Government inspection of initial teacher training (ITT) courses in England is frequent, relentless and high-stakes. How confident should providers be about the consistency of judgements made through inspection? This paper researches outcomes of the 1999?2002 round of inspections of secondary Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) courses. It…

Several writers have appealed to the literature on communities of practice as a way of thinking about the nature of educational research. In this paper, I look at the benefits and dangers of doing this. There seem to be two main sorts of lesson that have been drawn from this literature, one about research as an activity in its own right, the other…

That researchers should give anonymity to research sites and to the individuals involved in research is usually taken as an ethical norm. Such a norm is embodied internationally in most of the ethical guidelines and codes of practice of the various educational, sociological and psychological research associations and societies. This paper…

On the basis of reports of the limitations of staff meetings in various professions, the contribution of such gatherings to pedagogic activities and faculty cooperation was investigated. Organizational characteristics that differentiate between effective and ineffective conferences were also examined. Two hundred and ninety-four teachers from 64…

This article arose from a series of workshops with practitioners in early years teaching. The workshops addressed how history could be taught to very young children, three- to five-years-old. The authors were aware that there was a widely held belief that history was inappropriate for the very young child. The authors felt that this was because of…

The metaphor of scaling up is the wrong one to use for describing and prescribing educational change. Many of the strategies being employed to achieve scaling up are counter-productive: they conceive of practitioners as delivery agents or consumers, rather than as co-constructors of change. An approach to educational innovation based on the…