202 pages
228mm x 145mm
ISBN-10: 1 85856 210 4
ISBN-13: 978 185856 210 0
First Published September 2000, Reprinted 2002 due to popular demand

This study of ten inner city schools shows how the empathy and imagination of teachers and headteachers can enable bilingual pupils to achieve all-round success. Their teachers understand achievement in the widest sense: academic success as marked by assessment results, certainly, but also the development of creativity, initiative and social responsability.

In much official guidance, the emphasis is on organisation and control: strong management, monitoring, assessment, target setting, behaviour control. All these are are important, but only to help ensure that learners are empowered to think and develop. Really effective leadership is about shared responsibility, releasing the energies of teachers, a commitment to ensuring equal opportunities and, above all, a close understanding of the local community and life around the school.

These stories of school improvement show that a relevant curriculum and stimulating teaching and learning styles are of central importance to raising achievement.

This book draws lessons from theories of pedagogy and curriculum, and from the successful practices of specialists in English as an additional language and mainstream teachers working in partnership to give pupils the power to learn and the confidence to succeed.
Terry Wrigley is lecturer in education at the University of Edinburgh. For this book, he has drawn on his recent research in schools, as well as earlier experience as a school inspector.