‘They think that if you're a teacher here … you're not clever enough to be a proper teacher’: the courtesy stigma experienced by teachers employed at schools for pupils with behavioural,emotional and social difficulties (BESD)

A wealth of literature has identified that children with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties (BESD) and their families are frequently stigmatised due to the perceived controllable and ‘invisible’ nature of this special educational need (SEN). Yet little research has considered the impact of this stigma on another group of individuals, educational practitioners employed in BESD schools. This is despite these professionals working in close contact with pupils with BESD, a heavily stigmatised group, on a regular basis. This paper therefore, details a study which explored perceptions of stigma specifically with educational professionals employed in schools for pupils with BESD. Semi‐structured interviews with nine practitioners (including head teachers and class teachers with additional responsibilities) were conducted, all of whom had worked within the BESD sector for at least 10 years, with data being analysed via Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Findings revealed how educational practitioners employed in BESD schools experienced courtesy stigma, with many not being perceived as ‘proper’ teachers due to a discourse of care surrounding BESD. Other professionals reported much confusion from their mainstream colleagues and other individuals about how they could want to work with such ‘challenging’ pupils. This courtesy stigma was linked to the wider stigma surrounding BESD schools, which were often ignorantly perceived to be full of ‘bad boys’ or ‘absolute horrors’. This paper concludes by considering the implications of these findings for policy and practice, and provides recommendations for addressing the identified stigma towards practitioners employed in BESD schools.     

Person Formulation in the Process of Schooling

Mainstream sociology of education has seemingly moved away from the micro‐world of schools and classrooms before we have fully understood them. This is an attempt to reassess some of the prevailing assumptions about the social processes in classrooms, particularly in early schooling. It emerges from an investigation into the formulation of pupils by teachers in primary schools using a four year longitudinal study of a cohort of pupils in two schools. It suggests that Becker's model of ‘ideal‐matching’ may not always be appropriate for understanding interpersonal processes in primary classrooms. Rather than the ‘ideal’ pupil it is apparently the ‘normal’ or ‘average’ pupil that is the significant yardstick in teacher‐pupil dealings.     

Do trainee teachers harm pupil attainment? Isolating the effect of pre-service teachers on contemporaneous pupil performance in ‘high-stakes’ tests

The prevalence of ‘pre-service’ or ‘trainee’ teachers in schools is rising in England, driven by the expansion of school-led routes to qualified teacher status and increasing demand for newly qualified teachers. This may have important implications for schools, which have historically been concerned with the impact of trainee teachers on their pupils’ attainment. There are, however, confounding factors which affect both the decision to host a trainee teacher and pupil attainment. We empirically model the impact of trainee teachers on contemporaneous pupil attainment in ‘high-stakes’ exams, exploiting unique data combining national administrative data on pupil test scores with a survey of schools’ involvement with initial teacher training over multiple academic years. We use school fixed effects to account for time-invariant school factors which may determine both schools’ teacher training decisions and pupil attainment. Counter to schools’ concerns, we find that pupil attainment in high-stakes assessments, on average, is not significantly affected by the number of trainee teachers. This is an important empirical finding, as it suggests that the rapid expansion of school-led teacher training is not likely to have a detrimental effect on pupil attainment in England, conditional on the set of schools that choose to engage with initial teacher training remaining similar: trainee teachers may still affect pupil attainment in schools that do not currently participate in initial teacher training, as these schools are typically more constrained.     

The importance of adjusting for pupil background in school value-added models: A study of Progress 8 and school accountability in England

