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New Purposes – New Practices – New Pedagogy (NP3) is a collaboration between The Open University, Lancaster University and Manchester Metropolitan University, led by Professor Peter Twining. NP3 is finding out about how children's digital practices influence teaching and learning. NP3 aims to find out about how children use digital devices outside school and what influence (if any) these practices have on what pupils and teachers do inside primary schools. The focus is on pedagogy across the curriculum (rather than the teaching of computing). Our Research Questions (RQs) for these exploratory studies are: RQ1 What are the digital practices that pupils bring to their learning in school? RQ2 Across subject domains what do teachers’ intended and enacted pedagogic practices indicate about their awareness of and the value accorded to pupils’ digital competencies, and how do pupils’ experience these pedagogic practices? RQ3 What institutional circumstances and practices enable or undermine how pupils’ digital competencies and practices are recognised (RQ1) and integrated into teachers’ practice (RQ2)? This brief report provides a snapshot of the digital practices evident in one of the 10 Exploratory Studies that we conducted between October 2015 and March 2016, with a summary of emerging findings from this Exploratory Study. For further details about NP3 go to http://www.np3.org.uk.

New Purposes – New Practices – New Pedagogy (NP3) is a collaboration between The Open University, Lancaster University and Manchester Metropolitan University, led by Professor Peter Twining. NP3 is finding out about how children's digital practices influence teaching and learning. NP3 aims to find out about how children use digital devices outside school and what influence (if any) these practices have on what pupils and teachers do inside primary schools. The focus is on pedagogy across the curriculum (rather than the teaching of computing). Our Research Questions (RQs) for these exploratory studies are: RQ1 What are the digital practices that pupils bring to their learning in school? RQ2 Across subject domains what do teachers’ intended and enacted pedagogic practices indicate about their awareness of and the value accorded to pupils’ digital competencies, and how do pupils’ experience these pedagogic practices? RQ3 What institutional circumstances and practices enable or undermine how pupils’ digital competencies and practices are recognised (RQ1) and integrated into teachers’ practice (RQ2)? This brief report provides a snapshot of the digital practices evident in one of the 10 Exploratory Studies that we conducted between October 2015 and March 2016, with a summary of emerging findings from this Exploratory Study. For further details about NP3 go to http://www.np3.org.uk.

This paper starts from the propositions that (a) pedagogy is central to the achievement of socially just education and (b) there are existing pedagogical approaches that can contribute to more socially just outcomes. Given the ostensible commitments of the current English Government to reducing educational inequality and to the importance of teaching, we set out to explore the conditions that would need to be put in place to enable these approaches to be developed and sustained consistently in disadvantaged schools in England. We start by analysing classroom observation and interview data from four primary schools with contrasting socio-economic composition, highlighting the different pedagogical practices that emerge in working- and middle-class schools and also in working-class schools in different circumstances. Interviews with pupils show the impact of these practices on learner identities. We then draw on a variety of literatures on school composition, markets, leadership and teacher identities to present an account of the ways in which these different pedagogies are consciously or unconsciously produced. We point to systemic constraints: a mismatch between student demands and organisational capacity; teachers’ attitudes and professional identities and performative pressures on school leaders. All of these suggest the need for fundamental reforms to educational purposes and system architecture, rather than the naïve reliance on teacher agency to transform educational outcomes. Nevertheless, the current policy environment in England does offer some possibilities for action and we close the paper with some suggestions about ways in which capacity for more socially just pedagogy could be built within English schools.

