Improving Schools

In July and August 2003, five top UK universities offered a range of three-week summer schools to ‘gifted and talented’ 11–16-year-olds. This initiative, heavily subsidized by the UK Government, who wish to push ‘the cream of the nation’s pupils forward’, used school holiday time to bring together nominated children from all parts of the country. Pushing pupils forward was recognized by the Minister for School Standards, David Milliband, as involving ‘enhancing students’ development as people and challenging them in areas outside the national curriculum, rather than speeding up their education’ (Kentish Gazette, 2003, 14 August: 19, emphasis added). Professor of Music, Grenville Hancox, wrote the proposal. He and Jonathan Barnes now write a reflection on a course that they feel has implications for the curriculum in all schools.

This article argues that school improvement requires the consultation of pupils to see learning from their perspective. It reports on a video-based research approach to the investigation of pupil–teacher reflections and identifies an apparent disjunction between teacher–pupil views on what constitutes learning. It describes how the use of video-stimulated reviews, immediately following lessons within a Year 8 music class, made learning visible. It is suggested that illumination of teacher and pupil views of what they implicitly know and think about learning are needed in order to recognize the role of multiple perspectives and to enhance the pupils’ roles as critical agents in their own learning. The findings of differentiated patterns of experience, learning and reflection are likely to resonate with the experiences of others in different educational settings, being representative of what we can learn from pupils about ways of improving teaching and learning in schools and they confirm the value of consulting pupils.

This article examines the journey of a secondary school in its attempts to be more responsive to community values. The school had worked hard for many years to gain the trust of the Asian-heritage population, and, after much debate and consultation, it was agreed to teach boys and girls separately in the first three years. The article examines the way in which existing research on single-sex schooling was used in support of this change, and focuses on an evaluation of the change that involved teachers and parents. It highlights some unexpected and contradictory responses of parents, and the dangers of a stereotyped understanding of identity and religion among teachers and school leaders. The authors advocate a boldness of vision in imagining possible changes and responding proactively to a cultural context, but also that major changes should first be piloted on a smaller scale in order to evaluate the experience and the responses of different groups of parents, even within a seemingly cohesive community.

This article reports a study of support for pupils with autism in a Scottish education authority. The pupils attend mainstream classes in primary schools but receive additional support from an outreach service. The study aimed to understand the nature of outreach support from a mainstream teacher’s point of view. The principal data of the project were interview transcripts from a critical-case sample of five schools. The data were subjected to two levels of analysis. First, they were grouped under five themes concerning teachers’ perceptions of support: speech and language therapy; parents, special assistants, communications, and the existing generic learning support team. Second, these five themes were reassembled as a textural and structural analysis which identified areas which influenced teachers’ perception of their own competence and the support of others. Among these areas, other professionals’ experience of working with pupils who are autistic was valued highly as a source of support.

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 the history and development of residential special education for children considered to be troubled or troublesome. It then draws on an evaluation of one former approved, or List D, school to describe how it managed the transition to the marketplace. Findings from the evaluation are introduced and some implications of these are discussed. It is concluded that the shift from state or local authority funding to private provision may have some advantages. However, it also raises a number of questions as to whether provision for some of society’s most damaged children should be determined by market forces.

The purpose of this article is to present the findings from some empirical research carried out in 2002 among 200 staff working in 13 secondary schools in South Wales, concerning their views of the management of professional development. The findings indicated many of the significant differences between staff were gender-based. Female staff valued, for example, sharing good practice and having opportunities to work with other colleagues more highly than did male staff. Conversely, male staff appeared to value the opportunity to discuss their career progression with a line manager more highly than did female staff. Other important attitudinal differences emerged between those with managerial responsibilities and classroom teachers and between the least and most experienced staff.