One instrumental step in promoting overall children's academic success across the trajectory of early childhood, elementary, middle, and secondary grades is purposefully establishing positive linkages for families and schools through a shared partnership. By facilitating an ongoing collaborative approach to sustain family engagement practices…

This article considers a school community initiating change in pedagogical practices to complement new-build premises in the context of demands for school improvement, but constraints on autonomy. We investigate how school leaders planned the change towards enquiry-based learning in flexible spaces, and how teaching staff prepared for the coming…

Child poverty is a global issue that affects around half the children in the world; it is inextricably bound to the poverty experienced by their parents and families and has been identified by the United Nations as a human rights issue. Child poverty can be a barrier to children and young people accessing school education or achieving any form of…

In this article, the author presents a review of his extended research engagement with disadvantaged young people and their education. He challenges the dominant neoliberal model of school reform based on business values and the "managerial school" as alien to educational values. He introduces various stages of research he and his…

This article explores poverty from the perspective of the intergenerational transmission. That is, it suggests that communities, and specifically a post-industrial community in South Wales, had developed coping strategies to manage the precarious character of employment associated with the mining and steel industries. These post-industrial…

This article presents a case study of a primary school that engaged with the Innovative Designs for Enhancing Achievement in Schools (IDEAS) Project, and moved to the sustaining phase over a period of three years. It reports how the students, who were 98 percent English as a second language, improved their reading and numeracy during this time and…

Using metaphor to clarify pedagogical understanding and to anchor teacher beliefs and knowledge to meaningful contextualized mental maps can have powerful consequences in schools. Frequent changes in school staff and clientele present schools with the challenge of how to share culturally specific messages quickly and effectively to those new to…

This article is based on a systematic review of educational research, policy and professional literature relating to creative environments for learning in schools. Despite the search yielding 210 documents, comparatively few empirical studies were published between 2005 and 2011 that addressed the review objectives. Only 18 studies included in the…

This article explores the challenge of education reform and presents an alternative to dominant approaches. In doing so, it draws on the work of three projects: first, the "Advancing Education Quality and Inclusion" initiative; second, the APREME (Advancing the Participation and Representation of Ethnic Minorities in Education) project which…

In this article, we outline the necessary action steps for schools to improve the achievement of bilingual students. We review, summarize, and utilize the pertinent scholarly literature to make suggestions for school-wide, collaborative efforts to support the achievement of bilingual learners through linguistically responsive pedagogy and…

This article explores the learning arising from a pilot inter-school visits programme in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. Teachers from two schools undertook a series of visits with the aim of developing learning and teaching in their schools. The pilot sought to understand ways in which such a collaborative visits programme could be used to build…

Early colleges are one alternative to the traditional comprehensive high school. This article examines whether early college students are academically, socially and emotionally ready for university work at age 16. Preliminary data indicate enough promise in the innovation to revision not only the high school curriculum, but middle school and…

Transition from primary to secondary school is an important but neglected topic. For this review, 88 studies were selected from 325 possible studies, as including substantive data related to transition. The teacher's perspective and the child's perspective were very different, the former principally concerned with attainment and the latter…

This article explores the varied ways in which schools can respond to students who present with challenging behaviours and who are at risk of disengagement from learning. It sets out a typology of school responses and reflects on the philosophies which underpin each approach. In an effort to rethink the use of suspensions within schools, which…

This article is based on a case study of one English secondary school in the three years following its release from Special Measures. Having followed the school's successful improvement (in inspection terms) while under Special Measures, I was interested to know if the school would be able to sustain its improvement once the inspectors had…