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John Gray, Improvement and Effectiveness in SchoolsProfessor John Gray

Position/Status
Professor of Education

E-mail Address: jmg1004@cam.ac.uk

Phone: 01223 767649

Qualifications
MA (Oxon)
EdM (Harvard)
PGCE (Sussex)
DPhil (Sussex)

Membership of Professional Bodies/Associations
Member of the British Educational Research Association
European Educational Research Association
American Education Research Association
International Congress on School Effectiveness and Improvement
Fellow of British Academy

Profile

John Gray is a Professor of Education at Cambridge University and served as the first Dean of Research in its newly-converged Faculty of Education. Prior to joining the Faculty he was Director of Research at Homerton College, Cambridge (1994-2001) and Professor of Education at Sheffield University (1987-1993). He has been a Visiting Professor at the London Institute of Education and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000.

Research Interests:

His current research interests lie in the areas of school improvement, school effectiveness, the dynamics of change, the nature of educational reform and educational evaluation. He is particularly interested in the challenges facing disadvantaged schools and their communities. During the course of his career he has directed well over 60 externally-funded research projects for a wide range of sponsors including the ESRC, the DfES, LEAs and their schools, research organisations and bodies beyond the UK. He has also led several major school improvement initiatives and contributed to their evaluation.

His research has ranged widely across issues of contemporary concern. He was one of the first researchers in the UK to develop 'value-added' approaches for judging the quality of schooling and has explored a range of factors affecting schools' rates of improvement. With Jean Rudduck, he led the national research for the Elton Committee of Enquiry into Discipline in Schools. During the early 1980s he was a founding parent of the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales, a major longitudinal study of factors affecting young people's participation in education and training post-16 which continues to this day. He also undertook some of the first research into the methodology and impact of school inspection on schools' development, much of it in collaboration with the late Brian Wilcox.

Contributions to the Development of Educational Research:

He has served on the major committees of the Economic and Social Research Council concerned with education, chaired their national initiative on the Quality of Teaching and Learning and led their first enquiry, during the early 1990s, into the structure, organisation and impact of educational research. He directed the 1985 Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association and was a Founder Convenor of the European Educational Research Association. He has served on numerous steering groups for research projects funded by the DfES and the Scottish Office as well as other government departments. He has been on the Board of the Teacher Training Agency and chaired its Research Committee, with a particular remit to develop greater involvement of practising teachers with educational research. He has also acted as a consultant to a wide range of organisations including the Northern Ireland Assembly, the National Audit Office and the Nuffield Foundation. Amongst his current roles he is a Syndic of UCLES (the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate) and a member of the DfES Advisory Group on Research Strategy.

Early Career:

On leaving school he worked for Shelter in the aftermath of the documentary Cathy Come Home and was responsible for developing a national programme of sponsored walks, at the time a largely unknown form of fund-raising for charity. After studying PPE at Exeter College, Oxford he obtained a Masters at Harvard (where he also worked as a Research Assistant at its Centre for Education Policy Research) and a doctorate at Sussex, where he also trained as a teacher. He taught in inner London schools and for the Open University before moving to Edinburgh University in 1975 as a Research Fellow at its Centre for Educational Sociology. In 1979 he moved to a lectureship at Sheffield University where he worked on a range of innovative research and teaching initiatives including a major School-Focused Secondment programme and the first national Masters degree on evaluation methods specifically designed to meet the needs of LEA advisers and inspectors.

Main Committees and Responsibilities:

  • Chair of the Board of the Faculty of Education
  • Chair of the Standing Committee on Higher Degrees
  • Co-Chair, Leading Learning for School Improvement Academic Group
  • Member of the Board of Syndics of Cambridge Assessment

Research Topics

School improvement; School effectiveness and organisation; Reform processes in education; Pupil progress and attitudes to school; Disadvantaged schools; Educational accountability; Educational evaluation; Gender, ethnicity and social class issues in education; Research design; Survey analysis; Research synthesis; Integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches

Recent Research Projects

  • Developing Value-Added Approaches to School Improvement (various LEAs)
  • Raising Boys' Achievement at School: Research and Intervention Project (DfES, with Warrington, Younger and Rudduck)
  • Improvement Processes in Schools Facing Exceptionally Challenging Circumstances (DfES, with MacBeath)
  • Recent Research Projects:
  • The Impact of Transitions and Transfers on Pupil Progress (DfES, with Galton and Rudduck)
  • Advanced Multi-Level Modelling Methods in Analysis of A-Level Results (ESRC, with Goldstein)

Current Research Interests and Research Projects

  • The influence of schools on young people's mental health outcomes (with Maurice Galton and Colleen McLaughlin, funded by the Nuffield Foundation as part of its Adolescent Mental Health Initiative).
  • The impact on the educational system of trends towards 'Governing by Numbers' (in collaboration with Jenny Ozga at CES, Edinburgh University, part of a project funded by the ESRC).
  • The effects of increases in educational expenditure on long-term improvements in school performance: explorations using a dynamic methodology (in collaboration with Jean Mangan and Geoff Pugh of Staffordshire University, DCSF).
  • I also have longstanding interests in the various factors that affect the implementation of educational reform, especially national reform initiatives.
  • I am also continuing my programme of empirical research into:
    • the effects of schools on pupils' progress in disadvantaged areas using the increasingly wide range of longitudinal data now nationally available;
    • the factors influencing longer-term trends in school performance.

