The school effectiveness and school improvement movement has had a great impact on educational reform over the past thirty years. It has been both influential because it has demonstrated that schools can make a difference to student achievement, beyond that which is associated with family background, but also controversial, because some governments in the late 1980s and early 1990s interpreted this as schools being the only thing that made a difference. However, if the history of school effectiveness is placed in the longer history of education in general, then we can start to see the role that it has played in reshaping how we perceive education. Over the course of history, education has had four major shifts in focus, with each shift bringing new understandings of what education means. This commenced by very localised education characterised as thinking and acting individually, where only those that could afford it were given any kind of education and this has progressed through thinking locally, nationally and internationally, but still acting locally. The evidence suggests that these changes have brought as much improvement in terms of student achievement as is likely to occur and that it is time for a new way of approaching education, which is identified as thinking and acting both locally and globally. The paper considers what this means for school effectiveness and school improvement research and makes some suggestions as to where the research might move in the future to maintain its important place in educational change.