The aim of the current study was to investigate the impact of parental constructs of school upon their children’s constructs of school and their emotionally based school refusing (EBSR) behaviour. The literature review explores the range of definitions surrounding EBSR, examines the existing research conducted to date and explores the lack of research around parental constructs and the potential role parental constructs may have upon EBSR. Using a Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) (Kelly, 1955) methodology called the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT), 5 parents and their children’s (who present with EBSR) constructs were elicited around school and school related elements. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data collected from the RGT interviews and also the shared themes between the constructs elicited from the parents and children and also between the parent-child dyads. In addition, a chi-square methodology was used to examine whether any of the parent-child repertory grids could be identified as being significantly similar. The results are discussed in relation to PCP and the impact the findings may have upon interventions for the child and their family and also the practice of professionals around the family. Methodological challenges with the study are examined and opportunities for future studies are illustrated.

This study explores how science and history trainee teachers, who have different amounts of higher education in science, respond to news reports about science. In semi-structured interviews, using researcher and reader selected articles, readers were asked about the likelihood of veracity of knowledge claims and also their reactions to what they read. The thesis reports a range of heuristics which served to increase, or decrease, epistemic distance and so make the reader more or less willing to accept scientific claims as true. The quality of participants’ responses to news stories was also examined by using concepts maps to identify the extent to which ideas were interconnected. Concept maps were found to have a networked structures for both groups of participants, however, there was limited evidence for participant use of ‘ideas about interconnectedness’, thus there was limited evidence of epistemic thinking. The veracity of news stories is largely indeterminate for the non-expert reader given the limited information contained in the story and so readers’ multiple understandings are emphasised. Overall, there was not much difference between the two groups of readers.

Previous research has highlighted that Greek-Cypriot teachers need to be offered a solid programme to support their practices with regard to SEBD children, and to provide support to SEBD children in order to meet their educational needs. This study examines the effect of the SEAL programme on children with SEBD in a mainstream Greek-Cypriot primary school in terms of changing their behaviour. Five teachers were interviewed in the researcher’s attempt to identify the way that teachers understand the concept of SEBD, the kinds of SEBD behaviours observed, and the provision made available by the Ministry of Education and Culture of Cyprus (MOEC) and by the school under consideration to support the teachers’ practices. A seminar was given to raise awareness of the concept and to provide information on the SEAL programme to the teachers. Finally, a series of observations took place, before during and after the implementation of the programme with SEBD children (Years 1, 2, 3) in order to address changes in their behaviour. This study highlights different challenges that the teachers appear to come across while trying to educate SEBD children, and a number of areas that need to be improved within the Greek- Cypriot education system to improve practices with regard to SEBD children. Results also indicate the improvements in teaching practices and SEBD children’s behaviour after the implementation of the SEAL programme. Further research into strategies that could be used by teachers, and changes in the education system, are called for.

This research is an evaluation of a Key Stage 3 intervention, Sanctuary, from its inception, through its evolution across nine years. The research explores the dichotomy related to achievement and inclusion and the conflicts that emerge when poor behaviour is involved. Pupils were identified in each of the three key stage 3 Year groups using criteria. These identified pupils were taken out of mainstream school into the resource base for a three week intensive course aimed at improving their basic numeracy and literacy skills whilst still ensuring provision of the core curriculum. Their adapted curriculum also included strategies to manage behaviour and anger and opportunities to develop self esteem, empathy, resilience and nurturing. The first research question was to investigate if the intervention provision answered the needs of the identified pupils. This justification was based on a formative evaluation of available literature and research. The second research question looking at the impact of the intervention required a summative evaluative methodological approach using documentation, questionnaires and interviews. Teachers, peer members, parents, employers, external inspectors and the young people themselves recognised improvements commensurate with other similar research as a result of the intervention.

