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The purpose of this paper is to outline how collective capacity building is supporting system‐wide reform in one country. It seeks to outline the way in which professional learning communities within, between and across schools are creating an infrastructure for improving professional practice and raising standards.

The paper is both descriptive and analytical. It draws on the international literature pertaining to system‐wide reform and the empirical evidence concerning professional learning.

The paper highlights some of the challenges in building the collective capacity for change throughout an entire system and reflects on progress to date. The paper concludes by arguing that despite the compelling case for collective capacity building, the real test is to make it happen.

The professional learning communities (PLC) programme in Wales is gathering evidence about impact but as the programme is just completing its first year of implementation these findings are not yet available.

This paper adds to prior analyses and discussion of collective capacity building by providing a system‐wide perspective.

This chapter examines the potential and barriers for evidence-based practices in Californian schools. In a large and complex school system, the state plays an important role in legitimating the use of certain types of evidence, but evidence-based practices are heavily determined by the resources, actors, and prevailing cultures in a local district environment. Until recently, high-stakes accountability policies mandated improvements in student test performance and intrusive interventions for failure. In recent years, the state has shifted to a different accountability approach that emphasizes local control and the use of multiple measures of school performance to pursue continuous improvement around locally developed goals and interventions. Amid this context, two stories arise about evidence-based practices in California. In one story, a set of major and highly touted districts have led the way in demonstrating evidence-informed continuous improvement district-wide. In these districts, the new state accountability approach, enabling leadership, long-term commitments to collective learning, networked opportunities to learn, and access to elite external expertise have contributed to fairly extensive practices of disciplined team problem-solving involving rich data. In a second story, schools and districts that face resource scarcity, high turnover, and conflict and in which past high-stakes accountability left a deep imprint on prevailing norms and routines, leaders and teachers have had difficulty establishing a conducive context for collective learning. However, given ingrained practices and limited absorptive capacity, it is not entirely clear how to enable productive evidence-based practices in such contexts.

This article aims to report the findings of a research project exploring Mauritian principals’ receptivity to the main tenets inherent in Total Quality Management (TQM). The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) framework (aligned with, and an outcome of, the TQM movement) provides a set of criteria for organizational quality assessment and improvement in the business, healthcare and education sectors. Given the imperative to improve the quality of schools in Mauritius, this study was designed to investigate the usefulness of the widely accepted MBNQA framework in the Mauritian context.

A nationwide questionnaire survey of school principals explored the nature and strength of the Baldrige theory of relationships between leadership, systems and processes of primary and secondary schools and the ensuing outcomes. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted.

The findings indicate that Mauritian school leaders play a critical role in influencing school outcomes directly and indirectly through the inner workings of the schooling system.

The research relied on principals’ views as the unique source of data about school leadership. The perspectives of the other stakeholders within schools, including teachers, students and parents, should also count and would offer a richer description of leadership reality in Mauritian schools.

This is the first ever study assessing empirically the notion of “quality” in primary and secondary schools in Mauritius at the national level. It contributes new perspectives about leadership for school improvement.

This chapter draws on the school improvement research of EducAid, a small NGO with schools in Sierra Leone. We review the challenge of school improvement in the context of a low-income country still emerging from the aftermath of civil war, historically low expenditure on education as a per cent of GDP, low levels of trust between people and the government and lack of a reliable evidence base on which to plan school improvement. As predictable consequences of these challenges, the Ministry of Education recognises weaknesses in teacher recruitment and training, resulting in low student attainments. In a critique of adaptations of Hood's (1998) social cohesion/social regulation matrix we argue that it may not provide a coherent framework for understanding the process of school improvement in a low-income country such as Sierra Leone. Specifically, high social cohesion, when focussed on educational improvement, is likely to be necessary for school improvement, but the concept of social regulation is more complex. Although the structure is hierarchical, both at national and local levels, implying high social regulation, lines of accountability seldom work effectively, resulting in low social regulation. The picture is further complicated by evidence that socioeconomic status may be less influential in predicting students' attainments in low-income countries than in those with high and middle incomes. We argue that a professional learning network for head teachers is a necessary starting point for head teachers to stimulate debate on change strategies within their own schools.

School inspection or supervision is one of the core institutional mechanisms for ensuring the quality of education. While analyzing the practices of this quality assurance tool at the basic education level in six developing and emerging economies, this paper found that there has been a major shift in exercising supervision system pushed by the policy dynamics of both international actors and state institutions. The school supervision system has been shaped by decentralization, school-based management, monitoring, data gathering, and output-focused governance. These are also known as the elements of New Public Management (NPM). The growing practice of NPM in all these countries has made the external supervision a less prioritized issue, which is evident in its stagnated and sometimes deteriorated state. On the other hand, the pro-NPM management system advocating for greater autonomy, decentralization and results has not evidently yielded any major positive outcomes, especially in lower-income countries. Thus, the absence of an effective supervision system, both support and control, has created a vacuum in the educational quality assurance instruments. By oversimplifying local contexts in situating NPM, this foreign-emerged management system also has shown reluctance toward fundamental crises of weak institutions in lower-income countries, including resource constraints, skills shortage, and service recipients’ lack of trust, among others. In short, developmental level and institutional capacity matter for the successful implementation of NPM.

This paper will discuss one university’s efforts to initiate a process to better support PK-12 continuous school improvement goals for all 13 schools in their PDS network as a way to broaden the university’s mission and respond more formally to the individual school communities with which they partner.

The paper is conceptual in that it presents an innovative idea to stimulate discussion, generate new ideas and advance thinking about cross-institutional collaboration between universities and professional development schools.

The paper provides insights and ideas for bringing about change and growth in a seasoned PDS partnership network by connecting PK-12 continuous school improvement efforts to PDS partnership work.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how seasoned partnerships can participate in simultaneous renewal by offering ideas that school–university partnership leaders can build upon as they make efforts to participate in the process of growth and change.

The purpose of this article is to outline how far the empirical evidence supports the centrality of leadership in the process of improving underperforming schools.

This article draws on evidence from a contemporary, selected, review of the literature.

The findings show that leadership is the critical factor in the improvement of underperforming schools. Seven new themes, derived from the selected evidence, are presented that illuminate how leaders secure improvement in the most challenging of school contexts.

This review is not a systematic review of the evidence and does not claim to be. It provides a commentary based on selected contemporary evidence and therefore is not comprehensive account of all the relevant evidence pertaining to leading the improvement of underperforming schools. The evidence is derived from sources written in English; therefore, it is fully acknowledged that other sources, in other languages might exist but are not included or reflected.

The practical implications are clearly laid out in the form of seven key themes about leading the improvement of underperforming schools that are of direct practical use.

With so many schools in high poverty areas finding themselves in difficulty, this contemporary review provides new insights about the leadership approaches and practices that continue to make a considerable difference to underperforming schools.