The aim of this study was to investigate whether a non-phonics-based intervention, Fischer Family Trust (FFT) Wave 3, might help children in Years 1 and 2 who were falling behind in literacy to catch up with their peers. The study consisted of an ‘outer’ and an ‘inner’ study. The outer study was a pilot/feasibility study (PFS) which investigated whether the quantitative approach used in the inner study would be suitable for scaling up to investigate the research questions. The inner study was a quantitative evaluation of FFT Wave 3. It consisted mainly of a randomised control trial (RCT) using standardised literacy tests, supplemented by a number of non-standardised assessments. A small (n=24) two-armed RCT lasting 10 weeks was undertaken in a state primary school in Derbyshire. Standardised tests of reading comprehension (primary outcome), of spelling and of oral word and sentence reading (secondary outcomes), were administered to both groups pre and post, and after the control group had received the intervention. At pre- and post-tests both groups answered an attitudes questionnaire, and the intervention group provided one-sentence writing samples, and their reading ages were estimated (exploratory outcomes). Results for the primary and secondary outcomes fell into a confusing pattern, and were inconclusive, and results for the exploratory outcome of attitudes to reading were null. Results for the exploratory outcomes of reading ages and writing showed statistically significant gains, but could not be considered definitive because no parallel data were gathered from the control group. Thus the inner, quantitative study failed to show conclusively whether the FFT Wave 3 intervention had real impact. On the other hand, the PFS successfully showed that, with adjustments, a quantitative, mainly RCT, approach could be a suitable method for assessing a non-phonics-based intervention.

In the history of school management and leadership in the Caribbean, the principal has been the primary focus in the work of educational researchers. Over a decade ago, Trinidad and Tobago began its second major reform of its educational system. As part of the Secondary Education Modernisation Programme, school-based management was introduced and with it a restructure of the organisation of secondary schools that included the formal appointment of middle managers. This study focuses on the beliefs and values that shape and influence the practices of middle management in secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago. In my exploration of their beliefs and values, four participants took part in one of the few studies conducted on the middle management in the secondary school in the country. By middle management I refer specifically to the Heads of Departments and Deans who are intermediaries between the senior management-Principal and Vice-Principal, and staff. For the theoretical framework, I chose Kamau Brathwaite's "The Inner Plantation." As educational institutions become more homogeneous and tied to global economic plans for expanding markets, the choice of a theory that has the potential to expose the ways in which secondary school middle managers are co-opted into feeding the global economy by the imposition of a market-driven model of school leadership and management is timely. To explore the beliefs and values of this tier of management, I employed the life history methodological approach as it offers a perspective of the major changes in an era of reform that have affected and continue to affect them, from their lived experience of a devolved version of school-based management. Based on this study, the Heads and Dean, resist the overseer role imposed upon them as they seek to live out their beliefs and values in their daily practices as advocates.

In this study, I have tried to explore how a group of non-native English teachers, first of all, define culture in relation to their English language teaching practices. In addition, I have tried to understand how they perceive ‘intercultural competence’ to find out if they are aware of the concept and how important it is for them. I have also explored to what extent they are concerned about the challenges that learners might face in intercultural communications and, finally, to what extent they can help learners overcome these barriers and increase students’ insights into cultural differences. More specifically, the research has considered the how and why of incorporating intercultural competence into English language lessons and how, in particular, non-native teachers think they can improve their learners’ knowledge, attitude and skills in this domain. The participants of this study were nine non-native ESOL teachers from different language centres in the UK. The main methods of data collection were semi-structured interviews and classroom observations. A qualitative interpretivist approach was adopted and the data was analysed using theme-based content analysis. The findings of the study suggest that the teachers’ attitude towards the concept of culture could be divided into four main categorisations of culture: as transferable facts, as modes of thought, as skills and as two-way beliefs. The participants also identified some challenges that their students might encounter in their intercultural communication. Their attitudes in this regard were explored under two broad concepts of the effects of globalisation and the effects of glocalisation on intercultural communication. This study illustrates that although the teachers welcome the approach of intercultural competence and they generally have positive attitudes towards it, they are not certain how to integrate it in a systematic and explicit manner. They also identified some restrictions regarding the integration of this approach. Time constraints, level of students, lack of theoretical and practical contents of teacher training programmes regarding intercultural competence were some of the restrictions they asserted.

