School improvement refers both to a field of research and to the deliberate efforts of schools to change their practices and conditions so that pupils learn more. Where school effectiveness research asks which characteristics distinguish more effective schools from less effective ones, school improvement asks how a particular school can become better, and how that change can be sustained. The distinction matters for leaders and policymakers: knowing what effective schools look like does not by itself tell a struggling school what to do next, in what order, or with what support.
Origins
Both traditions grew out of a reaction to the 1966 Coleman Report in the United States, which was widely read as showing that family background, not schools, largely determined achievement. Effective schools researchers set out to show that schools could make a difference. Edmonds (1979), studying urban schools that served poor children well, argued that institutional factors such as leadership, expectations and an orderly atmosphere were linked to pupil performance. Later lists of “correlates” of effective schools were built on this work.
School effectiveness research then developed into a quantitative, increasingly sophisticated field, now usually called educational effectiveness research. Its review by Reynolds et al. (2014) traced its growth from the 1970s across several countries, its methodological and theoretical advances, and its findings on school and classroom processes, but acknowledged that translating these findings into policy and practice had been limited. One of its most developed theories is the dynamic model of Creemers and Kyriakides (2008), which places factors at several levels (classroom, school and system) and assesses each factor not only by how often it occurs but also by its focus, stage, quality and differentiation.
School improvement research developed alongside, with more qualitative, practitioner-oriented and change-focused methods. Hopkins et al. (2014), reviewing its history, described five overlapping phases: understanding the school’s organisational culture; action research and school-level initiatives; managing change through comprehensive reform; building local capacity for pupil learning, with a strong emphasis on leadership; and moving towards improvement of whole systems.
Main approaches
| Tradition | Central question | Typical methods | Main contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| School effectiveness | What makes some schools more effective than others for similar pupils? | Large samples, value-added and multilevel models | Evidence that schools differ in their effects; lists of school and classroom factors |
| School improvement | How do schools change, and how can change be sustained? | Case studies, action research, evaluation of reform programmes | Attention to culture, process, leadership and capacity |
| Improvement science | How can schools learn quickly and reliably what works, for whom and under what conditions? | Small tests of change, practical measures, networks | Disciplined inquiry led by practitioners |
Five essential supports. The most influential empirical framework of recent years came from the University of Chicago. Drawing on seven years of data from several hundred Chicago elementary schools after the city’s 1988 decentralisation, Bryk et al. (2010) identified five organisational supports for improvement: school leadership, parent and community ties, the professional capacity of the staff, a student-centred learning climate, and a coherent instructional plan. The supports worked as a system: schools strong in most of them were far more likely to make substantial gains in reading and mathematics than schools weak in most of them. A later reanalysis summarised the original result as up to ten times more likely (Hart et al., 2020). The study also showed that schools in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods found improvement much harder.
Capacity building. A second strand stresses capacity, the collective ability of a school to keep learning and improving. Stoll (2009) described capacity as the power to engage in and sustain continuous learning by teachers and the school in order to improve pupils’ learning, and traced a shift from school-by-school improvement towards systemic and lateral capacity building through networks. Harris (2011), discussing reforms in Wales, argued that lasting system improvement depends on collective capacity building, in which professionals work together through professional learning communities and take shared responsibility for learners’ outcomes, rather than on heavy external accountability.
Improvement science. Bryk et al. (2015) adapted methods from health care and industry to education. Their six principles are to make the work problem-specific and user-centred; to treat variation in performance as the core problem; to see the system that produces current outcomes; to measure what one aims to improve; to use disciplined inquiry through repeated small tests of change; and to accelerate learning through networked improvement communities, in which schools and researchers share a common aim and a working theory of improvement.
Debates and criticisms
Critics of school effectiveness research argued that it overstated what schools could do on their own. Thrupp (1999) maintained that the social composition of a school’s intake, its “school mix”, shapes its processes and outcomes, so that lists of effective school features risk blaming schools in poor areas for problems rooted in inequality. Others have questioned whether factors identified across many schools can be transferred to any single school, a point that improvement science takes seriously in its focus on variation. School improvement work, in turn, has been criticised for relying on case studies of successful schools and for slow, local change that is hard to scale. Capacity building and networks are attractive ideas, but evidence on their effects is still uneven, and Harris (2011) noted that impact evidence for the Welsh programme was not yet available when she wrote.
What the evidence shows
The strongest conclusions concern the indirect role of leadership. Hallinger and Heck (2010), following a large sample of US primary schools over four years, found that collaborative leadership was associated with growth in the school’s capacity for academic improvement, which was in turn associated with growth in reading and mathematics. They also suggested that leadership and capacity shape each other over time. The Chicago work points the same way: no single support was sufficient, and improvement was most likely where several were strong together (Bryk et al., 2010).
