This paper provides a critical discussion of "Putting Learners at the Centre: Towards a Future Vision for Scottish Education," which was published by the Scottish Government in 2022. After reconstructing the case made in the report for putting learners at the centre of Scottish education, I raise critical questions, both about the idea…

The Scottish Government has a strong commitment to strengthening children's human rights, with the aim of making Scotland 'the best place to grow up and bring up children'. The Education (Scotland) Act 2016 introduced a raft of measures to boost the rights of children with additional support needs (ASN). The programme for government in Scotland,…

Policy cycles are initiated via a variety of context-bound causal drivers. In situations where systemic reform is desired, agenda-setting is vital to this process. This paper examines 'The National Discussion on Scottish Education', which was a sequence of stakeholder engagements promoted as a listening exercise to enable policy agenda-setting for…

The 'virtual school' is an approach to supporting care-experienced children and young people in education. The Virtual School Head (VSH) has been a statutory role within the education landscape in England since 2014. In Scotland, where the education, social care and legal systems are distinct from those in England, there has been a recent increase…

Situated in the context of the Scottish Religious and Moral Education (RME) curriculum, this article considers the practice of Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CoPI) and how it supports the RME curriculum. Sharing extracts from children's CoPI sessions, the article reflects on the ways in which ten and eleven year-old children discuss religious…

This paper explores learning about environments with a focus on starting with trees. The paper examines children and young people's perceptions of and engagement with trees, as part of a large grant that sought to examine the dis/benefits of trees for children's lives and learning. In this paper, we attempt to move beyond notions of 'education for…

The human capacity for technological innovation and creative problem-solving far surpasses that of any species but develops quite late. Prior work has typically presented children with problems requiring a single solution, a limited number of resources, and a limited amount of time. Such tasks do not allow children to utilize one of their…

Background: Ultrasound visual biofeedback (UVBF) has the potential to be useful for the treatment of compensatory errors in speakers with cleft palate ± lip (CP±L), but there is little research on its effectiveness, or on how acceptable families find the technique. This study reports on parents' and children's perspectives on taking part in a…

The present study investigates how counsellors working with children and young people (CYP) perceive their professional identity, and how the 'Practitioner Manual' and BACP Competence Frameworks, commissioned by the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP; 2014/2019a), can contribute to the strengthening of CYP counsellor…

Over 30 years ago, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child passed legislation allowing children under the age of 18 to express their concerns in circumstances and decisions that affect them. Because one impact on children under the age of 18 is the educational system, Scotland education has integrated opportunities for students to…

Collaborative writing is well established in the humanities, but with little focus on how the writing relationship comes into being, including the power and relational dynamics at play. This is especially pertinent both when Black and "white" (sic) authors collaborate in writing about race, and in the process of writing collaborative…

Cultural comparisons suggest that an understanding of other minds may develop sooner in independent versus interdependent settings, and vice versa for inhibitory control. From a western lens, this pattern might be considered paradoxical, since there is a robust positive relationship between theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in western…

There has been a long-standing call for the participation of young people in decision making in school. However, research to date has mostly focused on pupil councils and is rarely conducted in areas of socio-economic deprivation -- the contexts for this study. In national examinations, the schools chosen had higher than average attainments given…

The incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into Scots law offers an unprecedented opportunity to improve the realisation of the right to education for all children and young people living in Scotland. One feature of such a commitment ought to be clear and comprehensive policies on Human Rights Education…

This report looks at the reading engagement of children aged 8 to 18 in Scotland, based on data gathered from 1,141 pupils across eight schools in 2023. The survey was conducted between January and the middle of March 2023. Slightly more girls (58.8%; n = 635) than boys (41.2%; n = 445) participated from Scotland. There is also data from 33…