Promoting quality and equity: An exploratory case study of a primary school in England exploring barriers and facilitators in implementing the Dynamic Approach to school improvement

Abstract

A number of studies have been conducted to identify the impact of the Dynamic Approach to School Improvement (DASI) on student outcomes, using mainly quantitative and experimental designs. However, few studies explored the impact of DASI in schools facing challenging circumstances using qualitative methods. This in turn restricts our ability to provide in-depth and detailed explanations of how, why and under which conditions DASI works in improving student outcomes in socially disadvantaged schools. This study provides an in-depth understanding of the teachers' perspectives of the facilitators and barriers they encountered while implementing DASI in a primary school in England with a relatively high percentage of socially disadvantaged students. Data were gathered from teachers using semistructured interviews at the beginning, during and the end of the intervention. The results of the study highlight important changes in a number of elements related with teacher, school and DASI characteristics.

Teacher job satisfaction in Taiwan: making the connections with teacher attitudes, teacher self-efficacy and student achievement

“…According to a number of studies, if teachers have a positive attitude towards their profession, they tend to complete teaching tasks more effectively (e.g. Gun, 2012; Onen and Ulusoy, 2012; Antoniou and Griaznova, 2018). Studies have also demonstrated that teachers' attitudes towards elements of their work are positively associated with teacher self-efficacy and teacher job satisfaction (e.g.…”

Investigating the quality and equity dimensions of educational effectiveness

“…The last two papers of this special issue, followed a different methodology for addressing the issue of equity. Charalambous et al (this issue), conducted an experimental study to search for the impact of a specific intervention at the school level on both quality and equity, whereas Antoniou and Griaznova (2017) used qualitative methods to investigate the effects of a school based intervention on students' outcomes in a specific primary school (an exploratory case study). Both studies have applied the dynamic approach to school improvement (DASI) (Creemers & Kyriakides, 2012) to schools situated in socially disadvantaged areas by highlighting the importance of conducting school improvement projects that are based on a theoretical framework that has been empirically tested (see Creemers & Kyriakides, 2015).…”

“…The experimental schools of this study which made use of DASI have managed to achieve better student learning outcomes than the control schools (quality dimension) and the direct impact of SES on student achievement was reduced only in the experimental schools (equity dimension). Antoniou and Griaznova (2017), used semi-structured interviews to 16 teachers of a primary school in England to identify the facilitators and barriers of the DASI intervention. In this way, the authors of the paper gain a better understanding of the conditions under which school improvement initiatives prove to be effective in relation to student outcomes.…”

“…One might treat the results of this intervention as indicating that schools have no effect on equity but this argument ignores the fact that longitudinal studies have revealed that the total effect of SES gradually increases (Gustafsson et al, 2017) for various reasons (beyond those that can be controlled by the schools) and by taking actions to avoid any increase in achievement gaps based on SES may be the first step towards creating a fair educational system. In addition, it is essential to acknowledge that studies that collected data from only one school year (see Antoniou & Griaznova, 2017;Charalambous et al, 2017) are not possible to investigate stability and changes in the effectiveness status of schools in terms of quality and/or equity. Therefore, longitudinal studies should be conducted in order to identify factors explaining changes and stability in the effectiveness status of schools in terms of both the quality and the equity dimensions.…”

Improving quality and equity in schools in socially disadvantaged areas

“…Moreover, the constant comparative method was used to analyse data that emerged from interviews with the head teachers, school coordinators and teachers in each school. These interviews were concerned with the experiences and attitudes of school stakeholders towards the implementation of the intervention that took place in their schools (see Antoniou and Griaznova 2018). The analysis of the qualitative data helped us generate ordinal data measuring the extent to which each school in the experimental and control groups invested efforts into implementing their improvement strategies and action plans.…”