The United Kingdom has a considerable attainment gap between students from the most and the least advantaged backgrounds. This gap opens up in the early years, with disadvantaged pupils already over four months behind their more advantaged peers by the time they start at primary school. The gap then continues to widen as students progress through…

The youth population bulge in Kenya comes with so many challenges such as poverty, gender inequalities, political inequities, the absence of adequate health and medical resources, low educational attainment, homelessness, increased involvement in violence, drugs, and alcohol, poor physical and mental health, a lack of key life skills, premature…

The years from birth to five are critical for building the emergent literacy skills that precede learning to read and write. Early childhood education and care services are in a unique position to support emergent literacy development, particularly for children in socio-economically disadvantaged communities. This article reports the findings of a…

Background/Context: The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of supporting educator, and particularly teacher, mental health and well-being when working to improve educational systems. Although education, and teaching in particular, has long been characterized as a stressful field of work (Kyriacou, 2001), outside of occupational…

This study explores the collaborative process that two Korean-English and one Spanish-English bilingual Early Head Start family childcare educators, two instructional coaches, and the author engaged in as they co-created intentional bilingual approaches to supporting young emergent bilinguals. A thematic analysis of the design-based approach of…

This study investigates the impact of accessible and inaccessible role models on early adolescents' conceptions of their identities. Accessible role models have regular direct interactions with adolescents, while inaccessible role models like celebrities do not. This investigation was based within the context of a broader educational intervention…

Many Australian students from poor families decline to take advanced mathematics when they reach senior secondary school, resulting in an under-representation of disadvantaged student groups in the advanced mathematics streams. It is important to promote disadvantaged students' aspirations for advanced mathematics given the significance of this…

Many youth experiencing homelessness (YEH) are surprisingly hopeful. We propose a typology of the hopes for the future (HFTF) of YEH, based on a qualitative study employing grounded theory. YEH fell into four categories: (a) nonmainstream HFTF youth who wished to escape the mainstream, (b) mainstream HFTF youth who wished to integrate into the…

Background: The presence of health problems in a child is known to be negatively associated with later academic achievement, but less is known about the educational outcomes for siblings of children in poor health. The study investigated how having a sibling with health problems affects a healthy sibling's academic achievement. Methods: We…

Children living in poverty often show delayed cognitive and social development compared with children reared in more affluent environments. However, much of the research focuses on how objective financial strain (e.g. household income) impacts preschoolers' executive function (EF); little research has considered the impacts of parents'…

"Parent involvement", valued by the field of early childhood education, is shown to contribute to the growth and development of children. However, what has in fact, been "valued" are engagement practices based on normalized white middle class cultural patterns. The current understandings of and expectations for "parent…

In this paper, we present a framework to examine the kinds of careers that rural disadvantaged youth would like to know about in a career guidance intervention as also related findings from two different rural disadvantaged contexts in India. Differences across gender, age group, region, and participation/non-participation in youth programmes are…

Student behaviour is a high priority for Pre-Service Teachers and Early Career Teachers. This article shares a view into a journey taken in the step from Pre-Service Teacher to Early Career Teacher. Driven by rising questions that challenged the norm of behaviour management presented through Initial Teacher Education and schools, this teacher…

Research Findings: Engineering play is a new framework for understanding constructive block building as a design process. The current study examined associations between engineering play with wooden unit blocks and mathematics and spatial skills of children with and without disabilities. Participants included 110 preschoolers (44% female; 25%…

Transitions between two educational settings can bring about new experiences and expectations for children and their families. In the early care and education (ECE) context, when children transition from Head Start to kindergarten, they are confronted with different places, people, activities, and relationships. This transition also occurs between…