Pat Thomson is Professor of Education in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK. A former headteacher, she works with teachers and artists using action research and ethnographic approaches. Her research focuses on arts, learning and change in educational, gallery, museum and community settings. Christine Hall is Professor of Education in the School of Education at The University of Nottingham, UK. Formerly a secondary school teacher, she has worked in teacher education for the last 20 years supervising numerous students and teachers on school-based research projects. Her research is on literacy and the arts in schools.

• List of FiguresList of TablesAcknowledgementsSeries Editor's Preface Glossary of Research Methods and ApproachesIntroducing the book1. Studying a School2. Getting Into the School3. Getting to Know the Neighbourhood4. Reading the School 5. Living with the School6. Multiple Perspectives on the School7. Analysing Complex Data Sets8. Writing the SchoolAppendixBibliographyIndex

The authors are generous with their suggested further reading and because of the geographical lens offered these are likely to give the reader references that many educational researchers will be unfamiliar with. The quality and depth of the approaches that the authors suggest make me particularly confident in the robustness of these qualitative data generation approaches. However, the authors do not shy away from the quantitative data that can be generated through national databases. A rich picture of one school can be generated if their advice about place-based research is followed. Overall, this book has much to be commended on and I highly recommend it to any researcher involved in school-based research.