The Roma are Europe's largest minority ethnic group, yet too few Roma achieve a level of education that enables them to secure employment or positive life chances. Gaps in their attainment compared to other ethnic groups start to appear in the earliest years, with Roma participating in early education at half the rate of their peers. The European…

Following a learning experience with one of her Year 2 students, whose extreme and challenging behavior required extra support from a teaching assistant (TA) but who loved practical hands-on science days and investigations, it occurred to the author that there must be hundreds of children and TAs all over the UK facing challenging dilemmas every…

Teachers, speech and language therapists, teaching assistants and nursery nurses are required to work together in a range of contexts in Foundation Stage (FS) school settings in the UK. In some cases these groups of practitioners are mutually involved in the implementation of a strategy or intervention and in the use of a particular tool or…

There has been much policy interest on the theme of children's services in recent years. For example, the 1998 National Child Strategy explicitly aims to ensure good quality, affordable childcare for children aged 0 to 14 in every neighbourhood, including both formal childcare and support for informal arrangements. The sector has a changed a lot…