Whilst mainstream schools in England may encourage multilingualism by insisting on the study of foreign languages, multilingual children are not always provided with support for the maintenance of their heritage languages and cultures. In response to this shortcoming, communities organise themselves to support their young members by setting up…

Contemporary discourse on Muslims and Islam has included a reassessment of traditional educational institutions; "makatib" and "madaris." Hitherto, understanding insider aspirations and anxieties appear to be rare. To this end, the perspectives of Muslim female teachers in "makatib" (supplementary schools for Muslims,…

Sociolinguistics has seen an emergence of new theoretical perspectives that somehow cater for the, according to Li, 'complex linguistic realities of the twenty-first century' (2017, p.14). Thus 'overwriting' conventional ways of understanding language/language use and its relation to identity construction. Taking these changes as a starting point,…

The article explores the governance, leadership and management of complementary schools through the case of Greek Cypriot complementary schools in England with a view to developing a research agenda for this under-researched yet significant sector of education for children and young people. Drawing on stakeholder and bottom-up theories of…

This article investigates the work of Henry Morris (1889-1961), in particular his ideas on the Cambridgeshire village colleges. It is now 90 years since the first of these was founded in Sawston in 1930, and the article aims to address the issue of whether Morris's views on education and democracy encapsulated in the village colleges still have…

Faith schools may play an important role in reproducing ethnoreligious identities, yet research into Jewish schools has tended to overlook students' personalised conceptualisations of faith. Instead, it has regularly utilised restrictive 'indicators' of ethnoreligious practice in order to gauge these institutions' effectiveness in 'strengthening'…

Community schools have long been accepted as an institutional mechanism for intervening in the relationship between poverty, poor educational outcomes, and limited life chances. At a time when public services are being retracted, and disadvantaged places are being increasingly left to struggle, community schools are poised to become more important…

Schools in many countries are beginning to take on extended roles, working with families and communities as well as with students. However, the rationales underpinning such developments are often unclear. This paper reports on case studies of 20 schools developing new roles as part of the national extended services initiative in England. It…

This article describes the learning which takes place between children, teachers and parents in a multilingual learning community. It centres on a community-based, supplementary/complementary Saturday class where--slightly differently from the usual pattern--the aim is not heritage language maintenance as such, but to enhance the pupils'…

Since 2004, the opening of labour markets has spurred a considerable number of Poles to emigrate e.g. to Iceland and England. Families with school age children have had the challenge of adapting to foreign environments and school systems. Polish complementary schools have played an important, albeit ambivalent, role in this process. Through focus…

Community schools have always rooted their work in a solid body of research about what it takes to promote student success, including parental involvement in children's education, rich and engaging out-of-school experiences, student wellness and family stability. Because the community schools strategy, on its face, makes sense--and because the…

This article aims to interpret how different policies of priority education deal with the notions of "educational needs" and "educational inequalities." Indeed, it is the processes and mechanisms embedded in the deployment of such policies that ultimately model a category of educational need that goes beyond the…

This paper, based on the results of a small pilot study of a Bengali supplementary school, discusses the features of the school in relation to other studies of supplementary "mother-tongue" schools and goes on to explore the pedagogy of the school, its relationship with other sites and spaces of learning and the implications of these for…

Global migration has had significant impact on the traditional configuration of the classroom role set. The language teacher may be teaching a group of learners with highly mixed interests, abilities, learning histories and exposures to the target language, while the language learner may be confronted with so many different models of the target…

This paper seeks an explanation for the persistent social phenomenon of segregated schooling in England whereby children from families with broadly the same characteristics of wealth, education and social networks are more likely to be educated together and therefore separate from children from more socially distant groups. The paper outlines the…