Since the mid-1970s there has been a greater emphasis placed on markets and competition as a means of allocating scarce resources. As a consequence of this the provision of public services has come under close scrutiny. In the English further education sector there has been structural and strategic change. The further education (FE) colleges are positioned to be able to play a key role in· the economic and social regeneration of the UK. The development- of 'managerialism' has occasioned the use of many practices and procedures more commonly associated with the private sector provision of goods and services. This study examines whether the concept of organizational culture has meaning and validity in a further education context. Research in this area is complex, time consuming and expensive. The concept of organizational culture is examined and evidence is gathered from a case study in Templeton College. The analysis of the evidence employs some of Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of the social world: field habitus and game. The evidence suggests that there is no integrated pattern of shared beliefs or behaviours that can claim to be a distinct entity. External factors are more likely to determine the situated social practices that exist within colleges. The case study approach has limited the external validity of the research and further analysis of . colleges is needed to verify the claims in this thesis. The study demonstrates that the migration of private sector management practices and concepts to the public sector is not an unproblematic process. FE would benefit from more extensive practitioner research; the more widely and deeply the colleges understand themselves the better chance for securing lasting improvements. Organizational culture is unlikely to be a significant lever of change in FE and colleges may be better advised to build a teaching and learning ethos.

Transition to secondary school is almost always a significant period of worry and anxiety. Research has linked it to a number of negative outcomes for young people including lower self-esteem and self-concept and lower academic achievement. Previous literature suggests that peer mentoring can combat negative effects associated with transition. The study explored the use of peer mentoring to support pupils who may be at risk of developing social, emotional and behavioural difficulties following transition to secondary school. A pre-test post-test two-group randomised controlled trial investigated the impact on the Year 7 pupils. To examine the impact on Year 9 peer mentors, a pre-test post-test single group design was applied. The quantitative data from Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaires (SDQ), Resiliency Scales and school attendance was analysed using ANOVAs and t-tests. A questionnaire was used to explore pupil views of the scheme and analysed using thematic analysis. No significant impact was found from the quantitative measures for either mentees or peer mentors. Whilst pupils largely enjoyed the experience, this did not translate into a significant measurable impact. Both the control and intervention group significantly improved on a number of SDQ subscales suggesting pupils may naturally improve following transition. The main themes regarding the things most liked about peer mentoring included having someone to talk to and supporting others. Areas proposed which could improve future schemes included a better environment and more frequent sessions. The study had some methodological limitations including a relatively small sample size, limiting the generalisability of the results; however, results coincide with previous research and the researcher questions future use of peer mentoring without more thorough investigation. This thesis highlights the lack of and need for well-conducted research into interventions before they are widely implemented.

Research conducted into the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions has considered at length their application in treating a range of clinical disorders. More recently, work has identified such interventions as being potentially applicable within school settings as a method of supporting pupils’ social and emotional development. This study reports the results of a mixed methods investigation designed to explore how pupils from two secondary schools perceive the impact of studying ‘mindfulness’ as part of an eight-week school-based curriculum and the barriers to its successful implementation. A range of qualitative and quantitative methods (online questionnaire, focus groups and in-depth interviews) were employed to capture the depth and breadth of pupils’ experiences. The data revealed distinct variability in pupils’ perceptions, highlighting how various psychological, social and functional factors impacted their experience of the curriculum itself and the practices taught within it. The reported impacts of such factors are broadly consistent with those highlighted in previous research and the theoretical literature regarding mindfulness. Pupils also described a number of issues preventing their engagement in mindfulness practice outside the classroom (e.g. a perceived lack of ability, forgetfulness and self-consciousness) and factors perceived to limit their impact (e.g. difficulty of technique, problems concentrating and the presence of environmental distractions). The results of this study reinforce the need for detailed exploratory investigations of school-based mindfulness interventions to account for the complexity of pupils’ experiences. Such information is considered to be of interest to a range of educational professionals and could help them to assess the potential value of mindfulness-based initiatives for secondary aged pupils. Limitations of the study and recommendations for further research are discussed herein.