The Open University were commissioned to evaluation Hackney Learning Trust's reading programmes: Destination Reader (for KS2) and Daily Supported Reading (for KS1). The reading programmes provide detailed pedagogies for teaching reading for schools in areas characterised by low social mobility and higher levels of poverty. Fifteen schools though south eastern England were included in the evaluation during the time period January 2018 - June 2019. The aim of the evaluation was to understand: the impact of the programmes on reading attainment and progress; teachers' knowledge and skills in teaching reading; children's reading skill, engagement and independent problem solving; changes in reading culture in the schools. The methodology consisted of in-depth case studies of 5 schools over 1.5 years; analysis of pupil reading test data; a pre-programme survey and a follow up survey 1.5 years later. The evaluation found that reading cultures in the schools were transformed to prioritise and value reading to a greater degree than before. Teachers felt more confident and knowledgeable about teaching reading and teachers and children were highly engaged with the programmes which were firmly embedded in all five case study schools. However, there was no evidence of a consistent increase in reading attainment across the 15 schools. Also, there was no evidence of an increase in children's enjoyment of reading or engagement with the new reading skills they learnt as part of the programmes. The former finding may be due to the short timeframe of the evaluation and the latter finding may be because children very quickly became fully engaged with the programmes.

New research findings are presented in this paper to inform current debates about the role of pedagogy in tackling persistent educational inequalities. The paper examines the potential of Reading for Pleasure (RfP) pedagogy to disrupt ‘pedagogy of poverty’ in low socio-economic schools (SES) and to enable children to reap the cognitive, wellbeing and social benefits of RfP. Children’s volition and social interaction as readers are central to RfP and have been found to be particularly constrained by pedagogy common in low SES schools. The research examined how pedagogy for RfP was instantiated in four low SES English primary schools to understand both how this potential might be realised and its effects on children’s engagement with RfP. The schools were selected because they had invested recently in RfP, yet the study found their RfP pedagogies did not in practice support children’s volition and engagement as readers because teachers’ understandings of reading were primarily about proficiency. The paper argues that to engage children in RfP, to enable them to reap the benefits and disrupt ‘pedagogy of poverty’ in low SES schools, teachers need to reconceptualise reading as social and volitional and ensure their RfP pedagogies reflect this.

This paper extends the ongoing debate about socially just pedagogy by arguing that disadvantaged learners’ capacity to exercise learner agency, which is essential for learning but has been shown to be unequally constrained, can be more effectively enabled. This is accomplished by critically discussing the possibilities and limits of a selection of existing literature on socially just pedagogies, including Critical and Productive Pedagogies, for enabling learner agency. Using sociocultural theory of learner agency, the paper argues that these pedagogies implicitly aim to support learner agency but are to varying extents limited in this respect. It is argued that through a dialogue with the research on pedagogy for Possibility Thinking, disadvantaged learners’ agency can be significantly increased. The paper argues that this could lead to extending learner agency from learning in the form of meaning-making and knowledge construction to learners co-imagining socially just pedagogies and co-transforming existing unjust pedagogical practices.

Existing international research suggests that widespread performative pedagogy has contributed to producing educational inequalities for ‘disadvantaged’ learners. There have also been calls for alternative pedagogies, which can be characterised as child-centred. This paper analyses pupils’ hierarchical positioning in a contemporary, mixed socio-economic, child-centred classroom using Bernstein’s theory of competence pedagogy and the concept of the ideal pupil. The ideal pupil’s central characteristics were perceived ‘intelligence’ and ‘good humour’, which were closely associated with middle class boys. Middle class and working class girls were positioned against a female ideal pupil, who would take on a supporting role by creating a facilitating environment for boys’ learning. While middle class girls were moderately successful in approximating these characteristics, working class girls were positioned at the bottom of the class hierarchy. These findings have implications for these pupils’ self-perceptions, and raise questions about the implications of child-centred pedagogy for social justice.

Why do boys from low-income families appear to read for pleasure far less than other groups of young people? This research project provides new evidence that how reading is taught in schools influences different boys’ orientations to and engagement with reading for pleasure. It offers evidence that boys’ (dis)engagement is not simply a gender issue and that it also involves teacher perceptions of other aspects of boys’ social and learner identities, including ‘ability’, ethnicity and social class. The research was funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Foundation.

