Understanding early school leaving (ESL) remains a key issue on political and academic agendas. Most research focuses on the experiences of young people who intend to leave or have left school early without a qualification from secondary education. In addition, most studies focus on regular secondary schools. We aim to add to this literature by…

This paper considers the experiences of education for girls at risk of permanent exclusion from mainstream secondary schools in England. The number of girls being permanently excluded from school is a growing issue, and data suggests that girls are being excluded at a percentage rate which exceeds boys, yet they have continued to receive…

Children in care from backgrounds of maltreatment often struggle to perform to their full potential in school. Although the English government has put education at the top of its agenda for children in care, there remains a high risk of children in care being excluded from school, undermining their chances of closing the attainment gap. This study…

A critical aim of teacher quality research is to identify and distil its multiple components. While many such components have been identified in the literature, there is a scarcity of research that has attempted to empirically investigate how these elements integrate within a larger profile of teacher quality, including how particular teachers'…

Given the disruptions the COVID-19 pandemic has engendered in people's professional lives, the importance and contribution of certain workforces has been under particular scrutiny. In England, the teaching profession has been under particularly close public scrutiny, with concerns that teachers' perceived social appreciation may have decreased…

Sourcing information related to socio-scientific issues requires sophisticated literacies to read and evaluate conflicting accounts often signified by disagreement among experts, multiple solutions or misinformation. Much of the previous work exploring how young people approach conflicting information has tended to focus on students in the…

Inspired by complex system theory, this study adopts a multilevel piecewise regression model to examine the relationship between homework time and the development of students in different grades using a large-scale testing database in China. The results indicate that the relationship between homework time and students' performance is positive when…

Large-scale international achievement studies such as PISA have been widely used to study how educational inequality compares across countries. Yet the various different biases that may affect these estimates are often not considered or are poorly understood. In this paper we draw upon the total survey error framework to provide a case study of…

This paper investigates the relationship between music qualification choice and academic performance in secondary education in England at Key Stage 4 (KS4; usually at ages 15 and 16). We analysed data from 2257 pupils at 18 educational settings in a city in the southeast of England. Two regression analyses with clustered errors modelled KS4 music…

Given the recruitment and retention crisis within the teaching profession, it is essential that the factors contributing to this are examined. Studies suggest that there has been a general decline in teacher wellbeing since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and student conduct problems are known to be a key negative contributor to poor teacher…

In 2018 the UK government launched a £50 million scheme to fund the expansion of existing grammar schools provided that they increase efforts to attract more pupils from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. This initiative assumed that grammar school attendance boosts the educational attainment and the higher education progression rates of…

While most research has focussed on the experiences and consequences of ethnic discrimination for students, little is known about how teachers respond to ethnic discrimination. Teachers' responses are important as they may affect the outcomes of ethnic discrimination for students. Additionally, many studies have shown that teachers find it…

A growing body of literature suggests that 'intercultural education' is an important tool for transformative learning about oneself and the other. Yet little is known about the challenges and opportunities of intercultural education in practice, particularly in light of an increasing focus in Western education policy on testing and…

This article builds on the findings of a critical systematic review that aimed to explore understandings and applications of inclusive pedagogies in the secondary school. Inclusive pedagogies are often conceptualised as both a set of strategies that aim to ensure access to learning for all students, and as value principles that reflect particular…

This study problematises the discourses of Pakistan's national curriculum textbooks to investigate how they represent Pakistan's indigenous languages/cultures through the prism of religion to constitute secondary school students' particular postcolonial linguistic identities. It also draws on the perspectives of 12 teachers and 424 students to…