Education

The attainment gap between disadvantaged students and their peers is persistent.  Recent research suggests that the gap is largest in rural and coastal schools.  My research explores the attainment gap from three perspectives:

• Secondary analysis of the National Pupil Database;
• The use of Pupil Premium funding in secondary schools in the South West and the strategies schools employ to the close the attainment gap;
• The ways in which students in rural and coastal areas construct and mediate their identities as  learners and young people, drawing on hybridised theories of identity, rooted in the the work of Bauman and Bourdieu.

In collaboration with Bristol City Council’s Gypsy, Roma, Traveller Team, I am investigating the potential benefits of identity discourse between Gypsy Roma Traveller pupils and their teachers through the production of co­authored inclusive literature. Cooperative and creative projects that facilitate identity discourse through story­-sharing could offer an opportunity to develop important cultural understanding between pupil and teacher and, importantly, offer Gypsy Roma Traveller pupils a chance for their voice to be heard in the education system from which they are too often excluded.

Having been a secondary school teacher for about ten years, I am interested in finding ways to meaningfully involve teachers in educational research. My work explores the connection between sustainability, wellbeing and participatory approaches to research. I believe teacher wellbeing is an important area of investigation in and of itself and not only because its cultivation has been linked to improved exam results. I aim to work with and develop methodologies that allow for the meaningful inclusion of stakeholders at each level of the research process. My most recent work involved the use of poetic inquiry

This research will critique the notion of teacher wellbeing in order to yield insights into how teachers can be well in ways that are meaningful to them. It will collaboratively explore, with a small number of teachers of English in England, our conceptualisations of teacher wellbeing, based on our lived experiences. The project will be partly conducted in collaboration with the National Writing Project, through writing workshops with NWP groups, as well as with individual teachers. This is an arts-based inquiry that recognises the importance of teachers’ experiential knowledge.

Given the changed policy context in England for the assessment of writing over the past five years, and the high-stakes assessment context in which it occurs, I want to investigate the validity and reliability of the current assessment of writing at the end of KS2. Currently, this combines an external test of grammar and teacher assessment of writing.

Key theoretical thinking from assessment research will be used to consider writing assessment. The research will be routed in a sociocultural perspective of writing.

Data collection will consist of interviews with teachers, observations of moderation meetings, and statistical analysis of the relationship between the KS2 test results and the teacher assessment results. The statistical analysis will look at the correlation between the teacher assessment results and KS2 results. A qualitative analysis of ten pupils’ teacher assessed writing portfolios and their KS2 test results to investigate the relationship between the two will also be conducted.

My research will primarily seek to create a formative assessment framework for tracking the progress of ‘Learning Skills’ (a term used in a number of schools and LAs to describe the skills or dispositions necessary for learning to learn, developing positive learning dispositions, metacognition and self-regulated learning) across primary school. This will take the form of a practical, teacher-friendly formative assessment framework that can be used by teachers and children to assess development in Learning Skills, in order to support children to make sustained and informed progress throughout their primary years.