Supportive teacher--student relations are crucial to stimulate academic success and well-being of students. These relations can become more strained in urban schools characterised by high levels of socio-economic inequality and ethnic diversity. However, supportive relations between teachers and students can be nurtured and be part of school…

In this study, as part of an intervention program in which students and their teachers participated in a school development project, we examined students' perceptions of connectedness to their urban school. A photovoice method was employed to map out the multiple emotions associated with the school connectedness experienced by 61 students from…

Previous research shows that the lockdown of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic increased the already existing inequalities in education but little is known about the processes underlying these outcomes. In this study we used Bourdieu's theories to explore how interactions between teachers' expectations of parents and parents' availability of…

Tackling early leaving from education and training (ELET) is one of the headline targets for education policy in the European Union. Although ELET rates have been decreasing in most member states, male, socially disadvantaged and immigrant students remain overrepresented in ELET figures. Moreover, students in vocational tracks and students who…

This study explores how four teacher teams introduced differentiated instruction into their practice. It draws on Tomlinson's conceptualisation of differentiated instruction to respond to diversity in their classroom. The aim of this study is to document to which extent participating teachers achieved in doing so. A participatory action research…

This study aims to test stereotype threat theory hypotheses using a pupil survey database from Flemish urban secondary education characterized by a stratified tracking system. We relate these systemic features to stereotype threat effects by adding teacher--pupil relations to our analyses. Our results show that stigmatized groups--ethnic minority…

Tackling early leaving from education and training (ELET) is one of the main education policy targets of the European Union and many of its member states. This paper offers new insights on this issue by studying how so-called at-risk students develop their educational trajectory by embedding their attitudes towards and engagement in schooling…

Governmental education policies provide vague, general confines in which local actors have to design concrete policies tailored to their needs. Such policies rely on the local capacities of schools for implementing them. Recently, qualitative studies reveal that a great deal of variation in policy enactment should be attributed to school…

Since the 1970s, schools have been characterized as loosely coupled systems, meaning that the teachers' work is weakly coordinated at the local level. Nonetheless, few studies have focused on the local variations of coordination modes, their sources and their nature. In this article, the process of local coordination of the teachers' work is…

Little research has investigated factors that facilitate beginning teachers' participation in professional learning activities related to differentiated instruction (DI). This study examines environmental factors for DI learning activities in a sample of 272 beginning teachers from 72 primary schools. Multilevel analyses show that teacher…

While British educational researchers have given considerable attention to issues of racism, little attention has been given to how pupils themselves perceive differential teacher treatment and how such views relate to pupils' claims of teacher racism and racial discrimination. This article employs ethnographic data gathered from one English and…

Charts the vocabulary evolution of three groups of students in Brussels' kindergartens: (1) originally monolingual Dutch-speaking children; (2) originally simultaneously bilingual children (Dutch/French); and (3) young successive second-language learners (French at home, Dutch in kindergarten). (23 references) (Author/CK)