This article reports on a systematic review of literature on the experiences of substitute teachers, also known as casual or relief teachers. This occupational group are an essential part of school improvement efforts, allowing release time for other teachers to participate in professional learning, complete administrative duties, and attend to…

Purpose: There is an urge worldwide that school leaders' mental health and well-being must be prioritised within the education recovery at the local, national and global policy levels. This research identified the intentional well-being practices that school leaders cultivated as they faced unprecedented challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

With increased linguistic diversity in schools, it is paramount that initial teacher education and training (ITET) develops linguistically responsive teachers who can confidently work in the complex language ecologies characterising today's multilingual classrooms. We argue that to achieve this aim, all future teachers should be given…

School transportation may have important implications for academic success, but few studies examine how these variables are related. This systematic review is the first that synthesizes research linking school transportation with academic outcomes. Using the PRISMA framework, the authors conducted a literature search across multiple data sources…

This paper presents evidence of how the role of teaching assistants (TAs) in England has been remade by the COVID pandemic. Drawing on data from a national survey of 9,055 TAs and 22 semi-structured interviews with TAs, teachers and headteachers, the authors show how essential TAs were to schools' responses to managing the disruption caused by the…

In a sector largely ignored in policy and the public imagination, Alternative Provision works to care for and educate children for whom mainstream schooling does not work. Central to their mission is the engagement of families, often seen as both the cause of their child's difficulties and the solution to their successful educational…

Administrative data sets can play a key role in informing and influencing education provision. To date, longitudinal analysis of special educational needs (SEN) in Northern Ireland (NI) has not been a visible feature of policy discourse, even though the number of these pupils has increased at a rate that is proportionally higher than the general…

Ever since the 1970s, politicised debates have raged over the teaching of history, dubbed the 'history wars'. These debates continue to impact primary and secondary teachers' choices of history curriculum foci to this day. This research aimed to discover history teachers' understanding of how to develop diversity within their history curricula and…

There is growing acceptance that governing boards in English schools and academies should be diverse. Yet progress towards this strategic aim remains slow despite initiatives to address this. We ask whether boards represent their communities and whether they model diverse and ethical leadership as seen in the culture and values of a school or…

The Church of England's vision for education is generous and seeks to allow the riches of Christian life to overflow throughout schools. The vision is captured by the strapline 'Deeply Christian, serving the common good'. The present study assesses the contribution made to service this vision by the 43 Anglican cathedrals within England and the…

Successive UK governments have adopted failure as a strategy in the reform of public education in England: first, to construct crises in order to blame professionals/parents/children for a failing system; and second, to provide rescue solutions that are designed to fail in order to sustain the change imperative. We describe this as policy…

This paper firstly presents Statement Archaeology, an innovative and rigorous method devised to systematically operationalise the approach to historical exploration used by Michel Foucault in pursuit of the question "how do certain practices become possible at particular moments in history?" Drawing on an analysis of the theoretical…

This research identifies new approaches to education health and care plan (EHCP) provision since the start of the COVID-19 (C-19) pandemic (March 2020 to March 2021). This qualitative research was conducted after the C-19 pandemic and used online questionnaires to identify the perceptions of 64 SENCos recruited from mainstream primary and…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the population invariance of equating functions across country subgroups in TIMSS 2015 mathematics tests in relation to the raw-score distribution, DIF, and DTF. We used equipercentile and IRT observed-score equating methods. The results of the study indicate that there is a relationship between the…

This paper delves deeply into the creative pedagogies which support cutting edge digital STEAM practice across primary and secondary school settings. It contextualises the research within current STEAM agendas including transdisciplinarity, and STEAM and technology and goes on to offer insight from the novel context of ocean learning to develop…