Measuring school improvement
Improvement can be measured as change in pupil outcomes over time, ideally with value-added or growth models that take account of pupils’ prior attainment and background, so that schools are not judged simply by the intake they serve. It can also be measured through the conditions that predict improvement. The Chicago Consortium’s 5Essentials survey of teachers and pupils turns the essential supports into school-level measures; a reexamination found that all 22 of its measures were positively related to improvement in at least some outcomes (Hart et al., 2020). Improvement science adds a third kind of measure. Bryk et al. (2015) argue that the measures needed to guide improvement differ from those used for research or accountability: they track the processes a change is meant to alter, and possible side effects, so that teams can judge quickly whether a change is working.
Evidence from Turkish Research
In Turkey, decisions on curriculum, staffing and much of school finance are made centrally by the Ministry of National Education, and principals are appointed through ministry procedures (see the digest on training and appointing school principals). Improvement therefore depends heavily on what happens inside schools: leadership for learning, teacher collaboration and professional learning. Recent studies by Turkey-based researchers examine exactly these mechanisms.
- Özdemir (2020), Journal of Educational Administration: a multilevel study of 425 teachers in 46 public elementary and lower secondary schools in two provinces. Teachers who found their principals’ evaluation feedback useful took part in more professional learning activities, which were in turn associated with changes in classroom practice; principals’ leadership content knowledge was linked to more useful feedback.
- Kılınç, Bellibaş and Polatcan (2022), Educational Studies: a survey of 447 teachers in public schools in 15 provinces. Learning-centred leadership was associated with changes in teachers’ instructional practice both directly and indirectly through teacher collaboration, with moderate effect sizes.
- Arastaman, Fidan and Çetinkaya (2026), Educational Studies: a cross-sectional study of 1,023 public school teachers found that teacher self-efficacy was positively associated with teachers’ contributions to school improvement, directly and through their motivation to lead; the authors stress that the design does not allow causal conclusions.
Related concepts
- School effectiveness: research on the characteristics that distinguish more effective schools for similar pupils.
- Instructional leadership: leadership focused on teaching and learning, a recurring driver in improvement studies.
- Distributed leadership: leadership spread across many people, often linked to school capacity.
- School culture: shared assumptions and norms that shape whether change is accepted.
- Teacher leadership: teachers leading improvement beyond their own classrooms.
- Professional learning communities: teacher groups that examine practice and pupil learning together.
Key takeaways
- School effectiveness research describes what effective schools look like; school improvement studies how schools change and sustain change.
- The Chicago study found that improvement was most likely where several organisational supports, led by school leadership, were strong together.
- Capacity building and improvement science both treat improvement as continuous, collective learning rather than the adoption of a fixed programme.
- Most evidence links leadership to pupil outcomes indirectly, through capacity, collaboration and teachers’ practice, and much of it is correlational.
References
- Arastaman, G., Fidan, T., & Çetinkaya, A. (2026). Teacher self-efficacy and motivation-to-lead: Driving contributions to school improvement in Türkiye’s public schools. Educational Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2026.2683075
- Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.
- Bryk, A. S., Sebring, P. B., Allensworth, E., Luppescu, S., & Easton, J. Q. (2010). Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons from Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
- Creemers, B. P. M., & Kyriakides, L. (2008). The dynamics of educational effectiveness: A contribution to policy, practice and theory in contemporary schools. Routledge.
- Edmonds, R. (1979). Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership, 37(1), 15–18, 20–24.
- Hallinger, P., & Heck, R. H. (2010). Collaborative leadership and school improvement: Understanding the impact on school capacity and student learning. School Leadership and Management, 30(2), 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632431003663214
- Harris, A. (2011). System improvement through collective capacity building. Journal of Educational Administration, 49(6), 624–636. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231111174785
- Hart, H., Young, C., Chen, A., Zou, A., & Allensworth, E. M. (2020). Supporting school improvement: Early findings from a reexamination of the 5Essentials survey. University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.
- Hopkins, D., Stringfield, S., Harris, A., Stoll, L., & Mackay, T. (2014). School and system improvement: A narrative state-of-the-art review. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 25(2), 257–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2014.885452
- Kılınç, A. Ç., Bellibaş, M. Ş., & Polatcan, M. (2022). Learning-centred leadership and change in teacher practice in Turkey: Exploring the mediating effects of collaboration. Educational Studies, 48(6), 790–808. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2020.1828833
- Özdemir, N. (2020). How to improve teachers’ instructional practices: The role of professional learning activities, classroom observation and leadership content knowledge in Turkey. Journal of Educational Administration, 58(6), 585–603. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-10-2019-0189
- Reynolds, D., Sammons, P., De Fraine, B., Van Damme, J., Townsend, T., Teddlie, C., & Stringfield, S. (2014). Educational effectiveness research (EER): A state-of-the-art review. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 25(2), 197–230. https://doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2014.885450
- Stoll, L. (2009). Capacity building for school improvement or creating capacity for learning? A changing landscape. Journal of Educational Change, 10(2–3), 115–127.
- Thrupp, M. (1999). Schools making a difference: Let’s be realistic! School mix, school effectiveness and the social limits of reform. Open University Press.
Last reviewed: October 2026