This research constitutes an evaluative case study of Specialist Leaders of Education (SLEs) deployed through one Teaching School Alliance (TSA) in the English West Midlands and their contribution to leadership development. While the Government purports that enactment of and engagement with the role will develop leadership capacity, the study explores SLE, recipient and head teacher perceptions across eleven primary schools as to whether this broad aim has been achieved and seeks to inform the research agenda at a time when a leadership recruitment shortage is anticipated. The study considers how leadership learning is both conceptualised and facilitated across deployments and whether or not 'professional growth' occurred. A new conceptualisation of professional growth is offered that synthesizes key tenets from the literature and themes emerging from the findings. This includes the notion of a transformed view aligned with greater 'role conceptualisation', socialisation experiences and a sense of belonging fostering a coherent 'leadership identity' and self belief leading to increased 'personal capacity'. Outcomes of the study suggest that professional growth in these aspects did occur for SLEs and their recipients through engagement with the SLE programme where successful matches were made. Modifications in order to best achieve the desired outcomes are also recommended.

This thesis is about learning strategies that are specifically taught, presented in instruction booklets and then learned, in order to perform verbal recall tasks. It is also about how learning strategies that are not specifically taught and in this thesis called 'representations' are used by individuals to work out problems. There are two parts to the thesis. The first part used wordlists and learning strategies to assist subjects in learning lists of words. The second part of the thesis used problems and no taught or instructed learning strategies, but asked the subjects to show their 'workings out' in answering the various problems. Four experiments are reported in the first part of the thesis. Subjects were aged 13 - 14 years in the first two experiments and 10 - 11years in the latter two experiments. The Cognitive Styles Analysis was only used in the fourth experiment. The words chosen in all the four experiments were familiar nouns and adjectives and selected from common categories including: food, mode of transport, and animals. The results of these experiments show that either being taught or learning the strategies from written instructions does not greatly influence subjects' list learning performance. Also, it is unclear from the literature if the learning of learning strategies in learning lists of words, has a long lasting effect on the learner. The second part of the thesis examined the 'workings out' of subjects after completing a variety of problems including: analytic reasoning, verbal reasoning, spatial, and mathematical word. This part of the thesis included two studies and in both the Cognitive Styles Analysis (Riding, 1991) was given. The subjects were postgraduates and undergraduates in experiments five and six, respectively. The data was analyzed in terms of not how many problems were correctly answered but how much representation and how many different types of representations were used in arriving at a solution to each problem The representations were categorised according to the number of 'characters',' lines', 'pictures' 'ideas' and 'letters' (number of characters used in total - the number of characters used in the answer) used in each problem The results showed that most subjects used representations in solving problems. They also showed that such factors as age and cognitive style had an influence on the type of representation used.

This research explores inter-professional supervision involving an educational psychologist supervising another professional and complements the recent guidelines on professional supervision produced by The Division of Educational and Child Psychology (DECP) (Dunsmuir and Leadbetter, 2010). The factors explored were purposes and boundaries of supervision; models of supervision; skills of the supervisor, including those that are distinctive to the profession of educational psychology; benefits and problems associated with supervision including the process of evaluation and ethical and legal issues pertaining to supervision. An interpretative epistemological stance was adopted. Ten semi-structured interviews were carried out with educational psychologists (supervisors) and other professionals (supervisees) recruited through purposive sampling. Interviews were transcribed orthographically and coded using thematic analysis. Findings suggest that inter-professional supervision was viewed positively. Supervision skills were recognised as a necessary pre-requisite but not necessarily distinctive to the profession of educational psychology. This research highlights the conflicting conceptualisations of supervision and the importance of contracting for increasing understanding of the supervision process, alerting stakeholders to important ethical and legal implications, and reconciling differences in expectations concerning the aims and functions of supervision.