Course Involvement

  • MPhil Educational Research
  • MPhil/MEd Educational Leadership and School Improvement
  • PhD supervision

Publications

John Gray is the author/co-author of 8 books, over 35 major published reports, some 70 articles in refereed journals and more than 40 substantial book chapters.

Selected Publications:

Gray, J. (2005)
Is failure inevitable? The recent fate of secondary school reforms intended to alleviate social disadvantage, in A. Heath, J. Ermisch and D. Gallie (eds) Understanding Social Change, Oxford University for British Academy (pp 73-91)

Mangan, J., Pugh, G. and Gray, J. (2005) Changes in exam performance over the course of a decade: searching for patterns and trends over time, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 16, 1, 29-50

Gray, J. (2004)
Frames of reference and traditions of interpretation: some issues in the identification of 'under-achieving' schools, British Journal of Educational Studies, 52, 3, 293-309

Gray, J., Schagen, I. and Charles, M. (2004)
Tracking pupil progress from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2: how much do the 'route' taken and the primary school attended matter? Research Papers in Education, 19, 4, 389-413.

Gray, J. (2004)
School effectiveness and the 'other outcomes' of schooling: a reassessment of three decades of British research, Improving Schools, 7, 2, 185-198.

Gray, J., Peng, W., Steward, S. and Thomas, S. (2004)
Towards a gender-related typology of school effects: some new perspectives on a familiar problem, Oxford Review of Education, 30, 4, 529-550.

Hofman, A., Hofman, R., Gray, J. & Daly, P. (2004)
Quality and Equity in European Education: An empirical analysis. Amsterdam, Kluwer Academic Press.

Galton, M., Gray, J. & Rudduck, J. (2003)
Progress in the Middle Years of Schooling: Continuities and Discontinuities in Learning, Research Report RR443, London. Department for Education and Skills (pp120)

Gray, J. (2002)
Jolts and reactions: two decades of feeding back value-added information on schools' performance, in A. Visscher and R. Coe (eds) School Improvement Through Performance Feedback, Lisse: Swets and Zeitlinger (pp 143-162)

Gray, J., Goldstein, H. & Thomas, S. (2001)
Predicting the future: the role of past performance in determining trends in institutional effectiveness at A-level, British Educational Research Journal, 27, 4, 1-15

Gray, J. (2001)
Building for improvement and sustaining change in schools serving disadvantaged communities, in M. Maden (ed) Success Against the Odds - Five Years On, London: Routledge Falmer (pp1-39)

Gray, J. (2000)
Causing Concern but Improving: A Review of Schools' Experiences on Special Measures, London: Department for Education and Employment Research Series (pp44)

Gray, J., Hopkins, D., Reynolds, D., Wilcox, B., Farrell, S. & Jesson, D. (1999)
Improving Schools: Performance and Potential, Buckingham: Open University Press (pp162)

Galton, M., Gray, J. & Rudduck, J. (1999)
The Impact of Transitions and Transfers on Pupil Progress, London: Department for Education and Employment Research Series (pp37)

Arnot, M., Gray, J., James, M. & Rudduck, J. (1998)
Recent Research on Gender and Educational Performance, London: HMSO (pp105)

Wilcox, B. & Gray, J. (1996)
Inspecting Schools: Holding Schools to Account and Helping Schools to Improve, Buckingham: Open University Press (pp160)

Gray, J., Goldstein, H. & Jesson, D. (1996)
Changes and improvements in schools' effectiveness: trends over five years, Research Papers in Education, 11, 1, 35-51

Gray, J., Reynolds, D., Fitz-Gibbon, C. & Jesson, D. (eds) (1996)
Merging Traditions: The Future of Research on School Effectiveness and School Improvement, London: Cassell (pp192)

Gray, J. & Wilcox, B. (1995)
"Good School, Bad School": Evaluating Performance and Encouraging Improvement, Buckingham: Open University Press (pp284)

Gray, J., Jesson, D. & Tranmer, M. (1994)
Local Labour Market Variations in Post-16 Participation, Sheffield: Department of Employment Research and Development Series No. 26 (pp31)

Gray, J., McPherson, A. & Raffe, D. (1983)
Reconstructions of Secondary Education: Theory, Myth and Practice Since the War, London: Routledge