This essay charts the experiences of a group of Year 10 students studying literature together. I challenge the current educational thinking that the literature classroom should consist exclusively of a set of canonised texts handed down from teacher to student. Instead I consider the importance of ensuring students have space to explore themselves…

In England, number of learners who speak English as their second or even third language (known as learners with EAL, English as an Additional Language) in state primary and secondary schools is constantly increasing. In 2012, these learners represented 16% of the entire school population, and in 2015 - 18% (DfE, 2013 and 2016). Many EAL learners…

This article draws on an inquiry into the design and implementation of the curriculum in a case study urban primary school in the north of England. In response to the introduction of the revised National Curriculum in September 2014, teachers and the school head engaged in a critical discourse around their perceptions of students' attainment and…

The children of navvies were subject to the vagaries of an itinerant lifestyle, and during the latter years of the nineteenth century this invariably affected their relationship with an educational system that mandated compulsory attendance. Based primarily on school records, this article explores the contrasting ways in which teachers perceived…

The Parent Academy was a series of classes for pupils' parents, designed to improve the English and mathematics attainment of pupils in Years 3 to 6 in English primary schools. Parents were offered the opportunity to participate in 12 Parent Academy classes, 6 on English and 6 on mathematics, delivered fortnightly by tutors with teaching…

By offering a close reading and interpretation of one conversation between four Year 8 pupils about Robert Swindell's "Stone Cold," I aim to address questions of what might count as knowledge in English and to suggest how it might develop not only out of the qualities of a text, but from particular social relations and a set of pedagogic…

This article, written by a research-active teacher of English with an academic partner, recounts the circumstances of forging a partnership way of working in an urban high school that is consistently targeted for closure in the north of England. This is connected to performance and achievement against Ofsted inspection criteria and school data…

Families are increasingly recognised as informal sites of learning, especially with regard to healthy eating. Through the use of Bourdieu's conceptual tools, this paper explores the role of family meals within different family structures and the informal pedagogic encounters that take place. How they help to construct young people's healthy eating…

The Learning Mentor role has been seen as one of the success stories of education policy introduced under New Labour, establishing itself as a key figure in the explosion of new non-teaching roles in the schools workforce. But have they stuck to their original, somewhat narrow brief of "removing barriers to learning" with the primary aim…

This paper explores the physical education (PE) and physical activity experiences of a group of South Asian, Muslim girls, a group typically marginalised in PE and physical activity research. The study responds to ongoing calls for research to explore across different spaces in young people's lives. Specifically, I draw on a…

John Yandell's "The Social Construction of Meaning: Reading Literature in Urban Classrooms" provides a powerful counterpoint to current policy discourse in education. By focusing on the social interactions that occur in the classrooms of two English teachers, Yandell shows how their pupils are able to explore dimensions of language and…

The landscape of gifted and talented education in England has changed in the past decade when the UK government launched an education programme for "gifted and talented" pupils as part of its Excellence in Cities policy initiative. The policy was initially intended to raise educational achievement of higher ability pupils in secondary…

This article, co-authored by two research-active teachers with the support of their academic partner, reports on the resistance of an urban primary school in a northern city of England to the label "disadvantaged school" and various judgements that refuse to take into account its holistic work with students and families from different…

The importance of reading skills to academic achievement, job acquisition and future success is well documented. Most of the research on reading interventions focuses on children in primary schools but many children start secondary school with very poor reading skills and schools require evidence-based interventions to support these children. The…

This paper reports on a pilot study of the social interactions between two children labelled with special educational needs and their peers in an early years setting. Data from play observations and staff interviews are used to examine the dynamics of friendship groups that the two children have developed and the way that they attempt to make new…