In the UK, USA and elsewhere, school accountability systems increasingly compare schools using value-added measures of school performance derived from pupil scores in high-stakes standardised tests. Rather than naïvely comparing school average scores, which largely reflect school intake differences in prior attainment, these measures attempt to compare the average progress or improvement pupils make during a year or phase of schooling. Schools, however, also differ in terms of their pupil demographic and socioeconomic characteristics and these factors also predict why some schools subsequently score higher than others. Many therefore argue that value-added measures unadjusted for pupil background are biased in favour of schools with more ‘educationally advantaged’ intakes. But others worry that adjusting for pupil background entrenches socioeconomic inequities and excuses low-performing schools. In this article we explore these theoretical arguments and their practical importance in the context of the ‘Progress 8’ secondary school accountability system in England, which has chosen to ignore pupil background. We reveal how the reported low or high performance of many schools changes dramatically once adjustments are made for pupil background, and these changes also affect the reported differential performances of regions and of different school types. We conclude that accountability systems which choose to ignore pupil background are likely to reward and punish the wrong schools and this will likely have detrimental effects on pupil learning. These findings, especially when coupled with more general concerns surrounding high-stakes testing and school value-added models, raise serious doubts about their use in school accountability systems.     

Pupils and ‘Race’: integration and disintegration in primary schools

Following the Swann Report of 1985 and its recommendation of ‘Education for All’, the need for multicultural education in all areas was generally recognized. School‐based attempts to respond have been little researched, as has minority ethnic pupil development from the pupil's point of view. Eighteen months’ ethnographic work in six main primary schools revealed a number of predominant themes, including that reported here of ‘integration and disintegration’. Their nature, the implications for pupil learning, and the conditions attending them are explored in relation to adapting to school in the early years; transfer between schools at ages seven and nine; relationships among pupils; and pupils’ experience of the curriculum. Integration and disintegration were found to be associated with certain factors at general societal and governmental, community, institutional and individual levels. Integrational features appear to promote pupil learning and development, disintegrational to obstruct and disrupt. The analysis appears to support, amongst other things, democratic, participatory procedures in schools and collaborative learning in its widest sense involving teachers, pupils and parents.     

The Culture Project: diasporic negotiations of ethnicity,identity and culture among teachers,pupils and parents in Chinese language schools

Notions of culture, ethnicity and identity are highly political (and also personally meaningful) issues within diasporic communities. Complementary schools are particularly interesting sites in this respect, as they are often set up with an explicit cultural agenda of ‘preserving’ or ‘maintaining’ ‘traditional’ culture and language within diasporic communities. In this paper, we draw on qualitative data from an ESRC funded study conducted in six Chinese complementary schools to consider how pupils (n=60), parents (n=24) and teachers (n=21) in these schools construct and negotiate issues of culture and identity. We consider the ways in which the cultural agenda of the schools is constructed and experienced, teasing out the ways in which cultural discourses and pupil identities are deployed (and resisted, reworked) within the space of Chinese schools. Finally we consider the extent to which the schools are perceived by the young people to be ‘successful’ (or not) in their efforts to make pupils feel ‘more Chinese’.     

Preferential treatment or unwanted in mainstream schools? The perceptions of parents and teachers with regards to pupils with special educational needs and challenging behaviour

This study explored the perceptions of parents and teachers regarding the differential treatment or stigma experienced by pupils with challenging behaviour – more specifically, those with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties (BESD), as well as children with visible special educational needs (Down's syndrome and/or profound and multiple learning difficulties) who frequently displayed challenging behaviour as a characteristic of their SEN. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with ten parents of children with challenging behaviour, together with 15 educational practitioners employed in mainstream and BESD schools. Findings revealed how several parents, and staff employed in BESD schools, viewed pupils with challenging behaviour as ‘unwanted’ in mainstream schools. The remaining parents, as well as mainstream practitioners, reported the opposite and indicated that these pupils received treatment deemed to be ‘preferential’ in the mainstream. This has direct implications for those concerned with supporting pupils with challenging behaviour in mainstream settings.     

Diagnosing the learning crisis: What can value-added analysis contribute?

