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.

The purpose of this study is to examine the aims of the education delivered in a small sample of schools in the boarding sector, using qualitative methods of data gathering - analysis of school documents, interviews with the key participants (pupils, heads, staff and parents) and a limited element of participation in the schools selected. Studies on school effectiveness have proliferated in recent decades, the majority focusing on day schools. In addition, the research has tended to focus on enhancement of achievement in the cognitive area, to the virtual exclusion of other aspects of pupils' development. The present study makes a contribution to the discussion of effective schooling in two ways: firstly, by looking at the practices of boarding rather than day schools, it extends the scope and applicability of effective school research; and secondly, it extends the focus on effectiveness to include the somewhat neglected psychomotor and affective domains, while also addressing academic achievement among the pupils in the sample schools. Case studies were made of three boarding schools: one state, two independent, drawing on analysis of the material gathered. The research questions were designed to throw light on the purposes, workings and effectiveness of the schools, as perceived by each interviewee. Analysis of collected data led to an exploration of three themes that emerged as crucial to the realization of each school's aims: curriculum, community and commitment. The study highlighted the responsibility felt in the boarding sector to enhance potential not only in the cognitive, but also in the affective and psychomotor areas of each individual pupil's development. Many researchers have voiced the need to exploit pupils' all-round skills and aptitudes and this study suggests that further research in boarding schools might well prove to be both fruitful and relevant to the day sector.

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The current focus on school leader preparation around the world is based upon the belief that school leaders make a difference in both the effectiveness and efficiency of schooling (Hallinger and Snidvongs, 2008). This study is an evaluative case study on the NPQH programme in Malaysia and it sought perceptions of eighteen incumbent secondary school headteachers who are graduates from the Masters degree group of the programme to determine the effectiveness of the programme in their headship practices. The study is a qualitative dominant mixed methods research which used semi-structured interview as its main method and adopted a mixed approach of evaluation models. Overall perception on the NPQH training programme was sought with strengths and weaknesses identified and influence of school context considered. The extent of leadership learning from the time of graduation was also sought from those who were not appointed straight into headship. As NPQH in Malaysia was acknowledged as the proper national level programme in preparing heads, further improvements were indicated in this study. A tentative model for headship preparation in Malaysia, derived from the findings of this study, is presented alongside contribution of this study to the knowledge of school leadership preparation.

This study explored my own societal gatekeeper role as an Ofsted inspector, using a systems thinking model of creativity, within the domain of vocational business studies curricula, in further education (FE) colleges in England. My research questions sought to explore how business teachers and inspectors define, recognise, measure, reward and promote creativity skills in vocational business education. To provide a definition of creativity, I propose a framework based on its seven key aspects: process, person, place, pressures, product, persuasion and permanence. In addition to evidence-based success, I argue that we recognise the need for trust and freedom, through quality of relationships, to stimulate creativity. Through critical self-reflection on my role as an inspector and thematic analysis of data from multiple sources including interviews, Ofsted reports and Further Education college websites, I conclude that there is a low level of interest in promotion of creativity skills in the business curriculum in FE and that Ofsted is associated with normalisation, standardisation and efficiency rather than creativity. Creativity is an important business skill, so Ofsted inspectors, as societal gatekeepers, need to be self-reflective in acknowledging pressures that may distort perceptions, resulting in biased judgments that fail to reward and promote creativity appropriately.

This study involved exploring the leadership of sponsored academy schools, in particular sponsorship and the realisation of the ethos and vision. The research focused on: the motivations of sponsors; the roles of sponsors and academy principals and how the ethos and vision have been realised in their academies. This is a nested case study of five nests of differing sponsored academy types. It is a qualitative study which adopted a nested case study methodology and the semi-structured interview as a method. Nineteen key actors were interviewed from ten academies including sponsor representatives and principals. The findings show that there were a range of motivational factors for the motivations of sponsors. These varied from the holding of deep philosophical beliefs on the nature of education, to a philanthropic ‘giving back to the community’ and, for international sponsors, the status from joining the state education in England. The roles of academy sponsors and relationships with principals varied across the sample. Some sponsors have greater day to day involvement than others; they were more prescriptive in their relationship with the academy principal. There appears to be a relationship continuum for the principal and academy sponsor which varies from autocratic to laissez faire. The final research question explored how the leadership of academies has sought to realise their ethos and vision. The emergent themes of leadership, branding, buildings (BSF), educational values, sponsor vision and high aspirations were evident in all nests.

In this thesis I explore high achieving students’ experiences of learning and being examined in mathematics during their two-year post 16 modular course. I am a practitioner researcher and used a mixed method case study approach with interview data collected from eight students during the learning of each pure mathematics module and subsequent examination. Data was also gathered from their mathematics teachers regarding their perceptions of the students’ experiences. This interview data was triangulated by questionnaire responses from the cohort of mathematics students at the end of each year. In a second strand of analysis, I developed a model from Sierpinska (1994) to analyse the nature of the demand the examination papers taken by these students. The level of challenge was found to be surprisingly consistent. Synthesis of the data showed that these high achieving students do find A-level mathematics difficult, with the difficulties remaining similar throughout their two year course. There was a significant overlap between learning and being examined and the difficulties described by the students reveal external factors such as workload, pace, memory and decision making. There very few references to mathematics as a source of difficulty, instead the majority of descriptions featured novelty.

Despite a wealth of research into improving questioning in mathematics, recent research has identified the need for more effective questioning strategies which are accessible to mathematics teachers. This thesis investigates the types of questions which encourage mathematical thinking and participation, with the aim of deepening and varying mathematical thinking for learners through working with my own tool to develop questioning in mathematics, the Intended Mathematical Processes and Cognitive Thought (IMPaCT) Taxonomy. Following a literature review of existing taxonomies which can be used for classifying questions, and framing the research around the establishment of sociomathematical norms in the classroom, this thesis develops a new taxonomy and presents the findings from the pilot study for this research followed by the empirical research to explore the effectiveness of the IMPaCT Taxonomy. Over the course of an academic year, 28 mathematics lessons, from four participant teachers and five classes of 14-16 year olds were observed, and the questioning in each lesson was analysed using the IMPaCT Taxonomy. After the first 15 of these observations, intervention was given to the participant teachers on using the IMPaCT Taxonomy before the remaining lesson observations were conducted. Proportions of question type and depth were analysed according to several factors: the participant teacher; the level of attainment of the class; the stage of the lesson; the Assessment for Learning techniques used; and the mathematical topic. The results show that although all these factors affect the questioning, the attainment of the class and the individual teacher have the biggest impact on the questioning employed. The empirical analysis shows that both the teachers’ understanding of how their questioning impacts on learners and the teachers’ variety and depth of questioning can be increased through working with the IMPaCT Taxonomy, although there are variations between teachers to the extent of the impact of the IMPaCT Taxonomy.