This report summarises findings from inspections and other evaluative activities carried out by Education Scotland over the period January 2012 to June 2016. It seeks to draw out some of the key features and trends that we have seen as education providers have sought to develop and improve their services over that period of time. During the period…

In December 2007 Newbattle Abbey College, Scotland's only Adult Residential College, celebrated its seventieth anniversary. Its survival during this relatively short span has always been contingent. Its greatest crisis occurred in 1987, when the Scottish Office announced its intention to withdraw public funding from the college. This event reveals…

Newbattle Abbey College, Scotland's only adult residential college, was founded in the 1930s by Philip Kerr, 11th Marquis of Lothian. This paper traces the debates concerning the college and the rationale for adult residential education until the 1950s, focusing on the difficulties that Newbattle faced in establishing itself as a central part of…

The context for this paper relates to the policy and practice implications of efforts to achieve social justice for Scotland's 12,000 children and young people in the care of local government authorities. The paper is located within a growing evidence base of the educational experience of young people in care and leaving care. The data on…

In earlier "humanitarian" accounts, Britain's voluntary blind institutions exemplified successful nineteenth-century philanthropy and later became effective partners of the state. From the 1970s, Victorian charity came increasingly under criticism and subsequent studies on disability condemn the exclusion and utilitarian training of a…

A Scottish study of 615 pupils in 49 alternative day and residential schools found that over a two-year period, only 21 were successfully returned to the mainstream. Reasons for this finding include resistance of mainstream schools to reintegration; lack of financial support; family attitudes; sex differences in student placement; and the presence…

Examines attempts to clarify empirically what is stressful about teaching. Reports data--based on standard indices of stress--from study of 55 staff in 4 Scottish residential schools for children with emotional/social difficulties. Within context of providing teachers with inservice help in coping with stress, demonstrates inadequacies of current…

Over the past couple of decades, residential special schools in Scotland have faced fundamental changes to the way they operate. This has involved the withdrawal of state funding, a shrinkage of the sector and a situation in which schools now have to sell their services in a market economy in order to survive. This article gives a brief outline of…