This project aimed to develop new theoretical understanding of the nature and extent of children’s learner agency in primary education. From a sociocultural perspective, having the capacity to exercise learner agency is essential for meaning-making and therefore deep and effective learning. Existing international research suggests that children attending schools with significant intakes of children from ‘disadvantaged’ backgrounds may develop ‘passive’ and disengaged orientations to learning in response to the strong pressure on many of these schools to raise attainment. Learner agency can be defined as volitional activity which has an effect on learners’ peers and teachers, for example in terms of their understanding of a concept or phenomena. Learner agency is both constrained and enabled by sociocultural practices, including, as in this research, the modes of pedagogy used by teachers. A multiple case study design (Yin 2009) was selected to enable collection of rich data using multiple methods within and compare across different schools. Four case study schools with above national average (26.7% in 2013) proportion of pupils eligible for Free School Meals (as a proxy for ‘disadvantage’) and located in urban settings in Greater London. Data was collected in the four schools through semi-structured interviews with Year Five teachers and children and Year Five lessons were observed by the researcher as a non-participant observer, across the curriculum. All four classrooms were characterised by a mixture of competence-based and performative pedagogy, although the dominant mode varied across schools. The higher the proportion of disadvantaged children at the school, the more performative the pedagogy was. The project provides new empirical evidence about the nature and extent of children’s learner agency in disadvantaged urban primary schools; it has led to the development of theoretical understandings of learner agency in such contexts. The data sugg

Why do boys from low-income families appear to read for pleasure far less than other groups of young people? This research project provides new evidence that how reading is taught in schools influences different boys’ orientations to and engagement with reading for pleasure. It offers evidence that boys’ (dis)engagement is not simply a gender issue and that it also involves teacher perceptions of other aspects of boys’ social and learner identities, including ‘ability’, ethnicity and social class. The research was funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Foundation.

This project aimed to develop new theoretical understanding of the nature and extent of children’s learner agency in primary education. From a sociocultural perspective, having the capacity to exercise learner agency is essential for meaning-making and therefore deep and effective learning. Existing international research suggests that children attending schools with significant intakes of children from ‘disadvantaged’ backgrounds may develop ‘passive’ and disengaged orientations to learning in response to the strong pressure on many of these schools to raise attainment. Learner agency can be defined as volitional activity which has an effect on learners’ peers and teachers, for example in terms of their understanding of a concept or phenomena. Learner agency is both constrained and enabled by sociocultural practices, including, as in this research, the modes of pedagogy used by teachers. A multiple case study design (Yin 2009) was selected to enable collection of rich data using multiple methods within and compare across different schools. Four case study schools with above national average (26.7% in 2013) proportion of pupils eligible for Free School Meals (as a proxy for ‘disadvantage’) and located in urban settings in Greater London. Data was collected in the four schools through semi-structured interviews with Year Five teachers and children and Year Five lessons were observed by the researcher as a non-participant observer, across the curriculum. All four classrooms were characterised by a mixture of competence-based and performative pedagogy, although the dominant mode varied across schools. The higher the proportion of disadvantaged children at the school, the more performative the pedagogy was. The project provides new empirical evidence about the nature and extent of children’s learner agency in disadvantaged urban primary schools; it has led to the development of theoretical understandings of learner agency in such contexts. The data sugg

New research findings are presented in this paper to inform current debates about the role of pedagogy in tackling persistent educational inequalities. The paper examines the potential of Reading for Pleasure (RfP) pedagogy to disrupt ‘pedagogy of poverty’ in low socio-economic schools (SES) and to enable children to reap the cognitive, wellbeing and social benefits of RfP. Children’s volition and social interaction as readers are central to RfP and have been found to be particularly constrained by pedagogy common in low SES schools. The research examined how pedagogy for RfP was instantiated in four low SES English primary schools to understand both how this potential might be realised and its effects on children’s engagement with RfP. The schools were selected because they had invested recently in RfP, yet the study found their RfP pedagogies did not in practice support children’s volition and engagement as readers because teachers’ understandings of reading were primarily about proficiency. The paper argues that to engage children in RfP, to enable them to reap the benefits and disrupt ‘pedagogy of poverty’ in low SES schools, teachers need to reconceptualise reading as social and volitional and ensure their RfP pedagogies reflect this.

