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The roles that ethnographers adopt in their fieldwork are “perhaps the single most important determinant of what he [or she] will be able to learn” (McCall & Simmons, 1969, p. 29). My purpose in this paper is to demonstrate that these roles can be in a state of rapid flux, depending not only on who the researcher is interacting with, but also on a complex system of constantly changing settings for those interactions.

Advocates of market-based reforms in the public sector argue that competition between providers drives up performance. But in the context of schooling, the concern is that any improvements in efficiency may come at the cost of increased stratification of schools along lines of pupil ability and attainments. In this chapter, we discuss our empirical work on competition and parental choice in English primary schools and present a methodology for identifying competition effects that exploits discontinuities in market access close to education district boundaries.

This chapter focuses on the participation and social interaction of pupils with low-incidence disabilities in the Swedish educational system with the goal of relating policies and practices in education for learners with low-incidence disabilities. Sweden has a welfare system that ensures that all low-incidence learners and their families receive support in education and in their everyday life. The research section concentrates on studies that focus on participation and social interaction in an educational context (training school), which is an adapted education program for low-incidence learners characterized by its high staff ratio and individualized forms of teaching. Despite legislation, policies, and intentions that Swedish schools shall include all pupils, it is still a challenge for the Swedish school system to provide education for low-incidence learners in inclusive environments. Research shows that low-incidence learners primarily have vertical relations with teachers and assistants in school, and that there is a lack of horizontal relationships with peers. The greatest challenge is to create learning environments that contribute to building relationships between low-incidence learners and learners without disabilities.

This chapter presents a pedagogical tool for investigating at-risk children's attitudes towards the quality of school life. It has been developed from the questionnaire originally by Williams and Batten (1981), Binkley, Rust, and Williams (1996) and Dinkes, Forrest, and Lin-Kelly (2007).

Schools exist because of the children they educate but examples of their voice influencing their education in an authentic manner can be rare. This chapter outlines the importance of pupil voice and defines the key aspects of authenticity. It uses the themes emanating from this definition as examples of establishing practices to support pupil voice in the classroom. Such practices are based upon the findings of a pupil voice study into the experiences of 14–16-year-old children in physical education (PE) lessons. This PE project was driven by the pupils and adult voice was militated in order to enhance the authenticity of the findings. The project empowered children to raise and discuss the issues they deemed important and find their own solutions without steering or influence by their teachers. The implementation of these findings in one school demonstrated the dynamism and potential of learning based upon child-centred practice.

This chapter explores the use of three different approaches to capturing other perspectives in lesson study: lesson artefacts, pupil voice and pupil participatory approaches. Lesson artefacts and pupil voice appear to be the more common, whereas pupil participatory approaches are more recent initiatives in a lesson study context. Observation of pupils provides one perspective, but is limited because, among other things, it does not include the pupils’ perspectives. These approaches, especially when used together in triangulation, can provide a broader and potentially deeper understanding of pupil learning.

This chapter argues that, if pupils experiencing SEBD are to be able regulate their behaviour, it is essential for them to be perceived as being able to exercise agency, no matter how their difficulties are conceptualised. It also makes the case that, if we are to effect lasting change, it is necessary to impact at the level of values and beliefs, helping young people to come to an understanding of themselves and their relationships with others. The focus of the chapter is a case study evaluating a group work approach (Support groups), designed and implemented by the author, to support such pupils within a Scottish secondary school, situated in an area of multiple deprivation. The chapter examines the extent to which pupils participating within the intervention developed the capacity to regulate their behaviour with good judgement in a range of contexts, identifying variables which fostered or impeded progress. The study is principally qualitative but draws also from quantitative data. It focuses upon four cohorts of Support group pupils (N=69), inclusive of six case studies. The findings indicate that the intervention had impacted positively upon the capacity of the young people to self-regulate their behaviour, if to varying extents, and that pupil outcomes were highly context related. A range of factors came into play in effecting improvements in self-regulation in young people, such as the capacity of the Support group Leader to ‘see the good’ in the young person and hold onto them through difficult times. The quality of relationships between pupils and their Support group Leaders emerged as key as did the ethos of the group, providing an emotionally safe environment in which pupils could communicate without fear of reprisals.

There has been a policy for including pupils with severe, profound and multiple learning difficulties in mainstream schools in England since the 1980s. However, effective inclusive education has proved to be very difficult to achieve in practice. Currently, there is a mixed economy of special and mainstream schools offering inclusive education, and we argue that the place of education is less important than the quality of that education. Ideally, pupils with S/PMLD would be educated in their own local communities, alongside their non-disabled peers, but this situation is not yet established in English schools.