Research indicates a rise in children with medical conditions (CMC) (Canter & Roberts, 2012; Jackson, 2013). Chronic illness and healthcare needs can impede access to daily life and disrupt school attendance, impacting academic, emotional and psychosocial development (Yeo & Sawyer, 2005; Edwards, 2010; Kazak & Noll, 2015). As discourse around CMC is often dominated by illness, I considered it important to hear the child’s voice to appreciate their subjective experience and preferred identity. This study employed a narrative approach from a social constructionist perspective to hear CMCs’ multi-stranded stories. Participants included two children with identified medical needs (chronic fatigue syndrome and muscular dystrophy) who had experienced periods of school absence. Interviews were conducted using the ‘Beads of Life’ approach, developed by Portnoy, Girling & Fredman (2016), to elicit the child’s ‘life story’ and ‘challenge story’. The approach uses beads as prompts to enable children to tell their stories in ways that make them stronger, repositioning the child as the expert in their own life. Stories were analysed using narrative holistic content, holistic form and categorical content perspectives to explore their experiences and the meaning ascribed to these. Findings from the research indicate that whilst risk and challenge is experienced, support from school, family and peers can relieve the injurious outcomes associated with medical conditions. A need for agency, social connectedness and a sense of ‘normalcy’ is also indicated. Implications for educational and psychological practice are discussed, valuing the ‘Beads of Life’ approach to elicit child voice, inform systemic practice and enhance the school experience for CMC.

The persistent underachievement of Black children of Caribbean descent and their over-representation in Special Educational Needs (SEN) has been highly documented within the UK. However, whilst there is wealth of research exploring the educational experiences of Black males, little has been written about the experiences of Black females of Caribbean heritage. This study explores the relationship between identity and the educational experiences of Black females of Caribbean heritage in the UK, considered to be academically successful. It considers potential protective factors and barriers to educational achievement for participants, how their experiences and identities are expressed within group interviews and the impact of intersectionality on educational experience. Constructs of power, oppression and belonging are explored through psychological frameworks of identity formation, psychoanalytic colonial theory, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Race Feminism (FemCrit). The participants engaged in two focus group interviews to explore the research questions around their identity and experienced facilitators and barriers to educational success. The second focus group was aimed at expanding upon themes and encouraging participants to reflect on and contribute to the analysis of the first focus group. Narrative analysis, incorporating The Listening Guide (Woodcock, 2016) is utilised to attend to and respect the voices and experiences of participants. The study illuminated the complexities of identity as participants highlighted the primacy of Blackness as an identifier and the significance of both their Caribbean heritage and British identity. Gender was considered to be an important but perhaps less salient feature of identity. In relation to barriers to success, participants highlighted experiencing social and emotional difficulties in majority White settings and/or in the absence of Black peers, on account of their being the racial anomaly. Additionally, relationships with teachers were presented as depending on participants’ ability to perform as the ideal student which could conflict with cultural /individual identities. Personal ambition and resilience in addition to recognition of family and ancestral ambition, support and sacrifices, were highlighted as facilitators of success. Learning behaviours which supported achievement were also discussed, with some participants professing to practicing silence and enacting personal agency in their approach to knowledge development and others speaking out and seeking support from the community around them.

