Centre for East Asian Studies

Profile

Sally Thomas is Reader in Education at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol – currently one of only two education departments in the UK with the maximum rating for excellence in research. Until December 2000 she was an Associate Director and founding member of the International School Effectiveness and Improvement Centre at the London Institute of Education. Her main publications are on the topic of school effectiveness and school improvement. In particular she has carried out extensive research studies on ‘value added measures of school effectiveness’ and the application of these measures for different, or overlapping, purposes including: school improvement, school evaluation and self-evaluation, international indicators and academic knowledge-base research. Current research projects address the topics of effective professional learning communities and examining trends over time in schools value added performance. She has also been the UK HE partner in several British Council funded academic links with the China National Institute for Educational Research, Beijing. The current link is planned to run until 1998 and involves developing value added evaluation feedback for Chinese secondary schools. Recent publications include a co-authored book ‘Educational Evaluation And Monitoring; A Systemic Approach’ (published by SWETS autumn 2003).