Tony Attwood's contribution to school improvement has been extremely dramatic during the past ten years, and he is widely recognised as having added a major new dimension to school improvement work throughout the UK.

From the very start Tony's work in the field of school improvement differed from most academics working in this area by stating that it was quite possible for school improvement to be achieved through the work of individual teachers and managers working in schools, without the assistance of academics, government funded school improvement teams, and other outsiders.

In developing this approach, Tony took the work of Dr Alma Harris, whom he met at Nottingham University, which suggested that most improving schools had individual departments that were still failing.  Likewise Dr Harris had shown that failing schools often contained islands of improvement within specific departments.

Tony argued that this must indicate that the powerhouse for improvement must lie within individual departments within secondary schools.  Such improvement areas had developed, he reasoned, because of the work of the head of department and his or her colleagues, not because of the intervention of outsiders.

At the same time Tony recognised that in some schools powerful and energetic head teachers could make a major difference to an individual school.  But once again this was normally down to the dynamism of the individual rather than input from outsiders.

Such an approach has led to the development of an approach to school improvement which, unlike the traditional routes propounded in university departments of education, needs no external or additional funding.  It thus brings immediate school improvement within the realms of all schools, rather than the lucky few who have additional funding in place.