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This article explores and presents various statistics regarding permanent school exclusions in England. Publically available national data, e.g. "Permanent" and "fixed-period exclusions in England" (Department for Education, 2021a), are used to identify patterns and thus provide an overview of the number, profile and characteristics (considering variables such as gender, ethnicity) of the population of children and young people permanently excluded in England. The article does not seek to explain the trends, rather it presents them as a 'where are we' picture of permanent exclusions in England. It is important to have such an overview in order to contextualise the English education system and view the implications of policy for practice relating to exclusions as demonstrated through pupil numbers and proportionality. The analysis highlights issues of disproportionality and the characteristics of students permanently excluded as well as revealing the 'under counting' of those who are excluded. The discussion explores issues around disproportionality, relating these to broader educational issues. Suggestions are made as to how to accurately account for all children and young people who are permanently excluded or 'off-rolled'.

Frenetic digital timescapes reduce academic life to the endless achievement of metrics. These forces produce unsustainable work practices that disconnect us from ourselves, from ideas, from the natural world and from each other. While there is a substantial body of literature critiquing this, the use of arts-based inquiry into academic work is less common. In this article, we use slow 'thinking-in-movement' practices and arts-based methodologies to argue that beach walking enables us to resist the academic machine. We suggest that beaches act as liminal spaces where we may engage in post-feminist, new materialist c/a/r/tographies. Beach walking enables us to defamiliarize our bodies and interrupt the academic machine so that we might enact more embodied, contemplative ways of working. Written as a performative piece, this article intersperses citations of towards a valuable academic life. Come, join us as we walk ...

In the past few decades, several countries have introduced reforms aimed at increasing school autonomy. We evaluate the effect of the introduction of autonomous academies in England on the educational trajectories of children with special educational needs. This has been done using longitudinal data on all schoolchildren in state schools in England, from the National Pupil Database. The results show that the effects of school autonomy on educational inclusion are not uniform and depend on schools' previous performance and socio-economic composition. Schools that obtained autonomy under the control of an external sponsor (sponsored academies) were more likely to decrease the proportion of pupils with special needs and remove additional support for them. We do not observe these effects in the schools that voluntarily applied for the more autonomous status (converter academies).

Conference attendance is a feature of contemporary academic work and an accepted way of building academic identities and networks through the dissemination and promotion of ideas, achievements and research. However, our personal experiences have caused us to problematise the traditional conference and consider alternatives which mitigate its associated problems yet achieve its aims. In this paper, we use collaborative autoethnography to engage in inquiry about the roles of conferences, and their inhabited notions of representation, membership and inclusion/exclusion. We use personal experiences of virtual confer-ring to highlight that many agreed-upon purposes of attending conferences can be effectively achieved through other means. We explore how particular ways of engaging with technologies enable responsive gathering spaces, relational knowledge production, kinship and community; and facilitate the development, and promotion of scholars and scholarship. We offer a view that confer-ring interactions in online/virtual spaces can support collegial, feminist and egalitarian sharing and knowledge exchange.

This study investigates how three secondary subject teachers think about and take account of learner diversity in their lesson planning, enactment and reviewing, with a specific focus on pupils designated as having special educational needs (SEN). The study is significant in the context of international moves in contemporary school teaching towards greater personalisation and inclusion. Focussing on three different subject teachers whose lesson planning was nominated as high quality, the study uses a sequence of interviews and lesson observations alongside the analysis of lesson planning artefacts, to present three in-depth cases and, through cross-case analysis, to develop a provisional situated model of lesson planning for diversity. Different forms of planning are identified -- formal, personal, expanded and in-flight -- which differ with regard to dimensions of purpose, formality, whether recorded, and timing. The teachers understandings of diversity are broader than differences related to SEN, and this relates to different kinds of differentiation, connecting the concerns of special needs education with wider issues of lesson planning for diversity.

There are more pupils of secondary-school age in special schools in England than those of primary-school age. In 2016, 60% of the 88,009 pupils aged between 5 and 16 in special schools in England were of secondary age. This disproportionality can be viewed as an indication that inclusion of children with special educational needs in mainstream secondary schools is not being achieved. This two-part multiple methods study involved a standard empirical enquiry, used survey methodology with rating scales and open-ended questions. The second part used futures studies methodologies and focus-group evaluation techniques to develop a vignette of a school that successfully includes those children who are placed in special schools, at the time of this study which was then subjected to critique and evaluation by a variety of expert and stakeholder groups in several focus-group settings. The suggestions arising from these discussions informed the reformulating and development of the vignette. Analysis reveals that while school structure and organisation account for some of the explanations of over-representation, so do within-child factors, issues around relationships, processes and curriculum as well as exosystemic/chronosystemic factors. A vignette of a future school is presented, one that which includes the children who are excluded from mainstream schools at the time of writing. This paper highlights the unexplored phenomenon of secondary over-representation in special schools in England and presents an in-depth analysis of the reasons that stakeholders give to explain this over-representation. Uniquely, this analysis is then translated into a design of a possible future inclusive school.

