About SQTE
The FWF project ‘School Quality and Teacher Education’ (SQTE) conducts research on the historico-political, social and pedagogical factors of successful school quality development and school turnaround in England (1990-2020). Which policies and initiatives enabled school development? Which measures contributed to the compensation of social disadvantage in London and other regions of England, which received worldwide attention?
In order to find answers to these questions, headteachers of successful and highly effective schools in England were interviewed on their experiences with school quality development. What were the central levers to improve their schools? How did they suceed in raising the learning outcomes of pupils? How can we utilize their experiences for the practices of school development, teacher development and headteacher training in the Austrian context?
The project focuses particularly on schools in difficult circumstances that attain excellent learning outcomes despite a high proportion of pupils from disadvantaged home backgrounds; specifically, the research looks at schools in deprived areas of London that have improved considerably over the last 15 years in the context of the „London effect“. Funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the project is based at the Kirchlich Pädagogische Hochschule Vienna/Krems (former: University of Salzburg) and the University of Oxford.
On this website, we regularly inform about the project’s progress and insights. In this regard, a first interim report was published in March 2020, which you can find under the menu item Publications or here directly.
KPH Vienna/Krems - University of Salzburg
The project is located at the Kirchlich Pädagogische Hochschule Vienna/Krems (until August 2021: School of Education, University of Salzburg).
The project lead is Roland Bernhard. His principal collaborators at the University of Salzburg were Ulrike Greiner, head of the School of Education, and Burkhard Gniewosz, professor of educational sciences.
University of Oxford
The project is partially located at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education in the context of a Visiting Research Fellowship, for which the University of Oxford has generously provided an office and additional infrastructure in 2019 and 2020. Dr Bernhard’s principal collaborators in Oxford are Katharine Burn, Associate Professor in Education, and Pam Sammons, Professor of Education, who specialises in school effectiveness and improvement research. The project complies with the guidelines issued by the University of Oxford’s Central University Research Ethics Committee (CUREC), which has reviewed and approved it. The SQTE project is continuing and consolidating the existing collaboration between the Kirchlich Pädagogische Hochschule Vienna/Krems (former: School of Education, University of Salzburg), and the University of Oxford.