This paper critically examines the tensions arising between Reception teachers' professional beliefs and knowledge, and the school readiness agenda in England. It scrutinises how the increasing academic expectations placed on children to ensure they are 'ready for school' may conflict with teachers' understanding of how young children learn, their…

Pre-service teachers need to experience authentic arts activities to confidently impart the quality arts engagement that young learners deserve. Most importantly, these experiences should contribute to shaping emerging teacher identities. We sought to understand the student experience of online early childhood pre-service in their arts courses,…

This paper sets out original findings from analyses of the English National Pupil Database of Key Stage 1 (KS1) attainment, to examine educational outcomes of children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). The schooling of these children has been entirely within the context of the current SEND system, defined by the 2014-2015…

This article reports on a survey of 332 Year 3 students from 14 Australian schools. We are interested in exploring Year 3 primary school student aspirations and what this data shows us about any societal changes, or not. This study is timely as it reports on contemporary data within an Australian educational context marked by significant…

Globally, access to higher education has increased, but inequalities by socio-economic background remain. This article explores the relationship between early schooling opportunities (and learning) and progression into higher education in four low and middle-income countries. We analyse data from the Young Lives longitudinal study, following…

This article disrupts dominant discourses around boys and reading that often homogenise young males as reluctant, disengaged and, at times, adversarial readers. Rather than essentialising boys, we argue there is a need for a more sophisticated knowledge base about the influences, constraints and diverse experiences of boys as readers in society…

This article addresses the issue of 'quality' in early years education, with the aim of highlighting the voices of nursery school head teachers. Government early years achievement statistics display a reductive and de-contextualised focus on young children's developmental outcomes, with measures of the percentage of 5-year-olds achieving a 'good…

Exploring one's life-history in order to unearth how one's past influences current conceptions of teaching is commonly employed in teacher education. Recognising the constructed and situated nature of autobiographical memory, this study examines autobiographical comics completed by pre-service early childhood educators as part of the first year of…

The belief that English language teaching (ELT), for its global scope, should not only focus on furnishing learners' language skills but also on raising their awareness about critical global issues, like environmental crises, led to the 'greening' of ELT textbooks. However, the ecopedagogical import of the green contents in ELT textbooks has a…

Investigations into the relations between phonological processing and math performance have yielded contradictory results. These contradictions might be related to small sample sizes and/or cross-sectional designs of previous studies that limited the possibility of generalizing the findings obtained. The first goal of this study was to estimate…