The place of Church school headteachers as spiritual leaders of the school community is rarely highlighted. This article investigates how 13 Church primary school headteachers (Catholic Church of England, and Methodist) interpret this role. It draws on the Faith in the Nexus research which investigated how church primary schools nurtured pupils'…

Lack of acceptance of biological evolution, despite the overwhelming evidence that supports it, can be very problematic in higher education courses that have a strong biological basis. We investigated acceptance of biological evolution in 344 first-year Life Sciences undergraduate students across five programmes at the University of Roehampton,…

This research article explores how two English universities with Anglican foundations responded to UK government requirements to counter radicalization on campus. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with student union representatives, senior staff in the universities responsible for implementing the legal requirements and also those with…

Today, the term 'global' has become a pervasive description of universities that aim to alleviate their importance and reach. The global looks inherently big. By relating to a spherical shape it attributes size in two distinct ways: it signifies the comprehensive and extensive reach of a theme or issue as well as the spherical centrality of an…

This article proposes a conceptualisation of dialogic spaciality, and advances our understandings of the dynamic interplay of dialogic space (where meaningful conversations take place) and place (a geographic location) and the influence these have on academic life. The conceptualisation is developed from a qualitative study which focused on the…

Catholic schools and colleges are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain and sharpen their distinctiveness in a climate of secularism, indifference to religion and the shortage of practising Catholics. This article argues that one method of bolstering Catholic schools' mission integrity is to highlight one important feature of its identity…

We present a distinctive approach to knowledge exchange used in the 'Shared Space' project; an inter-disciplinary researcher-teacher partnership using Allport's contact theory contact theory as a lens to interpret teachers' self-reported practice in the subject Religion and Worldviews (RWE). By so doing, we created new professional knowledge and…

Church-affiliated universities operate with increasingly complex roles and functions when engaging with multiple stakeholders in the provision of higher education. This article asks how to understand and analyse the interactions when these universities are among the multiple stakeholders in Christian teacher education. What frameworks of analysis…

This article gives an account of a qualitative research project which investigated acts of collective worship (hereafter CW) in primary schools through non-participant observations undertaken by second year trainee teachers during one of their placements. The data were gathered from a range of schools across the West Midlands. The findings…

This article reports the learning achieved by a group of trainee teachers about acts of collective worship (CW) organised in English primary schools. Using data gathered from non-participant observation questionnaires, it describes, from the viewpoint of observers, three main findings related to children and their learning, the position of CW in…

This study compares the educational attainment of Muslim and Christian White-British boys and girls at the following junctions: Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, GCSE, getting into universities and achieving a place at a Russell Group university. The study utilises the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England waves 1-6 with linked data from the…

The relation between Christian education and the secularized public square, based on how state and church relations are typically portrayed, has been described chiefly in terms of conflict. However, in the case of church-founded schools and universities in Britain, the relationship, in practice, is more ambiguous than polarized. Arguably, there is…

Albeit fragmented and largely uncoordinated, there is currently considerable debate regarding the nature and rationale of university chaplaincy provisions in England and Wales. Clearly chaplaincies have repositioned themselves from an exclusively Christian ethical and service-based provider to cater for the challenging demands of a multi-faith…

This article explores the impact of wider social contact on the experience of Chinese postgraduate students of adaptation to life in the UK. Focus group and individual interviews were conducted with a group of 11 Chinese students on an MA programme at a university in southern England and individual interviews with three representatives of a local…

Although church-related universities in England gradually became more secular throughout the twentieth century, a group of nine teacher education colleges with church foundations have recently developed into full fledged universities. This article draws upon documentary and site-based research to evaluate the relevance of the Christian identity…