In January 2018, the Department for Education (DfE) committed £7.7 million over five years to the Curriculum Fund, to help teachers deliver the more challenging National Curriculum introduced in 2014, while reducing the workload associated with curriculum planning and resourcing. As part of the Curriculum Fund, the DfE set up the curriculum…

This paper presents a novel conceptualisation of the school context by examining the 'personal' (emotional wellbeing), the 'political' (everyday political actions and power relations) and the 'Political' (the Political system, including electoral politics and governmental policy) and how these interrelate. Informed by literatures from a range of…

This article examines the effectiveness of design as a subject fulfilling its role of developing creativity within students by allowing and supporting the behaviour and its expression. Creativity in education has been a pressing issue for many countries throughout recent history, once again resurfacing as a key topic for discussion, yet the term…

We explore the professional identities of UK-based secondary science teachers who actively participated in science research for at least six months. The study uses thematic analysis to analyse semi-structured interviews with 17 participants across England and Scotland, from a variety of educational/socio-economic contexts. We found that through…

This article discusses the use of assessment by teachers to replace external marking. It shows how professional participation and moderation can provide reliability in summative assessment, even in public examinations for older students. It draws on historical experiences of assessment for A-level English literature.

Humans are born to learn by understanding where adults look. This is likely to extend into the classroom, making teacher gaze an important topic for study. Expert teacher gaze has mainly been investigated in the laboratory, and has focused mostly on one cognitive process: teacher attentional (i.e., information-seeking) gaze. No known research has…

This article discusses the challenges faced teaching the promotion of 'British values', especially for trainee teachers. The advancement of these 'British values' as set out by the Department for Education is confusing, contradictory, and appear to exclude a sizeable minority of pupils of minority backgrounds from the current historical narrative…

Recent systematic observations of UK classrooms are reviewed. Findings about how verbal teacher-feedback and students' on-task behaviour are associated are discussed. The method, utility and impact of this type of quantitative research are discussed using a large-scale (mass) secondary school study. Findings include: the use of positive feedback…

This paper explores the influences of design on the perceptions and actions of students and teachers at four UK secondary schools. Typical post occupancy evaluations focus on environmental issues such as acoustics, lighting and temperature, using predominantly quantitative methods that often fail to explore how different environmental and social…

This paper explores the ways in which collaborative action research can facilitate the development of inclusive practices and thinking in schools. The paper uses examples from a study that involved three countries and eight secondary schools to illustrate how the process of collaborative action research promoted inclusive thinking and practices.…

In this research article, the authors developed a novel astronomy board game and examined how this approach could facilitate the learning and teaching of astronomy topics covered in the new Irish Science Syllabus. A total of 119 post-primary students took part in the pilot trial across Ireland. Data was collected via feedback questionnaires,…

School staff have an important role to play in identifying and assisting pupils who require additional support to regularly attend school, but their beliefs about risk factors might influence their decisions regarding intervention. This qualitative study investigated educational practitioners' beliefs about risk factors for attendance problems.…

This article describes a sequence of design research projects, some exploratory others more formal, on the teaching of modelling and the analysis of modelling skills. The initial motivation was the author's observation that the teaching of applied mathematics in UK high schools and universities involved no active modelling by students, but was…

This study examined the shared beliefs among mathematics teachers in one secondary school in the United Kingdom across the first term of a school year and almost 4 years subsequently. Leximancer software was used to analyse the language used as teachers responded to questions concerning their beliefs about mathematics, mathematics teaching,…

When planning a GCSE period study on the American West, Alex Ford wrestled with reconciling the content demands of the examination specifications with the need to provide his students with a memorable narrative. In this article, Ford shows how he drew on the latest academic scholarship to construct a rigorous, coherent narrative outlining the…