Advocates of teacher value-added modelling (VAM) argue that this technique can provide evidence on teacher effectiveness to inform teacher policies and broader education system reforms. Critics contend that value-added is a poor proxy for teacher quality and as such is of questionable utility, especially where teacher accountability is concerned. In low- and middle-income countries, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, where the challenge of the ‘learning crisis’ is most severe, a lack of longitudinal data has precluded extensive debate on the matter. In this paper we explore the potential of value-added analysis for diagnostic purposes in the context of Ethiopia. We make use of data from the Young Lives longitudinal study – specifically two rounds of school surveys conducted in Ethiopia between 2012 and 2017 when pupils were in grades 4–8. Learning levels in the Young Lives sites in Ethiopia are very considerably below curricular expectations. Like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Ethiopia faces a significant challenge in terms of a ‘learning crisis’ and in terms of the attendant need to develop policies to improve educational effectiveness within the confines of very limited resources. We discuss the background to VAM models and their use, including in relation to the context of Ethiopia. The paper shows that learning progress in primary schools varies widely between classrooms, and between pupils within the same classroom. Some schools and teachers are more successful in raising overall attainment by ‘raising the floor’ of learning and narrowing the dispersion. Others are more successful by ‘raising the roof’. Less effective teachers appear to be particularly ineffective for pupils with higher scores at the start of the year. In contrast, the most effective teachers showed high levels of ‘value-added’ for pupils at all levels of prior performance. Diagnostic analysis of teacher value-added has potential, we argue, to aid understanding of contributors to low levels of learning such as: (i) over-ambitious curricula; (ii) absence of ‘teaching at the right level’; (iii) within class heterogeneity and pupil grouping strategies; and (iv) teaching and learning strategies – such as ‘differentiation’ or ‘mastery’.     

Pupil mobility in schools and implications for raising achievement

This paper examines the causes of pupil mobility and good practice in schools to address mobility issues. Pupil mobility is defined as ‘a child joining or leaving school at a point other than the normal age at which children start or finish their education at that school’. The first part draws upon evidence of a survey, which explores the views of headteachers on the nature and causes of pupil mobility in schools and the priority they give to addressing pupil mobility issues in their schools. It examines the cause of mobility in schools in the context of mobile groups. This is followed by the challenges for managing mobility and strategies to address pupil mobility in schools. The second part of the paper outlines successful strategies that minimize the effects of mobility in schools. Evidence is drawn from case‐study research and focuses on the school systems, pastoral care and access to learning which combine to support the induction, assessment and monitoring of newly arrived pupils in school and effective use of data for self‐evaluation. Examples of flexible curriculum organization, innovative approaches to additional support and effective administrative procedures are drawn upon. Evidence reflects the views of a range of school staff, parents/carers and pupils in the case‐study school, as well as the judgements of senior researchers. Policy implications for government and for all concerned with school performance are highlighted, as well as many practical suggestions for raising achievement of mobile pupils     

Pupil mobility,attainment and progress in primary school

This article presents an analysis of the association between pupil mobility and educational attainment in the 2002 national end of Key Stage 2 (KS2) tests for 11‐year‐old pupils in an inner London education authority. The results show that pupil mobility is strongly associated with low attainment in the end of key stage tests. However, the negative association with pupil mobility is reduced by half when account is taken of other pupil background factors known to be related to educational attainment (such as special educational need and socio‐economic disadvantage), and is eliminated entirely when account is also taken of pupils' prior attainment as indicated by end of KS1 test scores at age 7. Thus there is no indication that changing school has a negative impact on educational progress during primary school. Pupils who join their school during KS2 from other schools in England are more likely to be ‘at risk’ of low attainment due to higher levels of socio‐economic disadvantage, a greater need for support in relation to English as an additional language, a higher incidence and greater severity of special educational needs and pre‐existing low attainment at the end of KS1. A key factor in understanding the relationship between mobility and attainment is the reason for mobility. One‐third of mobile pupils had arrived from schools outside of England, often as refugees, asylum seekers or economic migrants, and these pupils accounted for the major part of the effect ascribed to ‘pupil mobility’. The low attainment of these pupils is the result not of ‘changing school’ but of a broad range of factors including substantial cultural, educational and social adjustment.     

