Report: Powerful learning: taking educational reform to scale

This report was published by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development from the State of Victoria, Australia

Extract from report:

"This paper is a reflection on how to achieve educational, particularly school reform at scale. Since the early 1980s much has been learned about how to improve individual schools, but successful efforts at systemic improvement have remained elusive. As shall be described in a little more detail later, there have recently been ambitious attempts to reform whole systems, but these have tended to be: i) oppressive and resulting in considerable alienation such as some of the state-wide reforms in the USA; ii) well-designed and centrally driven but with impact stalling after early success as with the literacy reforms in England; or iii) sustained, but usually due to factors outside the immediate control of educators and policy makers such as in Finland. What is needed is a ‘grand theory’ of system change in education that results in relatively predictable increases in student learning and achievement over time. This paper is a modest contribution to that worthwhile and necessary goal."