Sustaining school performance: school contexts matter

Drawing upon empirical data from a pan-Europe wide study on successful school leadership in challenging circumstances, the paper discusses an analytical model designed as a framework of analysis to investigate the dynamic relationships between challenges in schools’ internal and external contexts and how leadership interventions mediate these and transform the nature of their influences on school improvement over time. Illustrative narratives of one English school and one Swedish school are used to show that the nature and intensity of challenges embedded in apparently similar school contexts vary across different school improvement phases. The analytical model connects the interactions between different dimensions of school contexts with the dynamic (and sometimes unstable) change and development of school performance.