Support staff are perceived to be highly important to schools in Britain (Department for Education (DfE), 2011; Department for Educational and Skills (DfES), 2000). The dramatic increase in support staff within schools has led to a range of roles being developed, impacting on their training and development needs (Training and Development Agency (TDA), 2010a), and those “involved in employing, managing, supporting and training them” (Alborz et al., 2009, p.4). Whilst guidance is available to schools (for example, Training and Development Agency (TDA), 2010c) there is a lack of evidence regarding the forms of support available to support staff in schools, or what is helpful, in order to carry out their role effectively and develop professionally. A qualitative approach was adopted to explore perceptions of support for support staff and the role of educational psychologists. Questionnaires, focus groups and individual interviews were utilised to gather the views of secondary school support staff, senior management team members and educational psychologists. Thematic analysis identified key themes relating to enabling support staff to feel supported within their roles, and the role of educational psychologists in working with support staff. Findings suggest that, being valued, included and involved is important to support staff feeling supported. Relationships with other members of support staff and school staff in addition to a school’s overall ethos were identified to have considerable influence on facilitating these aspects. Lack of clarity regarding the role of educational psychologists and their role in supporting support staff was also identified. Tentative suggestions are made regarding how schools might enable support staff to feel supported, and how EPs might widen their roles with support staff. In light of the findings, areas for further research are considered.

The problem of this study was the differentiation of high schools in a metropolitan school district from the standpoint of the measures taken to prevent student dropouts.

An attempt will be made to answer these questions: (1) Why is a guidance program necessary? (2) What steps are being taken to accomplish the objectives set forth? (3) What is considered the best method of instituting a guidance program? In answering these questions a study of the guidance programs in a few of the leading cities and states of the United States has been taken into consideration. The best possible method or combination of methods will be recommended. This method will be compared with the program of guidance now in operation in the Waco High School, Waco, Texas.

Modern Physical Education (PE) administered systemic models of teaching crafts. It atrophied the play element in human nature, and shaped a single-lens attitude to the treatment of bodies. Framing minds, it veiled the conditions of learning processes and thus “instituted” the sovereignty of subjective concerns. It created many unexplained “gaps” between abstract concerns and pragmatic issues. Following language’s poststructural analysis, PE’s professional communication practices were exposed to alternative methodological refocusing from conforming to move to personalise the agent’s experience in moving to learn. In the wake of poststructuralism came Whitehead’s Physical Literacy (PL) which I adopt as “leitmotif” to reform PE’s teacher preparation and schooling practices. PL addresses children up to 14 years. For older pupils, PL’s language needs to constitute versions of human purposes voiced by the introduction of a new development called “Movement Literacy” (ML). ML acknowledges that language and movement are very different forms of “self-expression”. By itself however, self-expression is inadequate when it comes to learning how to learn. Critical dialogue needs to be brought in to facilitate meaningful innovation in the PE world. By employing the philosophies of phenomenology and hermeneutics I make a case that expression in languaging movement [subjecting the agent’s account to hermeneutic treatment] is expression for others, and in exchange with others the expression is redefined, and changes the way one sees and talks about movement and about oneself. In its reflective practice, reverentially, ML will also unpack pedagogy’s hidden protocol, hoping to reclaim PE’s authentic purpose. It connects secular matters with sacred implications by reconciling the polemic differences between “techne” [purpose] and “phronesis ” [prudence]. With limited reference to Eastern “selflessness” ML advances teaching, through pedagogy and andragogy as a life-time mission. Not providing answers, the thesis offers a manifesto attempting to facilitate new questions such as: how can language and movement communicate? and how can movement educators “minister” to their learner’s sense of well-being?

