Children and young people live nested lives, so that when classrooms do not function as we want them to, we go to work on improving them. Those classrooms are in schools, so when we decide that those schools are not performing appropriately, we go to work on improving them, as well. But those young people are also situated in families, in neighbourhoods, in peer groups who shape attitudes and aspirations often more powerfully than their parents or teachers. (David Berliner, 2005) NESTED LIVES

The nesting of school performance The ‘family’ and neighbourhood context The social and economic context The national cultural context The global policy context The school context The ‘family’ and neighbourhood context The social and economic context The national cultural context The global policy context The school context

Measuring what we value? We couldn’t find a mechanism to show we valued the things we didn’t test. That was the problem. We always valued the other things but we couldn’t find a way of showing it, that’s the problem. We need to get to a situation where there’s a way of showing how much we value dancing, music, sport and PE; how much we value how much improvement children make in the widest sense and that really gets into the public consciousness. (Estelle Morris, Secretary of State for Education, )

Self-evaluation: a question of purpose As preparation for inspection? For practitioner professional development? To enhance student learning? To build school capacity? To raise standards? To encourage pupil voice?

Schools need critical friends, individuals who, at appropriate times, listen and help them sort out their thinking and make sound decisions, who are not afraid to tell them when expectations for themselves and others are too low and when their actions do not match their expectations. They also help schools raise their expectations because critical friends care about schools and want the best for them. (Stoll and Thomson, 1996, p27)

understands your work yet is a little removed and so can offer a different perspective? Asks questions that make you think, reassess your assumptions, helping you to see things in a new light? do you trust and know to be on your side, even if they sometimes present challenging critiques of your actions? helps you make sound decisions, challenge expectations, and helps shape, but never determines, courses of action? alerts you to issues perhaps only half perceived, whilst being sympathetic to you as a person and to the bigger tasks you face? WHO?

UNICEF 2008 The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which are born. (An Overview of Child Well Being in Rich Countries (2007 p. 3).