This paper argues that the Dynamic Approach to School Improvement (DASI) (Creemers & Kyriakides, 2012) can promote quality and equity in education. The first part refers to the main features and major steps of DASI. It is emphasised that DASI promotes the design of school improvement projects that are based on a theory which has been tested. Specifically, DASI has its own theoretical framework which refers to factors of educational effectiveness that need to be considered in introducing a change at school level. By making use of the dynamic model of educational effectiveness (Creemers & Kyriakides, 2008), this approach draws attention to the importance of improving school policy for teaching and the school learning environment since these two overarching factors were found to be associated with student achievement gains (Kyriakides, Creemers, Antoniou, & Demetriou, 2010; Hattie, 2009; Scheerens, Seidel, Witziers, Hendriks, & Doornekamp, 2005). DASI is also based on the assumption that each school should develop its own strategies and action plans for improvement, but support to schools should be offered by an Advisory and Research Team (A&RTeam), which is able to provide technical expertise and the available knowledge-base on improvement of factors addressed by the school. Although each school is treated as a professional community responsible for designing and implementing its own improvement strategies and action plans, school stakeholders are not left alone to design and implement their strategies and actions, but are encouraged to make use of the A&RTeam and any other available resource within and/or outside of the school. Therefore, a systematic research based approach to design, implement, and evaluate improvement efforts (Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010; Rowan, Correnti, Miller, & Camburn, 2009), is promoted by DASI. The second part of this paper advocates for the use of DASI to promote quality and equity in education. In regard to its impact on quality, it is stressed that four experimental studies revealed that DASI had a stronger impact on improving learning outcomes than the participatory approach to teacher and school improvement which gives emphasis to professional experience (Creemers & Kyriakides, 2015). Although these four studies provide some empirical support on the impact that DASI can have on promoting student learning outcomes (quality), participating schools were not situated in socially disadvantaged areas. Thus, the third part of this paper presents the methods of an experimental study which moves a step forward and investigates the impact of DASI on promoting not only quality, but also equity in socially disadvantaged schools. Given that early effectiveness studies were concerned with identifying ways to help schools in disadvantaged areas to achieve learning outcomes, it is important to find out whether DASI can help schools in low disadvantaged areas to become more effective. Specifically, the study reported here searches for the impact of DASI on: a) student achievement gains in mathematics (quality dimension of school effectiveness), and b) reducing unjustifiable differences in student learning outcomes in mathematics (equity).

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