This narrative account describes approaches to sanctions in primary school settings that also provide nurture groups, and the ways in which different approaches may be viewed as helpful or harmful to children's behaviour and to nurture group provision. It draws from research conducted as part of a larger comparative nurture group study examining…

Most countries across Europe now have their own Inspectorate as part of a school improvement and accountability system. However, there has been little research on the impact of school inspections or on the aspects of school inspections that maximise the positive effects and minimise the unintended consequences. As a precursor to further research,…

According to student surveys conducted cross-nationally, a substantial proportion of students continue to be bullied at school after they have sought help from teachers. This article examines a range of strategies that teachers employ in dealing with bully/victim cases. The most commonly used strategy is Direct Sanctions: the imposition of…

This article, written by three research-active teachers with the support of their academic partner, interrogates the achievement-attendance link in the most recent government quantitative data for secondary schools in England: persistent absentees stands at 6.6% for all children, but it raises to 9% for students who are classed as "Pupil…

Among western governments large-scale leadership development initiatives represent an increasingly deployed means of promoting the acculturation of school leaders to support educational reforms and ongoing improvement. England's sophisticated initiative centres on the National College for Leadership in Schools and Children's Services, a…

This paper focuses on accountability in school-based education in England. It explores notions of accountability and proposes a new framework for its analysis. It then identifies a number of types of accountability which are present in school-based education, and discusses each in terms of who is accountable to whom and for what. It goes on to…

Schools in England are legally required to have an anti-bullying policy, but the little research so far suggests that they may lack coverage in important areas. An analysis of 142 school anti-bullying policies, from 115 primary schools and 27 secondary schools in one county was undertaken. A 31-item scoring scheme was devised to assess policy.…

The Support Group Method (SGM), formerly the No Blame Approach, is widely used as an anti-bullying intervention in schools, but has aroused some controversy. There is little evidence from users regarding its effectiveness. We aimed to ascertain the use of and support for the SGM in Local Authorities (LAs) and schools; and obtain ratings of…

The Compensation Act 2006 received its Royal Assent on 25 July 2006. The Act allows the courts to have regard to the social utility of "desirable activities", including school trips, in considering negligence claims. The article reviews the law of negligence as it affects teachers of the very young and considers the possible impact of…

The author discusses the content in John Milton's "Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England" (1985) and provides parallelism to censorship practiced in higher education. Originally published in 1644, "Areopagitica" makes a powerful--and precocious--argument for freedom of speech…

This study evaluates a subjective performance-evaluation regime in place in the English public school system since the early 1990s. Under this regime, independent inspectors visit schools, assess schools' performance, and disclose their findings on the Internet. Inspectors combine hard metrics, such as test scores, with softer ones, such as…

Presents a study in which all secondary schools in West Midlands urban area of England were visited and a structured interview conducted with head teachers to determine what rules were common, to what extent they were formally written down, and what methods were used to ensure their enforcement. Concludes that sanctions far outweighed rewards in…

Recent studies have produced conflicting findings about whether test-based rewards and sanctions create incentives that improve student performance, or hurdles that increase dropout and pushout rates from schools. This article reports the findings from a study that examined the impact of England's accountability reforms and investigated whether…

Although homosexuality was considered to be a crime in nineteenth-century England, the subculture of the school system promoted it. For example, in the early nineteenth century schoolboys of all ages were locked up in dormitories at 8:00 p.m. and no master entered the building until the next morning. No-one supervised the boys' activities during…