This paper provides a rationale for understanding personal/professional identities to support personal/professional learning and positioning in academe and higher education. It explains the importance of women writing and speaking out the stories of their lives (everyday and academic), having their voices heard and responded to, and using embodied knowledge to question and challenge workplace systems and structures of power and sexism and invisibility. Importantly, this paper opens the space for women's visibility, voice and agency in academic and educational life.

Each generation seems to lament the characteristics of the generations that follow. Today, however, with a student population unique in traits that impact teaching and learning, differences between teacher and learner generations must be recognized, analyzed, and addressed if faculty in higher education are to meet the needs of students. In spring 2008, as part of a Faculty Leadership Pilot Program, the author interviewed a number of key administrative personnel throughout her college and attended a variety of meetings. A common concern heard was the changing nature of today's students and the growing challenges of meeting their needs. In an attempt to determine if and how students are different, the author began to consider her own teaching experiences of the past twenty years; she spoke with faculty and administration and read the growing body of literature regarding today's students. This article is a result of her findings regarding the characteristics of today's students, with a focus on how they use information and learn. Defined here as those born between the years 1981 and 2001 and numbering more than seventy-six million, college students today are proficient in technology and communicate more continually with their parents. They are often seen as the "everyone gets a trophy" (or an "A") generation. Following upon the heels of Generation X, this new generation has been called Generation Y, Gen Y, or Millennials. (Contains 2 tables.)

The purpose of the study was to examine how reader response journals followed by classroom discussion ("Reader Response Plus") contributed to students' reading comprehension and to their attitudes toward reading. The study was conducted in a rural school in upstate New York. The twelfth grade class that participated in the study consisted of six students in a special education classroom, four of whom were randomly selected as focus students. As they read the award-winning novel, "The Watsons Go to Birmingham," by Christopher Paul Curtis, students responded in reader response journals and participated in classroom discussions where these responses were shared. Classroom discussions allowed to consider the perspectives of others and gain new information. Instruments used to collect data include the "Qualitative Reading Inventory-3," a journal rating rubric, a reading attitude questionnaire, an individual attitude checklist, and field notes. Findings indicate that "Reader Response Plus" contributed to improvements in reading comprehension and attitude. All four of the focus students increased either their independent, instructional, or frustration levels of reading comprehension based on the "QRI-3." Each student also demonstrated an improvement in reading comprehension based on data collected from rubrics used to assess journal entries. Throughout the course of the study, the students also became more actively engaged with the text and began to participate more during discussion.

This article examines the purposes of education with a particular focus on young people with severe learning difficulties (SLD). The topic is explored with reference to a specific case, whereby some of the key findings of an evaluation of the first year of "The Greenside Studio", an English special school's vocational teaching resource for young people with SLD, are presented. A conceptualisation of different "sides" to the Studio is discussed in relation to the purposes of education for these learners in which the view of vocational learning as a stepping stone to paid employment and independence is presented as problematic. With a broader interpretation of vocational education this stepping stone is reconfigured as a bridge to life after school, whatever form that takes. It is argued, however, that the nature of this life must be viewed aspirationally.

Between 2011 and 2013, the Department for Education (DfE) in England made £3.3 million available to support the development of opportunities for young disabled people to access high-quality physical education and school sport. The DfE with the Youth Sport Trust (YST) developed a range of initiatives to help meet this aim, including Project Ability, TOPsportsability and the Young Leaders programme. The authors of this article were commissioned by the YST to evaluate the school-based inclusion initiatives. One aspect of the evaluation was an examination of project "legacy" benefits--a term much cited in the run-up to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games. This article asks what additional, unexpected, positive legacy benefits appear to be associated with the capacity built by the DfE Disability project initiatives. A wide range of legacy benefits beyond those the YST set out to achieve were found, including tangible achievements such as accreditation, and intangible benefits such as the holistic development of participants beyond sports.