Inclusive practices mean many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) attend mainstream education settings. To manage the stressors involved and access its benefits, support can be critical. Indeed, insufficient support can detrimentally impact wellbeing, longer-term development, and the inclusivity agenda. Expanding a limited evidence-base…

This article presents the results of a small-scale, comparative study on the perceived impact that having students enter Mathematics competitions has on Mathematics teachers in Puerto Rico, Switzerland and the UK and on their classroom practice. The study surveyed a small number of Mathematics teachers in the three countries who teach in both…

This article describes a novel UK school/university partnership, the "Plymouth Model" designed to encourage young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to aim for higher education (HE) study. The model incorporates the activity of university students, researchers and teachers working together to improve aspirations and outcomes for…

Commonsense understandings of school practices have historically painted parents of color as inattentive and non-participatory actors in public school settings. Racist implementations of policy and individual actions, based on teacher ideology and deficit paradigms of race, force parents of color to take an oppositional stance in public school…

Within the UK there are grave concerns about retention and attrition rates within the teaching profession, particularly in challenging schools. These are compounded by worries about the gap that will be left as long-serving teachers reach retirement age. This article is about the working lives of long-serving teachers in three high-poverty urban…

Education Action Zones (EAZs) have formed one of the key elements of government policy in trying to drive up standards and disseminate best practice. However, the initiative has been subject to a sustained critique and questions have remained as to the efficacy of such networks of schools. This article reports on study of one EAZ in the north-west…

This paper is developed from a study carried out to explore factors influencing the choices of a range of stake-holders in a multi-ethnic urban community--students, parents, teachers, community representatives--with regard to single-sex schooling. The paper discusses competing perspectives underpinning the focus of the study. Recent legislation in…

This article considers how the private finance initiative, a contract for infrastructure, affected teachers' perceptions of efficacy, job satisfaction, and morale at an urban secondary school in the United Kingdom. Qualitative data collection techniques, including unstructured observation and semistructured personal interviews, were utilized to…

This paper analyses the experience of so-called "failing schools" in order to develop understandings that can inform improvement efforts. It reports on a study of the experiences of a small number of English primary schools placed in "special measures" as a result of being inspected. The study is unusual in that, in the past,…

This paper reports on a small-scale, recently completed qualitative project conducted in the United Kingdom that focuses on links between refugee families and the schools their children attend. The project attempted to study the relationships between refugee parents and education professionals in order to identify factors that encourage or hinder…

In British schools, and in the United States, black boys are both the heroes of a street fashion culture that dominates inner cities and students who receive a disproportionate amount of punishment in school. A central thesis of this book is that teachers in elementary and secondary schools cannot escape the wider social perceptions about young…

This study investigated the situation of ethnic minority students in predominantly white British schools, highlighting factors affecting their educational achievement and examining the perspectives of ethnic minority students and their parents and teachers. Surveys of the performance of over 34,000 students in predominantly white schools in 35…