Integrated learning systems: where does the management take place?

For the last four years of the UK national investigation into the effectiveness of integrated learning systems (ILSs) we have been monitoring the educational contexts within which ILSs are used. Management issues related to ILS use are a significant factor in that educational context. In this paper some of the key management issues related to the effective use of ILSs are outlined. These will include: styles and levels of management of the learning by the ILS; management of the ILS as a learning tool (models of ILS usage); partnership or subservience (‘who’ manages ‘who’ and does it matter?). For some schools, however, the introduction of an ILS has had more profound impacts than this, in that we have recorded changes in teachers' pedagogy. Where such profound changes have been reported then those factors and processes now clearly modelled in school effectiveness and improvement debates have been shown to be operating