SCHOOL PERFORMANCE, SCHOOL EFFECTIVENESS AND THE 1997 WHITE PAPER

The rhetoric of the 1997 White Paper, Excellence in Education, appears to mark a 'rediscovery' of the role played by contextual factors in i nfluencing the quality and performance of schools. Despite this, the p olicy initiatives outlined in the White Paper remain wedded to the ide a that school improvement cart take place largely independently of con textual constraints. This paper argues that this survival of a perspec tive more in Keeping with New Right thinking reflects the continuing d ominance of the School Effectiveness Research (SER) paradigm. Providin g a methodological critique of SER, we argue that the focus on the use of prior attainment data in the measurement of the 'value added' by s chools has deflected attention from studies of how patterns of school performance reflect underlying patterns of social advantage/disadvanta ge. Reviewing a growing body of work which demonstrates how schooling selves to reinforce existing patterns of social advantage, we conclude that genuine and widespread school improvement is unlikely unless con textual constraints on performance are better understood and directly addressed by policy makers.