This article examines the role of the Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO) in primary schools in Ireland, an area that is under researched with little or no empirical data available. The current qualitative study, congruent with an interpretivist paradigm, provides narratives from four SENCOs offering insight into both the operational and…

Institutional Research associations across the world are re-imagining and redesigning their professional development and capacity building activities. This paper outlines the professional development activities of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) in the United States (est. 1966), the European Association for Institutional Research…

This research explored the experiences of children (age 9-10) when five Irish generalist primary teachers positioned meaningfulness as the priority filter for their pedagogical decision-making in physical education (n = 37). Pedagogies that support meaningfulness include those that are democratic and reflective, and give attention to individual…

While the literature in skill formation systems has paid considerable attention to inter-variation between types of national skill formation systems and intra-variation among individual types as in the case of collective skill formation systems, less is known about the role of the European Union in establishing a European model of skill formation.…

This paper explores how a collaborative self-study of teacher educators in the Republic of Ireland supported pre-service and practising teachers on teacher education programmes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teacher educators engaged in student feedback meetings conducted online as a replacement to traditional in-school visits, some of which were…

Further Education and Training (FET) in Ireland is an evolving educational sector, available in every community, that offers education, skills, and qualifications to a broad spectrum of the population (SOLAS, 2020). FET coordinators are an important occupational group within the FET sector, occupying a middle management/leadership position with…

This research investigated how the bug tracker database of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Moodle is developed as an application of crowd work. The bug tracker is used by software developers, who write and maintain Moodle's code, but also by a wider public world of ordinary Moodle users who can report bugs. Despite many studies of the…

This empirical article presents student affairs and services practitioners' perceptions regarding the sense of accomplishment they feel in their job. Results show helping students, collaborating among colleagues, contributing positively to a broader community, and the autonomous and engaging nature of the work itself provided SAS staff across…

This qualitative research explored 9- to 12-year-old children's citizenship participation at primary school in the Republic of Ireland. During 2016-2017, 160 children from 6 co-educational primary schools participated. Through a process of grounded analysis, children are identified as active "citizen-peers" of their peer groups. As…

The importance of school self-evaluation (SSE) as a school improvement mechanism has been acknowledged by increases in the number of countries with legal requirements for schools to conduct self-evaluation. Despite the provision of a range of support to schools to encourage their engagement with SSE, many implementation challenges have been…

The "Children's School Lives" (CSL) study provides a unique opportunity to learn first-hand from school principals as part of a large national study about their sensemaking as they led in a time of crisis and change in terms of teaching and learning. Major interconnected findings include: (1) the centrality of relationships and…

School leadership and school self-evaluations (SSE) have emerged as central to school improvement and effectiveness. In Irish policy, SSE has had a challenging history as several attempts to embed SSEs have been met by poor clarity around roles of responsibility, a moratorium on middle leadership appointments and more laterally, a global pandemic.…

In early 2020, Initial Teacher Education providers were forced to reimagine many long-established practices due to pandemic restrictions. One post-primary concurrent Initial Teacher Education programme in the Republic of Ireland responded by conceptualising and developing an initiative to engage pre-service teachers in an authentic assessment task…

Purpose: To systematically develop a farm safety intervention for farmer peer learning groups, to support safe working practice adoption. Design/Methodology/Approach: An iterative, multi-actor process was used, guided by the Intervention Mapping framework and the Socio-Ecological Model. The target peer learning groups were Irish dairy farmer…

Driven by COVID-19, remote work is popularising. Companies and employees are increasingly embracing its benefits of flexibility and convenience, showing reluctance to return to full-time office schedules. Similarly, companies and HEIs started offering remote forms of work-based learning (WBL) -- or eWBL. However, remote work presents social and…