Existing international research suggests that widespread performative pedagogy has contributed to producing educational inequalities for ‘disadvantaged’ learners. There have also been calls for alternative pedagogies, which can be characterised as child-centred. This paper analyses pupils’ hierarchical positioning in a contemporary, mixed socio-economic, child-centred classroom using Bernstein’s theory of competence pedagogy and the concept of the ideal pupil. The ideal pupil’s central characteristics were perceived ‘intelligence’ and ‘good humour’, which were closely associated with middle class boys. Middle class and working class girls were positioned against a female ideal pupil, who would take on a supporting role by creating a facilitating environment for boys’ learning. While middle class girls were moderately successful in approximating these characteristics, working class girls were positioned at the bottom of the class hierarchy. These findings have implications for these pupils’ self-perceptions, and raise questions about the implications of child-centred pedagogy for social justice.

This paper extends the ongoing debate about socially just pedagogy by arguing that disadvantaged learners’ capacity to exercise learner agency, which is essential for learning but has been shown to be unequally constrained, can be more effectively enabled. This is accomplished by critically discussing the possibilities and limits of a selection of existing literature on socially just pedagogies, including Critical and Productive Pedagogies, for enabling learner agency. Using sociocultural theory of learner agency, the paper argues that these pedagogies implicitly aim to support learner agency but are to varying extents limited in this respect. It is argued that through a dialogue with the research on pedagogy for Possibility Thinking, disadvantaged learners’ agency can be significantly increased. The paper argues that this could lead to extending learner agency from learning in the form of meaning-making and knowledge construction to learners co-imagining socially just pedagogies and co-transforming existing unjust pedagogical practices.

This paper starts from the propositions that (a) pedagogy is central to the achievement of socially just education and (b) there are existing pedagogical approaches that can contribute to more socially just outcomes. Given the ostensible commitments of the current English Government to reducing educational inequality and to the importance of teaching, we set out to explore the conditions that would need to be put in place to enable these approaches to be developed and sustained consistently in disadvantaged schools in England. We start by analysing classroom observation and interview data from four primary schools with contrasting socio-economic composition, highlighting the different pedagogical practices that emerge in working- and middle-class schools and also in working-class schools in different circumstances. Interviews with pupils show the impact of these practices on learner identities. We then draw on a variety of literatures on school composition, markets, leadership and teacher identities to present an account of the ways in which these different pedagogies are consciously or unconsciously produced. We point to systemic constraints: a mismatch between student demands and organisational capacity; teachers’ attitudes and professional identities and performative pressures on school leaders. All of these suggest the need for fundamental reforms to educational purposes and system architecture, rather than the naïve reliance on teacher agency to transform educational outcomes. Nevertheless, the current policy environment in England does offer some possibilities for action and we close the paper with some suggestions about ways in which capacity for more socially just pedagogy could be built within English schools.

The Open University were commissioned to evaluation Hackney Learning Trust's reading programmes: Destination Reader (for KS2) and Daily Supported Reading (for KS1). The reading programmes provide detailed pedagogies for teaching reading for schools in areas characterised by low social mobility and higher levels of poverty. Fifteen schools though south eastern England were included in the evaluation during the time period January 2018 - June 2019. The aim of the evaluation was to understand: the impact of the programmes on reading attainment and progress; teachers' knowledge and skills in teaching reading; children's reading skill, engagement and independent problem solving; changes in reading culture in the schools. The methodology consisted of in-depth case studies of 5 schools over 1.5 years; analysis of pupil reading test data; a pre-programme survey and a follow up survey 1.5 years later. The evaluation found that reading cultures in the schools were transformed to prioritise and value reading to a greater degree than before. Teachers felt more confident and knowledgeable about teaching reading and teachers and children were highly engaged with the programmes which were firmly embedded in all five case study schools. However, there was no evidence of a consistent increase in reading attainment across the 15 schools. Also, there was no evidence of an increase in children's enjoyment of reading or engagement with the new reading skills they learnt as part of the programmes. The former finding may be due to the short timeframe of the evaluation and the latter finding may be because children very quickly became fully engaged with the programmes.