Janet Collins

Methodological challenges in researching inclusive school cultures

This article addresses the methodological challenges faced in a pilot study of the processes and cultures of inclusion and exclusion in two primary school classrooms. The authors, who were the research team, engaged with a range of practical and ethical challenges, some of which face any researcher entering classroom contexts and some of which were specific to our focus on inclusive school processes and cultures. This article is about the latter: challenges of who decides that a school is inclusive and worthy of attention in an inclusion study; how we look for and recognize inclusive school cultures; how much we do and should change things that we find; and how to put children and their experiences at the centre of our research. We discuss the risks of pathologizing and objectifying children and a key issue that arose for us, the risk of problematizing teachers when (perhaps inevitably) we found more evidence of exclusionary than inclusionary processes at work.

Teaching assistants reflect: the way forward?

If teaching assistants are to be successful in helping schools to address the Government’s standards agenda as well as meet the needs of the workforce reform it seems self‐evident that the employment, development and deployment of teaching assistants is of extreme importance. Following the publication of the Common core of skills and knowledge for the children’s workforce, ‘clarity of roles’ and knowledge of ‘how to reflect and improve’ are identified as core knowledge for the development of all staff working with children. The paper suggests that skills and performance are valued implicitly in the new arrangements in England, but there is a danger of the power of reflection not being recognised as a mechanism for the enhancement of such qualities. The issues raised in this paper are illustrated from evidence collected during a series of semi‐structured interviews with a group of eight bilingual teaching assistants who work in the same large multicultural primary school in the centre of England. The paper concludes by citing a number of specific questions for further empirical work.