ainscow champions the notion that schools have the capacity to improve themselves. His model builds on the idea that there are untapped resources within schools, and the communities they serve, that can be mobilised in order to transform schools from places that do well for some children to ones that do well for many more. This requires teachers, especially those in senior positions, to see themselves as having a wider responsibility for all children and young people, not just those that attend their own schools.
Ainscow’s model has major implications for key stakeholders within the education system; it requires those who administer district school systems to adjust their priorities and respond to improvement efforts that are led from within schools.
“This is one of the most extraordinarily powerful books on school improvement and positive systemic change I have ever read,” Andy Hargreaves says in his brilliant foreword for the book. “It bears a message that the world needs to acknowledge: working with the community, not against it; investing in professional and community capital; reviving rather than removing local community and democracy; collaborating with competitors; and being pragmatic about means in the pursuit of ideologically unshakeable ends."
About the Author
Mel Ainscow is Professor of Education and Co-director of the Centre for Equity in Education at the University of Manchester, UK. He is also Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Previously a head teacher, local education authority inspector and lecturer at the University of Cambridge, his work focuses on ways of making school systems effective for all children and young people. Currently he is leading Schools Challenge Cymru, the Welsh Government’s multi-million pound flagship programme to accelerate the rate of improvement across the country’s schools. In the Queen’s 2012 New Year Honours list Mel was made a CBE for services to education.
Towards Self-Improving School Systems
Lessons from a City Challenge
By Professor Mel Ainscow CBE
Published: 2nd April 2015
PB: 978-0-415-73660-2: £29.99
HB: 978-0-415-73659-6: £100
To find out more, please visit:
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415736602
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