This thesis represents my reflective journey to explore the relationship between ethos, learning habits and educational outcomes of Church of England secondary schools and academies. Leaders of Church schools often suggest that their Christian ethoses contribute to their favourable outcomes although they offer limited evidence to support this. Using published inspection reports for Church schools I argue that it is possible to find a statistically significant relationship between an aggregated score for ethos and an aggregated score for educational outcomes. Focusing on one school with a particularly strong match as a case-study, and drawing on the work of Jeynes (2003) in the United States, I argue that there is a perception amongst the stakeholders of this school that its Christian ethos contributes to success through cultivating the learning habits of diligence, resilience and compliance. Further, I argue that the values, theology and actions of the headteacher have contributed significantly to this ethos and these related learning habits. In proposing these findings I argue that my role as a self-professing Christian and serving Church school headteacher provided me with a unique experience to obtain this data grounded in my own story. Through personal biographies and further enquiry, I suggest that these learning habits may be applicable not only to the case-study school but to all successful Church schools. Finally, in arriving at all these findings, I maintain that the employment of a range of methodologies throughout this thesis enabled me to illuminate the different dimensions of the relationship between ethos, learning habits and outcomes in Church schools. In an age when there is evidence of growing opposition to all ‘faith’ schools, I suggest that the findings from this study provide important insights into the relationship between ethos, learning habits and outcomes, not only of Church schools but other schools too.

After conducting a number of pilot studies pre- and post-tests were given to three experimental classes of 11 to 13 year old early adolescents, one taken by Collings, and the two others by an inexperienced teacher. With one class the latter used materials designed to develop Field-independence only, with the other the teacher followed a similar pattern to Collings who incorporated a meta-cognitive aspect by encouraging students to analyse their own thinking strategies and to 'bridge' between the Field-independence lessons and the contexts of science. There were two control classes, and the overall period of the intervention was one school year with about 20% of the science teaching time used for the intervention. The tests used were the Group embedded Figures Test (GHFT) for Field-independence, and Volume and Heaviness (SRTII), NFER (1979) for Piagetian operations. In the pre- post-test Comparisons between experimental and Control groups all the differences between the differences were statistically significant. Collings' own class showed an effect-size of 1.53 σ on GBFT over the controls, and 0.92 σ on SRTII. The inexperienced teacher's class with Field-independence training only, showed an effect-size of 1.09 σ on GHFT and 0.36 on SRTII whereas his class with meta cognition added showed an effect-size of 1.13 σ on GEFT, and 0.63 σ on SRTII. There was no statistical difference between the 1.09 and 1.13 σ on GEFT and this inferred that the Field-independence materials were fairly robust to teacher effects. The difference between 0.36 and 0.68 σ on SRTII was significantly different, and this was interpreted as showing that the meta-cognitive aspect assisted transfer of training to Formal Operations.

The study focuses on 9 teachers teaching pupils aged between 12 and 18 years of age at the turn of the twenty first century in three schools; a Technology College for boys, a Rudolf Steiner-Waldorf School, and an Islamic School for girls. Starting from the premise that teachers may express different views to what they do in practice, qualitative methods of close examination (through interviews and observations) were used to explore the influence of ethos of the different schools on the teachers' expressed knowledge and behaviour, and sought to identify relationships between the models of learning and the models of moral learning teachers expressed in interviews, and implied in their interactions with children. The methodology highlights the qualitative perspective of 'the researcher as an instrument of the research', and 'gaining closeness' to the subjects and the data; and demonstrates how closeness and triangulation ensures the trustworthiness of qualitative research of this nature. The analysis is grounded in the research through themes arising from the data; and three fields of knowledge (e.g. theory and research on learning processes, philosophical perspectives of morality, and theory and research of moral development) inform the models of teachers' understanding identified from the implicit values or philosophical perspectives that they expressed verbally or implied by their behaviour. In general teachers expressed more eclectic views of learning processes and moral learning than they appeared to use in practice. Furthermore, some teachers may have been influenced towards mainly behaviourist perspectives by the ethos of their schools, and their perceptions of respect for their roles. However, unique characteristics and personal tacit knowledge of how children learn and learn morally dominated teachers' actions in the way that they imparted knowledge and guided children morally. Finally, the thesis acknowledges the personal journey of the researcher moving from positivist values and analytical methods involving quantifying qualitative data, to postmodern, constructivist and feminist values that emphasise the relationship between knowledge and context; and the validity of subjectivity and 'lived experience' as exploratory tools in research.