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It is well-documented that schools fail to adequately engage with contemporary content about intersex awareness and education or inclusion of people with intersex variations. Where sexuality and relationships education are the remit of Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum in countries such as Australia, the learning area shows little obligation/response-ability towards the needs of students with intersex variations. It also fails to pay nuanced attention to non-dominant issues, knowledge, or people with respect to sex, gender and sexuality. Similarly, the normative endosex nature/focus of HPE/PE/sport and related professional education bodies (e.g. in teaching and coaching) ignore the need for relevant and affirming content about intersex bodies. A recent project reported here, created a collective narrative addressing how such HPE bodies of learning and teaching can advocate for and enact approaches that are inclusive, affirming, visible, and supportive in promoting and upholding the human rights and health needs of students with intersex variations. The research question driving the project was: What part can HPE bodies of learning and teaching play concerning intersex awareness and education? This original empirical research draws on the methodology and theory of narrative inquiry. The narrative was created between artefacts from a cohort of second year Australian pre-service HPE teacher education students in dialogue with teacher/researcher/expert/author bodies. The paper employs a recently developed Strategic Framework for intersex inclusion that promotes a positive whole-school approach, for educational institutions to be more inclusive, humane, safe and educationally relevant for people with intersex variations. This framework assists critical reflection on project findings. We argue that such engagement, as illustrated in this project's scope, promotes a positive and diverse understanding about intersex in educational spaces, curriculum and pedagogies, guidelines, and policies, and ultimately reflect Australian Human Rights Commission recommendations and Australian anti-discrimination legislation.

Child maltreatment is a serious problem, worldwide. Children and young people who have experienced maltreatment face multiple physical and mental health challenges which hinder their success at school and these adverse experiences makes them more challenging to teach than their non-maltreated peers. Increasingly, teachers are considered as an important part of the wider the child protection workforce as they are well-placed to intervene and prevent further harm. To fulfil this role effectively, teachers require requisite training beginning in initial teacher education programs. This paper is a protocol for a systematic scoping review that asks: "What is known about preservice/initial teacher education for child protection?" Systematic scoping reviews are worthwhile and necessary in fields where research is diverse and needing of synthesis to identify strengths in the body of evidence and identify gaps to set new research directions. We will draw on Askey and O'Malley's six-stage scoping review methodology to assess the scope, range, and nature of research activity on this topic. We will add an innovative seventh stage involving a commitment to disseminating and applying knowledge generated from the review. The research question has been established, and key terms defined (Stage 1). The search strategy has been devised, and searches have been run (Stage 2). Round 1 screening of titles and abstracts is completed and full text screening is currently in progress (Stage 3). To our knowledge this is the first attempt to systematically map the empirical literature on child protection in pre-service teacher education. When completed, this systematic scoping review will offer a comprehensive, transparent, and replicable way to assess the full scope of empirical research on this important topic of utmost educational relevance.

It is well documented that the most effective sexuality education programmes employ a whole-school learning approach. More specifically, when schools and their leaders and teachers embrace such an approach, they view student learning in the context of the whole experience of being at school -- from the classroom, to the home and the partnerships schools form with the local community. In parallel to this, people born with intersex variations report the lack of a systematic and broad approach to recognition and inclusion of intersex variations in schools due to strong 'normativity' messaging, including that pertaining to the body. Similarly, schools fail to engage mindfully with contemporary content that promotes a positive and diverse understanding of intersex in educational spaces, guidelines, policies and the curriculum. In line with community expectations outlined by the Darlington Intersex Community Consensus Statement, peer-led intersex rights-and-health-advocacy, and intersex-affirming scholarship, this paper advocates for and seeks to offer recommendations on how schools might enact a whole-school approach for sexuality education that is inclusive, affirming, visible and supportive in promoting and upholding the rights and health of students with intersex variations.