This thesis documents an ethnographic study of teaching Mandarin in three educational contexts in the United Kingdom. The first context is a complementary school where the language is taught as a heritage language. The second context is an evening class which took place in a community centre in Birmingham where Mandarin is taught and learnt as a foreign language. The third context is a secondary school in London where students are learning Mandarin as a foreign language in order to obtain a GCSE. This thesis makes an original contribution by bringing together, within the same research agenda, three different contexts for teaching and learning of Mandarin. Although not a comparative study, this research highlights how context shapes learning for three very different groups of students. The analytical chapters describe how the different environments each sustain a variety of practices, beliefs and values in and around learning Mandarin which shape identity and pedagogy. The thesis is organised around the following themes: culture and intercultural understandings; multilingual identities; language ecology; and multilingual practices. Findings show the political and economic rise of China is imperative in understanding the local ecological order of classroom practices. Evidence shows the importance of establishing ‘small cultures’ in classrooms to engage students in intercultural questioning and understanding. The socially imposed identities of ethnicity along with affiliation to heritage language are investigated. The importance of negotiation is highlighted across the three contexts as young people are shown transforming identities which are presupposed by teachers. The researcher’s role is also investigated in this regard. Finally the use of multilingual pedagogies for teaching Mandarin are described with proficiency as an important element in determining the use of code-switching in the teaching of Mandarin. Several suggestions and recommendations for policies and practices are formulated at the end of the study which argue for pedagogic and linguistic flexibility.

There has been a significant increase in interest in distributed leadership among policy-makers, practitioners and researchers in educational leadership over the past decade. Most of the literature has focused on distributed leadership as a leadership approach and has paid little attention to its effects on student learning outcomes. This study explores the perceptions of headteachers, middle leaders and teachers about the effects of distributed leadership on teaching and learning. The study uses semi-structured interviews with four headteachers, six middle leaders and eight teachers from two primary and two secondary schools in the West Midlands region of England. From these semi-structured interviews with eighteen participants, the study captures their perceptions of distributed leadership: what it means to them, how it is practised in schools and the perceived effects on teaching and learning. The findings show that distributed leadership has the support of leaders and teachers. They perceived it to have a positive effect on teaching and learning and the majority of practitioners believe that distributed leadership contributes to improvement in student learning outcomes. The participants’ responses also reveal that distributed leadership is believed to contribute to effective school leadership and involvement in decision making. The study identifies two interrelated yet competing principal approaches to the practice of distributed leadership. First, responsibilities are devolved across the school through formal mechanisms in a top-down manner. Second, was the emergent approach where bottom up influences were operational. Whilst the majority of the literature on distributed leadership promotes the latter approach, findings from this study reveal that the former is predominant in terms of how distributed leadership is practised in schools.

The Institute of Public Administration (IPA) is the Irish national centre for development of best practice in public administration and management. The setting for this study is the information systems (IS) department of the IPA. In the time frame of this study the IPA undertook an Institute-wide re-appraisal of teaching and learning, including higher order thinking skills and the use of e-learning. The aim was to investigate the relationship between critical thinking and technology and the extent to which computer based tasks could support the development of higher order thinking skills. The research is best described as a small-scale case study in which 17 computer science student subjects participated. The two principal data collection methods used were authentic computer-based critical thinking tasks (COGITASKs) and online discussions (OLD). The COGITASK requires student teams to construct an artefact using authentic general purpose Hypermedia and Modelling tools. On completion of each COGITASK, each individual student records in an OnLine Discussion forum (OLD) a narrative account of their impressions of what they have learned. The COGITASK generates quantitative data on critical thinking performance, the OLD generates qualitative data about student perceptions of their performance on tasks. The data is analysed using exploratory data analysis and content analysis. The analysis is conducted within a theoretical framework that describes critical thinking as constructive, cognitive, metacognitive and knowledgebased. The research is situated in the natural, authentic context of the IPA classroom, since these tasks are an integral part of instruction on the computer science course. Findings indicated that although, overall, students performed well, across tasks they performed less well on some planning, analysis and application aspects requiring deep understanding and metacognition. However, by triangulating performance and perception data, tools did seem to enable development of skills by making visible certain effects. Eight such effects are discussed. Reflecting, the aim throughout to relate theory to practice the study concludes by translating findings into non-prescriptive, practical guidelines for (IPA) teachers.