Improving Schools
Improving Schools provides an international forum for peer-reviewed research that interrogates, reimagines and strengthens school improvement, with particular attention to the organisational and systemic levels of action. The journal positions school improvement as a fundamentally human endeavour and foregrounds the question of what schools are actually for, who they serve and for what purpose.
We prioritise scholarship that critically examines how schools enact, reshape, or struggle with policy; how systems support or constrain meaningful organisational change; and how schoolwide initiatives take root within complex, context-specific educational ecologies.
We are especially committed to research that centres the experiences, knowledge and voices of students, educators and communities, recognising their perspectives as fundamental to any understanding of how schools might improve in form and function. Although we welcome studies that examine how leadership approaches, collaborative endeavours, innovative practices, digitalisation, systems thinking and other structures that are reshaping schools and contributing to their improvement, we also encourage explicit engagement with questions relating to issues of equity, the human dimensions of organisational life and the ways in which schools can either reproduce or disrupt entrenched inequities.
In the interest of helping students, teachers, educational leaders, families, academics, education authority staff, evaluators, policy makers, community organsiations and others with a vested interest in school improvement; to improve schools experiencing difficulties or make successful schools even better than they presently are, the journal aims to
- advance systemic and organisational level understanding of school improvement, policy implementation and enactment, and organisational change.
- explore how the intended purpose of schooling shapes improvement efforts.
- support context-rich international scholarship with explicit attention to sociocultural, political and historical contexts.
- explore the various drivers of school improvement within evolving societal and policy dynamics.
- contribute to global conversations concerning justice, equity, and the purpose of schooling.
We publish research that is methodologically rigorous, inclusive of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods. This also includes Policy analyses, critical approaches, and systematic literature reviews that synthesise and advance theoretical or empirical concerns in the field of school improvement.
Papers that narrowly focus on classroom-level or instructional practices without clear school-level implications, that lack contextual grounding and without a clear link to school improvement fall outside the scope of the journal.
| Martin Brown | Dublin City University, Ireland |
| Sedat Gümüs | The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China |
| Shelley D. Zion | Rowan University, USA |
| Gareth Burns | Dublin City University, Ireland |
| Hilal Buyukgoze | Hacettepe University, Turkiye |
| Paul Campbell | The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China |
| Walter Gershon | Rowan University, USA |
| Yara Hilal | The University of Sydney, Australia |
| Shengnan Liu | East China Normal University, China |
| Donnie Adams | The University of Melbourne, Australia |
| Francis Akena Adyanga | Kabale University, Uganda |
| Asmaa Al-Fadala | Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar |
| Michael Apple | University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA |
| Margarita Bianco | University of Colorado Denver, USA |
| Norman Biliwang Mendoza | The Education University of Hong Kong, China |
| Wanda Blanchett | Rutgers University, USA |
| Louise Campbell | University of Dundee, Scotland |
| Dianne Cantali | University of Dundee, Scotland |
| Joan Conway | University of Southern Queensland, Australia |
| Steve Courtney | The University of Manchester, UK |
| Nurullah Eryilmaz | International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Germany |
| Beatriz Fernández | Instituto de Estudios Avanzados en Educación U. de Chile |
| Tony Gallagher | Queen's University Belfast, UK |
| Qing Gu | University College London, UK |
| David Gurr | The University of Melbourne, Australia |
| Philip Hallinger | Mahidol University, Thailand |
| Harold Hislop | Dublin City University, Ireland |
| Johanne Hughes | Queen’s University Belfast, UK |
| Ronni Laursen | Aalborg University, Denmark |
| Jiafang Lu | The Education University of Hong Kong, China |
| Javiera Marfán | Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile |
| Sefika Mertkan | Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus |
| Denise Mifsud | University of Bath, UK |
| Nedim Ozdemir | Ege University, Turkiye |
| Marcus Pietsch | Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Germany |
| James P. Spillane | Northwestern University, USA |
| Nicola Sum | Monash University, Australia |
| Lei Mee Thien | Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia |
| Yufeng Zhang | Beijing Normal University, China |
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