The construction of the ‘ideal pupil’ and pupils’ perceptions of ‘misbehaviour’ and discipline: contrasting experiences from a low‐socio‐economic and a high‐socio‐economic primary school

This paper examines the effect of school social class composition on pupil learner identities in British primary schools. In the current British education system, high‐stakes testing has a pervasive effect on the pedagogical relationship between teachers and pupils. The data in this paper, from ethnographic research in a working‐class school and a middle‐class school, indicate that the effect of the ‘testing culture’ is much greater in the working‐class school. Using Bernsteinian theory and the concept of the ‘ideal pupil’, it is shown that these pupils’ learner identities are more passive and dominated by issues of discipline and behaviour rather than academic performance, in contrast to those in the middle‐class school. While this study includes only two schools, it indicates a potentially significant issue for neo‐liberal education policy where education is marketised and characterised by high‐stakes testing, and schools are polarised in terms of social class.     

Computerised formative assessment of reading comprehension: field trials in the UK

Increased curriculum time allocated to reading might not be effective in raising achievement. Teachers need to closely monitor and manage both the quality and quantity of individualised reading of all their pupils for optimal effectiveness. ‘Learning information systems’ (LIS) for reading such as the ‘Accelerated Reader’ (AR) enable this through individualised computerised assessment of pupil comprehension of ‘real books’, with feedback to both pupil and teacher. This study explored the impact of AR on reading achievement in 13 schools of different types spread across the UK, the majority socio‐economically disadvantaged. Participating pupils were aged 7–14 years. Pre‐post norm‐referenced gains in reading achievement were measured by group paper‐reading tests and a computer‐based adaptive reading test. The implementation integrity of AR was assessed by direct observation by researchers and through data generated by the programme itself. On both paper and computer‐based reading tests, on aggregate pupils in the 13 schools gained in reading at abnormally high and statistically significant rates. Boys tended to show larger gains than girls on the paper test. However, implementation integrity was very variable. In particular, some teachers failed to intervene in response to AR data indicating that pupils were reading ineffectively. AR appears to have potential for raising reading achievement, but only if implemented appropriately.     

Prospect

ABSTRACT

The 1988 Education Reform Act introduced a schools’ quasi‐market intended to reward schools financially for recruiting pupils and to give them a financial incentive for ‘good’ educational performance. The paper examines this linkage by analysing data on financial performance for over 300 English Local Education Authority (LEA) and Grant Maintained (GM) secondary schools from 1990/91 to 1995/96, correcting for inflation and changes in LEA delegation ratios. On average over 6 LEA areas, real school budgets per pupil declined by 0.6% a year while examination performance at GCSE improved. Statistical analysis shows that while change in pupil numbers is the most important variable explaining school budget change, half as much is explained by variations in LEA and government financial policy, thus weakening market incentives. It was also found that the proportion of socially disadvantaged pupils, as measured by free school meals, is associated with a loss of pupils over time and hence a decline in budget. GM status had no discernible effect on pupil recruitment, once social disadvantage and other explanatory variables were taken into account. It is suggested that both ecological and open systems theories of how organisations change in response to external environmental pressures explain the differential success of schools in attracting resources.     

Adolescent moral judgement: A study of UK secondary school pupils

Despite a recent world‐wide upsurge of academic interest in moral and character education, little is known about pupils’ character development in schools, especially in the UK context. The authors used a version of the Intermediate Concept Measure for Adolescents, involving dilemmas, to assess an important component of character—moral judgement—among 4053 pupils aged 14–15. Data were generated in 33 UK schools of varying types between February 2013 and June 2014. Results showed that compared with US samples, the pupils’ scores were, on average, low, suggestive of tendencies towards ‘self‐interest’, ‘not getting involved’ and ‘conformity/loyalty to friends’. Judgements varied by subscales assessing ‘action’ and ‘justification’ choices; pupils more successfully identified good actions than good justifications, but generally struggled more to successfully identify poor actions and poor justifications. Highest scores were for a dilemma emphasising ‘self‐discipline’ and lowest for ‘honesty’, with ‘courage’ in between. Overall average results were significantly and positively associated with being female, having (and practising) a religion and doing specific extra‐curricular activities. Differences in schools were also noted, although the kinds of school (e.g. public/private, religious/secular) were unrelated to student scores.     

