Within school variation

The NCSL have released a paper proposing ways to tackle within school variation and suggests this might be a focus rather than the usual strategies of approaching between school variations.

Key points:
- Within school variation is more dominant in the UK, which could be due to the inability of professional development to close the gaps between the effective and the ineffective or less competent teachers.
- Schools which improve within school variation see an improvement in many outcomes.
- Whilst it is difficult sometimes, the focus should be on what happens at the classroom level, rather than the department or school level.
- The focus should be upon enabling forces which allow effective "smarter working" such as by the use of performance data; benchmarking and systematically transferring knowledge between those on the front line.