In Australia, under the National Assessment Plan, educational accountability testing in literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) is undertaken with all students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 to monitor student achievement and inform policy. However, the extent to which these data have been analysed to report student progress is limited. This article reports a study analysing Year-3 and Year-5 NAPLAN reading and numeracy data, school and student information for a single student cohort from Queensland, Australia, to examine student achievement and progress. The analyses use longitudinal multilevel modelling, incorporating an enhanced approach for missing data imputation, given that such data frequently involve large amounts of missing data and failure to account properly for such missing data may bias interpretations of analyses. Further, statistical adjustments to deal with the impact of measurement error, an aspect not previously addressed in such analyses of data, are undertaken. A special focus of analyses is achievement of Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. International and national data demonstrate a considerable achievement gap between these students. "Closing the gap" is a core Australian education equity policy, with NAPLAN data used as a primary indicator of policy impact. Overall, analyses indicate greater understanding of student progress for all students is available from Australian data if appropriate analyses are undertaken. However, analyses also demonstrate not only that the gap between Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous student progress increases as they move through school but also diversity of achievement within the Indigenous student cohort. Implications for policy are considered.

Students with ASC are at heightened risk for bullying and their understanding of bullying is known to protect them from involvement in it (Humphrey and Hebron 2015). However, only a handful of studies have examined how students with ASC understand traditional bullying and none of them focused on cyberbullying. To fill this gap, we investigated how traditional bullying and cyberbullying are understood from the perspectives of 89 students with ASC attending inclusive schools and 490 students without ASC. Twenty vignettes were used from (Campbell et al. 2017a), based on the Olweus (1999) definition of bullying and verified by a Delphi technique. In the majority of traditional bullying and cyberbullying vignettes, students with ASC made more accurate responses than inaccurate ones and demonstrated higher accuracy rates than students without ASC. Findings of linear multiple regression analyses pointed out ASC status as a predictive variable for understanding both types of bullying, along with students' age for understanding cyberbullying. The findings highlight the ability rather than inability to understand bullying in students with ASC. It is therefore critical to include the voices and experiences of students with ASC in our research endeavour.

The transition from early intervention programs to inclusive school settings presents a range of social challenges for children with developmental disabilities. In Queensland, in the year of transition to school, many children with developmental disabilities attend an Early Childhood Development Program for two to three days each week and also begin attendance in a mainstream program, with the latter increasing to full-time attendance during the year. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected by questionnaires regarding 62 children participating in the "Transition to School Project." Their parents and teachers were asked for their perceptions of the success of the transition process and the benefits and challenges of inclusion. Both parents and teachers saw a range of benefits to children from their inclusion in "regular" classrooms, with parents noting the helpfulness of teachers and their support for inclusion. Challenges noted by parents included the school's lack of preparation for their child's particular developmental needs, especially in terms of the physical environment, while teachers reported challenges in meeting the needs of these children within the context and resources of the classroom. Parents were more likely than teachers to view the transition as easy. Correlational analyses indicated that teachers were more likely to view the transition as easy when they felt the child was appropriately placed in a "regular" classroom. Findings from this project can inform the development of effective transition-to-school programs in the early school years for children with developmental disabilities. (Contains 4 tables.)

Students with ASC are at heightened risk for bullying and their understanding of bullying is known to protect them from involvement in it (Humphrey and Hebron 2015). However, only a handful of studies have examined how students with ASC understand traditional bullying and none of them focused on cyberbullying. To fill this gap, we investigated how traditional bullying and cyberbullying are understood from the perspectives of 89 students with ASC attending inclusive schools and 490 students without ASC. Twenty vignettes were used from (Campbell et al. 2017a), based on the Olweus (1999) definition of bullying and verified by a Delphi technique. In the majority of traditional bullying and cyberbullying vignettes, students with ASC made more accurate responses than inaccurate ones and demonstrated higher accuracy rates than students without ASC. Findings of linear multiple regression analyses pointed out ASC status as a predictive variable for understanding both types of bullying, along with students' age for understanding cyberbullying. The findings highlight the ability rather than inability to understand bullying in students with ASC. It is therefore critical to include the voices and experiences of students with ASC in our research endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]