John is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge where his main commitment is to the Centre for Commonwealth Education, working with countries of the Commonwealth on leadership for learning, teaching and professional development.
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Prior to John MacBeath's Cambridge appointment in 2000 he was Director of the Quality in Education Centre at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow where he worked closely with the Scottish Inspectorate on self evaluation, leadership and school improvement, paralleling self evaluation initiatives with the National Union of Teachers in England. Since 1997 John has been working with the Hong Kong Education Bureau on the development, evaluation and embedding of self evaluation in primary, secondary and special schools. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member of Tony Blair’s Task Force on Standards and from 1997 to 1999 Scotland’s Action Group Standards. In 1997 John received the OBE for services to education and in June 2008 an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. In 2006 he was elected President of the International Congress on School Effectiveness and Improvement.
Series: World Library of Educationalists
In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions - so the world can read them in...
Published December 13th 2011 by Routledge
What lessons can we learn from the relationship between policy-makers and schools over the life of the ‘New’ Labour and its predecessor Conservative government? What happened to ‘Education, Education, Education’ as it travelled from political vision to classroom practice? What are the lasting...
Published September 15th 2010 by Routledge
Children, their World, their Education is the definitive text for students, teachers, researchers, educational leaders and all who are interested in primary education. As the culmination of the Cambridge Primary Review, the most comprehensive enquiry into English primary education for half a...
Published October 13th 2009 by Routledge
Leading schools is becoming almost daily a more complex and demanding job. Connecting Leadership and Learning reassesses the purpose of schools, the nature of learning and the qualities of leadership that make schools authentic places of learning. Starting with a review of what we can claim to know...
Published July 24th 2008 by Routledge
Written for heads and teachers, this forward-thinking book examines exactly what the relationship between inspection and self-evaluation means for schools and explores some of the underpinning issues, featuring examples of best practice from successful schools. It is full of useful advice on topics...
Published August 2nd 2006 by Routledge
Leading schools is becoming almost daily a more complex and demanding job. Connecting Leadership and Learning reassesses the purpose of schools, the nature of learning and the qualities of leadership that make schools authentic places of learning. Starting with a review of what we can claim to know...
Published July 24th 2008 by Routledge
Written for heads and teachers, this forward-thinking book examines exactly what the relationship between inspection and self-evaluation means for schools and explores some of the underpinning issues, featuring examples of best practice from successful schools. It is full of useful advice on topics...
Published July 26th 2006 by Routledge
Self-evaluation is going global. This book describes what happened when teams of school students from across the world embarked on the trip of a lifetime to explore the school lives of their international contemporaries.The students involved in The Learning School project used a variety of tools to...
Published October 23rd 2002 by Routledge
Self-evaluation is going global. This book describes what happened when teams of school students from across the world embarked on the trip of a lifetime to explore the school lives of their international contemporaries.The students involved in The Learning School project used a variety of tools to...
Published October 23rd 2002 by Routledge
Series: What's in it for schools?
Self-evaluation in schools sits at the top of the national agenda in response to an awareness that performance tables and inspector's reports can only tell a partial story. Schools are now encouraged to raise questions about 'How are we doing?' and 'How do we know?'. Self-Evaluation: What's in it...
Published April 10th 2002 by Routledge
Series: What's in it for schools?
Self-evaluation in schools sits at the top of the national agenda in response to an awareness that performance tables and inspector's reports can only tell a partial story. Schools are now encouraged to raise questions about 'How are we doing?' and 'How do we know?'. Self-Evaluation: What's in it...
Published March 27th 2002 by Routledge
In a political and economic climate in which school performance is made public, performance tables and inspectors' reports can only tell a partial story.This is a unique book. It tells the story of one school seen through the eyes of a pupil, a parent, a teacher, a headteacher and a critical friend...
Published September 20th 2000 by Routledge
This best-selling book illustrates how schools can tell their own story. It draws on ground-breaking work with the National Union of Teachers to demonstrate a practical approach to identifying what makes a good school and the part that pupils, parents and teachers can play in school improvement....
Published March 10th 1999 by Routledge
Leadership for Learning has become something of a cliché in the last few years. Much effort has been expended in measuring correlations using proxies such as student attainment and head teacher/principal characteristics. Connecting Leadership and Learning: Principles for Practice is concerned to go deeper into the three key ideas contained the title, each of them open to widely differing interpretation. They argue that we can only understand ‘connecting’ when we have a firm grasp of learning (‘in the wild’ and ‘in captivity’) and an understanding of leadership as both an individual and a shared activity.
Exploring the connections was a three year project with schools in seven countries from the U.S. through Europe to Australia. As teachers, heads and board members from these seven countries came together in Cambridge, Copenhagen, Innsbruck and Athens the authors began to construct principles for practice which travel, which have been tested in classrooms from Seattle to Brisbane and London to Oslo. Each of the five principles and prompts to action are examined in turn. The book is co-edited with John’s Australian colleague Neil Dempster with chapters from his Cambridge colleagues (David Frost, Sue Swaffield and Joanne Waterhouse), Jorunn Moller from Oslo and Goerge Bagakis from Greece.
Publications:
John’s has written several books on school self evaluation, including: School Inspection and Self Evaluation: Working with the New Relationship, (Routledge, 2006), Self-evaluation: What’s in it for Schools? (Routledge, 2002), Self-evaluation in the Global Classroom(Routledge, 2002), Self-Evaluation in European Schools: a Story of Change (Routledge, 2000) and Schools Must Speak for Themselves, (Routledge, 1999).
Among the five Routledge books on self evaluation, that John has written, the one of which he is most proud was written entirely by school students and lightly edited by himself and his Japanese colleague Hidenori Sugimine. Self-Evaluation in the Global Classroom tells the story of what must be the most exciting project in student voice ever undertaken - a group of students from seven countries traveling the globe for a year evaluating classroom practice from the Shetland Islands to Japan and Korea via three other European countries. Living in the townships in South Africa, spending a night in prison, providing critical feedback to teachers and policy makers in Japan tells a compelling story
A companion volume Self-Evaluation in European Schools: a Story of Change tells the story of 101 European schools through the eyes of a student, a parent, a teacher, a head teacher. Now published in nine European languages, this story of change has had a significant impacted on policy development in those countries.
Publications in academic journals include special editions of the Leadership for Learning Project in School Leadership and Management, International Journal of Leadership in Education (forthcoming) and Leading and Learning. With Lejf Moos he is co-editor of a new international journal Evaluation, Assessment and Accountability in Education which will be launched in January 2009.
John’s other titles include Leadership for Learning: International Perspectives, (Sense Publishers 2008), Teachers Under Pressure (Sage 2008), Schools on the Edge: Responding to Challenging Circumstances (Sage 2006) and Improving School Effectiveness (Open University Press, 2001).
