and other societies, dating from the field's origins in the 1970s. Issues include its history, methodological and theoretical advances, scientific properties of school effects, processes at school and classroom level behind these effects, the somewhat limited translation of findings into policy and practice across the world, and future directions for research and practice in EER and for all of the discipline more generally. Future research needs are argued to be a further concentration upon teaching/teachers, more longitudinal studies, more work on possible context specificity, exploration of the cross-level transactions between schools and their teachers/classrooms, the adoption of "efficiency" as well as "effectiveness" as outcome measures, and a renewed focus upon the education of the disadvantaged, the original focus of our discipline when it began.

The article outlines the three phases that school improvement has been through since the mid‐1980s, paying particular attention to the characteristics of the recent ‘third age’ improvement paradigm. It is argued that these new models of improvement stand a chance of overcoming the difficulties that past improvement has had in affecting outcomes, and a number of areas of potential development for the paradigm are outlined for it to fulfil its promise, particularly in the areas of context specificity, focusing on learning in classrooms and concentrating on understanding ‘the capacity for improvement’. The contributions of ‘Third Age’ school improvement to resolving a number of conundrums that have affected the field are also explored.

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An evaluation is reported of an exercise-based approach to remediation of dyslexia-related disorders. Pupils in three years of a Warwickshire junior school were screened for risk of literacy difficulty using the Dyslexia Screening Test (DST). The 35 children scoring 0.4 or over on the DST were divided randomly into two groups matched for age and DST score. One quarter of the participants had an existing diagnosis of dyslexia, dyspraxia or ADHD. Both groups received the same treatment at school but the intervention group used the DDAT exercise programme daily at home. Performance on the DST and specialist cerebellar/vestibular and eye movement tests were assessed initially and after six months. Cerebellar/vestibular signs were substantially alleviated following the exercise treatment whereas there were no significant changes for the control group. Even after allowing for the passage of time, there were significant improvements for the intervention group in postural stability, dexterity, phonological skill, and (onetailed) for naming fluency and semantic fluency. Reading fluency showed a highly significant improvement for the intervention group, and nonsense passage reading was also improved significantly. Significantly greater improvements for the intervention group than the control group occurred for dexterity, reading, verbal fluency and semantic fluency. Substantial and significant improvements (compared with those in the previous year) also occurred for the exercise group on national standardized tests of reading, writing and comprehension. It is concluded that, in addition to its direct effects on balance, dexterity and eye movement control, the benefits of the DDAT exercise treatment transferred significantly to cognitive skills underlying literacy, to the reading