Search

This paper presents findings from an exploratory review of the literature on school approaches and current issues within European schools in relation to migrant children with Special Educational Ne...

All schools in England are required to have a SENCo. Although the DfE collects data relating to the demographics of this large population of teachers, this has not until now been analysed or published, meaning that much research relating to SENCos has had to proceed on the basis of estimates. A Freedom of Information request was made to the DfE, from which actual numbers could be established, with breakdowns by age, gender, ethnicity, position of responsibility and level of qualification. The data describe a professional who is most likely to be female, white and in the middle or towards to the end of their career, and often part-time. Most are on the class teacher pay scale rather than being on the leadership scale, with a minority holding a Master's level qualification. This article also evaluates several research studies in the field in the context of this analysis.

In England, schools are required to have a named and trained “Special Educational Needs Coordinator” or SENCo. The difficulties of operationalising the role of the SENCo are well documented, as is ...

Introduced in England in 2011, the pupil premium policy was an ambitious reform aimed at tackling the persistent attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their more affluent peers. The policy provides school leaders with the professional autonomy to determine how pupil premium funding should be used. This article examines the decision-making processes and influences involved in the use of these additional resources. We conducted interviews with 21 school leaders from different contexts across the Midlands in order to investigate the approaches, perceptions and experiences that influenced their engagement with the pupil premium policy. The findings highlight the range of strategies employed to determine how the funding should be used and the factors that influence the decisions made. Our data also indicate the tensions and challenges that are experienced by school leaders in relation to effective use of the funding. We conclude with recommendations for policymakers and practitioners in relation to the requirement for high-quality, accessible information to support pupil premium use, the role of accountability mechanisms and the need for wider societal reform in order to tackle social disadvantage.

We examined the independent contributions of prosodic sensitivity and morphological awareness to word reading, text reading accuracy, and reading comprehension. We did so in a longitudinal study of...