Obstacles to opportunities: Towards a model of school improvement through Appreciative Inquiry

Educational leadership on the threshold of a post-pandemic world

School improvement has always been high on school leaders’ agendas in England, but the pandemic has shone a light on new and emerging priorities. As well as the many problems that need to be...

Post-pandemic: Return or reset?

Educational leadership on the threshold of a post-pandemic world

Crisis management in schools has been examined and modelled in a variety of ways, and it is possible to identify four discrete stages through which school leaders progressed during the pandemic...

Forest School and its place within a Covid-recovery curriculum

With the easing of pandemic-related restrictions for UK schools, educators’ focus has turned to mitigating the impacts of Covid-19 on children’s learning and wellbeing (see Kumar Jha & Arora,...

Knowledge about what? ‘The knowledge question’ in the Norwegian curriculum

A fundamental question in education is, ‘What is most worth teaching and learning?’ A variation of this question can be directed from student to teacher: ‘Why should we learn this?’...

Call for abstracts: Theorising educational engagement, transitions & outcomes for care-experienced people

Editors Zoe Baker (University of York), Katie Ellis (University of Sheffield) and Neil Harrison (University of Oxford) are seeking high-quality, international contributions for a forthcoming...

The ‘shadow education’ phenomenon

In research, educational services such as private tutoring, coaching and academic enrichment classes that operate outside formal educational institutions (such as schools) are commonly referred to...

What is the purpose of school and who should control it?

We all learned at school Churchill’s comment that ‘democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’ (quoted in Langworth,...

Can we get generalist teachers to teach music? Yes we can!

Teachers in the UK need better professional development, especially in music education where the limited opportunities for training offered by teacher training providers have raised concerns (see...

Why Wales has a head start in the future of post-16 education in the UK and internationally

Wales is currently in the middle of a curriculum and qualifications reform. Since 2015, ‘pioneer’ schools across the principality have been contributing to the development of a new national...

Free school meals: What can the UK learn from Portugal’s model?

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, over 4.2 million children in Britain were living in relative poverty. Since then, this figure has increased by 200,000 (McNeil et al., 2020). Rising levels of food...

Rethinking how we can improve the diversity of the teaching workforce in England

The lack of black and minority ethnic (BAME) teachers and headteachers in English schools is a growing concern facing policymakers in England. In a recent conference of school leaders, Nadhim...

Playful creativity

The playful academic

‘Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do.’ (Attributed to Jean Piaget) Learning is often compromised by competitiveness (Brown & Vaughan, 2009). Bred from the...