Over the last 15 years there has been an increase in the number of Teaching Assistants (TAs) employed by schools to support children and young people (Tucker, 2009). It is recognised that TAs can impact on the educational (Webster et al, 2010), social (Webster et al, 2013) and emotional (Alborz et al, 2009) experiences of children and young people, whom they support. However, some of the literature alludes to this as not always being positive and suggests that practice of TAs can, in fact, hinder progress. However, many of these studies either did not, or only very briefly, incorporated TAs in their research. Studies related to the impact of TAs tend to focus on the views of children, parents and teachers, with few studies focussing entirely on TAs themselves. The aims of this research are to consider how TAs view their current role, how they would prefer it to look in the future, as well as considering the implications of these views for schools and Educational Psychologists (EPs). As a result of the desire to capture the voice of the TA, in order to explore curiosity around the subjectivity of the role, Q Methodology was identified as being the most appropriate method to use. Both primary and secondary TAs were invited to participate; Higher Level Teaching Assistants (HLTA) have a different role, incorporating different responsibilities, so did not contribute. In total, 38 TAs, from four schools, participated and were presented with 64 statements relating to the role. They were asked to sort them into a pre-arranged frequency distribution, twice. The first Q sort explored their views about their current role and the second focussed on how they would like the role to look in the future. The completed Q sorts were then analysed, using factor analysis, to identify shared viewpoints. Analysis of the current role identified a two factor solution and a five factor solution emerged for the ideal role. Findings are discussed in relation to existing literature before considering how they may impact on schools and EPs. Limitations of the study are also presented prior to suggesting how these viewpoints might encourage future research and how they are to be applied in to my practice.

This research considers how mothers make sense of their experience of parenting a young person with Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) needs. It considers the impact of their interactions with practitioners who support their child, individual psychological experiences, in the form of the unconscious, and what influences these have on subjectivity. I consider how findings from parent narratives can be used to inform practice for educational psychologists and other practitioners working with parents. A narrative methodology, adopting feminist principles, which privilege the voice of mothers in the research process was applied. The research engages in an exploration of mothers’ experience and considers the influences of social narratives around neurocultural and individualising psychological discourses that impact upon relationships between practitioners and mothers. I adopt a critical realist perspective and use Lacanian Psychoanalytic concepts to bring together psychological and social factors that influence experience. The analysis highlights the influence of dominant discourse on how mothers make sense of themselves and their experiences of interacting with practitioners. It reveals the possibility that mental health needs, such as anxiety, depression and eating disorders, may be understood in specific ways which do not apply to other conditions, such as attention deficit, included in the SEMH category of difficulty as outlined in the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Code of Practice (2015). Apparent commonalities and distinctions are highlighted as well as parent views on what they would find supportive when engaging with services and practitioners regarding their child’s needs.

Educational Psychologists frequently advocate for a systemic approach to supporting children and young people (CYP) in schools, viewing the adults around the child as fundamental to understanding their experience, advocating their needs and bringing about positive change for the child (Mackay, Lauchlan, Lindsay, Monsen, Frederickson, Gameson, & Rees, 2016). In recognition of this, my research listens to the stories told by three Primary School Professionals (SPs), who support children with an experience of domestic abuse (DA). This was an exploratory, qualitative study, within a sensitive field which is under researched (Swanston, Bowyer & Vetere, 2014). Stories were co-created through individual conversations with Primary SPs based in schools in the north of England. I adopted a storied approach to both the creation and analysis of conversations (Phillips & Bunda, 2018). Stories were analysed using an adapted version of Brown and Gilligan’s Listening Guide (1993) - a ‘Voice Centred Relational Method’. I adopted a social constructionist framework, which recognises that knowledge creation is a collaborative endeavour. With this in mind, my research design, foregrounds the importance of a social justice and a feminist paradigm in shaping my research journey throughout. The ‘sociology of childhood’ literature (James and Prout, 1990; 1997; 2015) has contributed toward a re-positioning of children’s response to an experience of DA, as one characterised by ‘agency’ (Overlien & Hyden, 2009). Agentic capacity can be recognised as range of behaviours which signify resistance, protection, strategic thinking and planning, amongst others. Stories told by SPs afforded differing levels of agentic capacity to children, in relation to their experience with DA. This finding has implications for how Educational Psychologists support schools.