Validating a model of effective teaching behaviour of pre-service teachers

Although effective teaching behaviour is central for pupil outcomes, the extent to which pre-service teachers behave effectively in the classroom and how their behaviour relates to pupils’ engagement remain unanswered. The present study aims to validate a theoretical model linking effective pre-service teaching behaviour and pupil’s engagement, incorporating the role of context and teacher characteristics. The study included a sample of 264 pre-service teachers from 64 secondary schools throughout the Netherlands. Pre-service teachers were observed using the International Comparative Analysis of Learning and Teaching to measure effective teaching behaviour and pupils’ engagement. We used multilevel modelling to account for the hierarchical structure in the data. Results show that the quality of teaching behaviour of pre-service teachers is below that of experienced teachers. Class size and (partly) teacher gender explain differences in the quality of teaching behaviour. All domains of teaching behaviour are related to pupil engagement, with classroom management and clarity of instruction showing the strongest relationships with academic engagement compared to the other domains. The results make it plausible to approximate minimum standards for the assessment of pre-service teachers based upon a normative criterion based on the impact on pupils’ academic engagement.     

Some issues arising from an examination of women's experience of university physics

This paper investigates secondary school pupils’ everyday knowledge of the dangers of electricity. It is based on classroom research by a team of teacher‐researchers working with a total of 241 11‐12 and 13‐14 year olds in English comprehensive schools. The initial data were collected by written questionnaires which probed the general meanings pupils had for electricity. When the responses were analyzed, there was a surprisingly high proportion of children (61% of the 11‐12 year olds and 35% of the 13‐14 year olds) who mentioned danger. The pupils were then divided into ‘fearers’ and ‘non‐fearers’, and group interviews were carried out with both in order to explore features of pupil thinking and influences on it. Results of these interviews include pupil quotations around themes such as personal experiences of electric shocks, excitement, the home, socially‐available knowledge and learning about electricity at school. Questions are raised about the possible effect of fear on motivation, participation in practical work and conceptual learning in general; and it is suggested that the pupils’ ideas should be acknowledged and addressed within a supportive classroom environment.     

Educational practitioners’ beliefs and conceptualisation about the cause of ADHD: A qualitative study

Objectives: Educational practitioners play an important role in the referral and treatment of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study aimed to explore how educational practitioners conceptualise their beliefs about the causes of symptoms of ADHD. Method: Forty-one educational practitioners from schools in the United Kingdom participated in focus groups or individual interviews. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Practitioners’ beliefs fell into two categories: biological and environmental. Practitioners conceptualised the causes of ADHD in lay-theoretical models: a ‘True’ ADHD model considered that symptoms of ADHD in many cases were due to adverse environments; and a model whereby a biological predisposition is the root of the cause of the child’s symptoms. Conclusion: Differential beliefs about the causes of ADHD may lead to practitioners blaming parents for a child’s behaviour and discounting ADHD as a valid condition. This has implications for the effective support of children with ADHD in schools.     

Learning mathematics—letting the pupils have their say

Pupil voice is an emerging force for change and improvement in many UK schools, but what is not fully understood is how best to access pupil voice within the specific context of secondary mathematics departments. This paper presents a research project designed to use pupils as co-researchers in increasing knowledge about how to improve learning in mathematics. Pupils within the school were selected and trained as “Ambassadors” to understand and disseminate innovative ways of learning mathematics into their school environment and to act to allow the voice of all the pupils in their year group to be heard. The project was intended both to raise the pupils’ awareness of how learning mathematics could be different and to enable them to voice their newly informed opinions about how best they learned mathematics. The pupils’ current feelings about the way that they were taught mathematics were explored, but the focus of the project was on enabling the pupils to make informed decisions about how they felt their learning could be improved. The pupils’ awareness of different ways of learning mathematics was raised by introducing them to alternative teaching approaches. The data generated were initially analysed by the pupils themselves in order to inform their teachers about their views and subsequently constant comparison analysis resulted in the outcomes reported here. The outcomes indicate that the students could have an important role in enabling schools to develop their teaching and improve their pupils’ mathematical learning when that voice is both informed and authorised.