Despite national and international legislation that enshrines the right for children and young people to have access to good quality education, educational provision and outcomes in the secure estate are considered poor. This thesis seeks to explore the educational experiences of three young people in a secure children’s home (SCH). I have done this in order to provide a platform for voices that are often overlooked and to explore potential ways in which educational provision within the secure estate can be improved. Participants were recruited in a collaborative effort between myself and the headteacher at the SCH. I interviewed each young person once. I used an unstructured interview format, seeking to dynamically engage with the double-hermeneutic, in order to deepen my understanding of each young person’s educational experience. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and the transcriptions were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Analysis generated three super-ordinate themes: Nurture, Control, and The Utility of Education. Sub-ordinate themes for Nurture explored the importance of a bespoke curriculum tailored to individual need, relationships within the SCH, and how my participants experienced an absence of nurture when recollecting their experiences in mainstream education. Sub-ordinate themes for Control explored how participants experienced confinement, how they experienced and responded to power being exerted over them, and how the controlling powers of the SCH led to experiences of meaningful engagement with learning tasks or social interactions. Sub-ordinate themes for the Utility of Education explored how participants experienced education as leading to the meaningful reward of employment, how educational engagement affected their experience of temporality, and how education gave them an opportunity to experience feelings of success. The knowledge generated here should be considered idiographic and specific to the time and space in which it was generated. The responses of my participants were presented in dialogue with relevant existing academic literature in order to seek a deeper interpretation of their responses. This analysis led to the generation of recommendations for educational psychology practice and future research. Recommendations include a greater focus on the embodied experiences of young people within the secure estate, a consideration of how relationships are experienced within the secure estate and how both can impact on how education is experienced in this environment.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which are typically short courses offered free to anyone with Internet access, provide opportunities for online education regardless of participants’ gender, professional status, qualifications, age or location. Since the international introduction of MOOCs in 2008 in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, they have attracted public attention and online learning researchers have already made headway in investigating their essence. However, although MOOCs were introduced to Saudi Arabia in 2013 and have gained the attention of Saudi government sectors such as the Ministry of Labour, little research has been published on the effects of MOOCs in the country. Therefore, this research, to the best of my knowledge, is the first to explore Saudi participants’ perceptions of MOOCs. As a Saudi teaching assistant at King Saud University in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), I can see a clear trend in Saudi education towards online learning. The use of online learning is perhaps one of the most important current developments in the education system (Algahtani, 2011) and it would be difficult to dispense with this kind of learning now. Therefore, after consulting with several Saudi professors in educational technology, I concluded that investigating Saudi participants’ perceptions of MOOCs could make a significant contribution to the evolution of Saudi education generally and online learning in particular, thus contributing to improving Saudi people’s culture. This study aimed to explore the cultural implications of MOOCs for Saudi participants with the main objective being to identify Saudi participants’ perceptions of MOOCs, specifically the impact of MOOCs on participants’ lives, their pedagogy and learning design, and their social environment. The data was collected using mixed methods through conducting surveys, observation, and interviews with participants. Consequently, participants’ perceptions are linked to the literature review and discussed in detail in relation to the Saudi Arabian context. Furthermore, recommendations are offered on how to maximise the potential of MOOCs alongside suggestions for further research. The conclusion of this study asserts that MOOCs are widely used by Saudi participants, especially women, due to MOOC flexibility and their contribution to the development of educational cultures. MOOCs contributed to improving participants’ knowledge and personalities, as well as developing their educational and professional lives; however, the study revealed that the benefits participants gained from MOOCs varied depending on their positions and aims. In addition, the findings showed that participants’ views regarding the effectiveness of the pedagogy and learning design of MOOCs differed. Moreover, the study highlighted several factors that affected participants’ learning in terms of course design and the rules of participation, and some insights are provided that could address the concerns participants raised. MOOCs can contribute to attaining Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 by providing courses that focus on educating Saudis and imparting the skills required for future employment and for effectively carrying out the jobs recently allocated to citizens.