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The UK government is planning to increase the number of pupils attending state-funded selective grammar schools, claiming that this will assist overall standards, reduce the poverty attainment gap and so aid social mobility. Using the full 2015 cohort of pupils in England, this article shows how the pupils attending grammar schools are stratified in terms of chronic poverty, ethnicity, language, special educational needs and even precise age within their year group. This kind of clustering of relative advantage is potentially dangerous for society. The article derives measures of chronic poverty and local socio-economic status segregation between schools, and uses these to show that the results from grammar schools are no better than expected, once these differences are accounted for. There is no evidence base for a policy of increasing selection, and so there are implications for early selection policies worldwide. The UK government should consider phasing the existing selective schools out.

All schools possess a duty of care towards their students. However, this duty of care falls unevenly across schools, with those serving low-income communities often responding to the material and psychological effects of poverty as a priority. This duty of care for such schools was placed into stark relief during the period of COVID-19 school closures, when structural inequalities in society became particularly pronounced. Previous research has drawn distinctions between different forms of caring enacted in schools serving low-income communities. These range from practices centred on children’s academic learning to those more concerned with children’s welfare and well-being—which, for the purposes of this paper, we term as academic nurturing and affective nurturing respectively. Others recognise the need for schools in low-income communities to perform a dual role and engage in both forms of nurturing simultaneously—which we term as critical nurturing. This paper presents findings based on case studies from three designated disadvantaged primary schools in Ireland during pandemic-related closures. It draws on interviews from the Children’s School Lives longitudinal study with the teachers, principals, and families of four Junior Infant children (typically aged four to five years). Our findings suggest a typology of nurturing pedagogies, with academic and affective nurturing emphasised to varying degrees across our three schools during this period. Narratives from interviewees also demonstrate the central role of school culture and leadership in achieving critical nurturing, with significant social justice implications for the education of children in schools serving low-income communities.

Influenza vaccination is an important and effective public health intervention. Since 2020, live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) has been available for children in Ireland, provided in the community in primary care. However, vaccine uptake has been suboptimal. Offering influenza vaccination in schools has improved uptake in other countries. In the 2023/24 influenza season, LAIV was offered in schools in Ireland, to targeted school year groups. To evaluate the LAIV schools programme in the 2023/24 influenza season in Ireland, by estimating vaccine uptake and identifying factors associated with vaccine uptake. We conducted a cross-sectional study. Mobile school vaccination teams collected demographic and vaccine uptake data. Univariable and multivariable regression analyses examined if school type, school size and programme resources were associated with differences in vaccine uptake. Offering LAIV to children in target school year groups in 1537 schools in Ireland resulted in a mean vaccine uptake of 49.3 %, compared to the general community uptake of 16.2 % in children aged 2–17 years. Vaccine uptake was lower in schools with higher proportions of children at risk of educational disadvantage (adjusted difference in means 8.0 %, 95 % CI 5.45 %–10.5 %). Larger schools had lower vaccine uptake, with each 10-child increase in enrolment associated with a 1.2 % adjusted decrease in mean uptake (95 % CI 0.7 % to 1.8 %). Offering LAIV in a school setting in Ireland resulted in a higher vaccine uptake than the general community uptake in children. This study supports the use of a schools-based approach for influenza vaccination. Additional supports may be required to improve uptake in children at risk of educational disadvantage and those with complex needs.

This study compares rural educational disadvantage across Australia, Canada, and New Zealand using data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Across the three countries, student reading literacy and school learning environments are less positive in rural communities than in urban. Furthermore, rural disadvantage in educational outcomes (reading) and opportunities is greater in Australia than Canada or New Zealand. This could be seen as surprising as student socioeconomic status (SES), typically a strong predictor of educational outcomes, is similar for rural communities in Australia and Canada, but lower in New Zealand. Rural school principals in Australia are most likely among the three countries to report that shortages of teaching personnel hinder learning. This could suggest that policies and structures can play a role in ameliorating or exacerbating rural educational disadvantage. We conclude with questions and recommendations for future research.

Teacher turnover is a long-standing and worsening problem for schools in England. Strategies to reduce turnover have been extensively researched; however, in England, fewer studies have engaged with how turnover affects students and staff, or how this impact can be mitigated. This article synthesises research suggesting that the negative impact of high turnover is linked to its corrosive impact on trust, student-centric and institutional knowledge, and collaboration and collegiality. It proposes that schools need to intentionally nurture relationships, establish routines and culture at an institutional level and create opportunities for informal professional development. It also argues that decisions about teacher allocation or assignment can drive within-school churn, undermining continuity of care. Teacher allocation decisions have a particularly negative impact on socio-economically disadvantaged and minority ethnic students, but ‘looping’ may reduce within-school churn and enhance continuity of care. Looping has been studied in several countries, but further research is needed in the English context, particularly given that teachers report being open to the strategy, if it is supported by evidence. However, as this article highlights, there are potential tensions between reducing teachers’ influence over allocation and the impact this might have on teacher satisfaction and retention, as well as potential tradeoffs between grade-specific and student-specific expertise.

Governments and education systems worldwide have tried using additional cash transfers to encourage school enrolment and attendance, and to reduce the attainment gap between disadvantaged students and their peers. There are now many strands of evidence on the success of such schemes. This paper presents the results of international structured reviews of the existing evidence, coupled with a natural experiment in India and Pakistan, and a summary of the new findings from a 14-year evaluation of the impact of the Pupil Premium policy in England. The paper addresses the key issue of whether funding is best provided to poorer regions, to schools, families, or individual students. The synthesised results are clear. However, the results differ slightly in terms of whether attendance or attainment is the key objective, and with the age of the students, and the level of development of any education system. Regardless, cash transfers need to have conditions attached, and these conditions must be audited. A key condition for giving money to schools, rather than individuals, should be that it is only used to provide evidence-led programmes and processes.

In Australia (and arguably in many other countries) parent involvement in their child’s learning is dominated by Western notions of learning, education, pedagogy and knowledge. We discuss the application of a critical anthropology of education angle to these dominant discourses and methodological resources that encourage us to be in the field, to take time, and to, with critical reflexivity, listen and learn. We describe how we worked to create an Aboriginal Guided approach and drew on Aboriginal Research Protocols to maintain a steady and sharp emphasis on our practice as researchers.

Although intercultural practices are believed to be extremely relevant to combat educational disadvantages, evidence on the factors that are related to their implementation is not yet well established. This study aims to deepen the understanding regarding the implementation of intercultural practices by professionals working in disadvantaged and culturally diverse contexts, examining its association with the institution’s socioeconomic and cultural diversity, organizational climate and professionals’ self-efficacy and job satisfaction. Participants were 78 professionals (95.3% female, with an age average of 42.52), working in disadvantaged and culturally diverse educational settings in Portugal. Self-efficacy was positively associated with the use of intercultural practices, while higher concentration of Roma and lower education/low-income children were negatively associated with the implementation of intercultural practices, self-efficacy and job satisfaction. A supportive organizational climate was positively associated with professionals’ sense of efficacy and job satisfaction. Findings highlight the importance of promoting a positive organizational climate and helping professionals to effectively handle diversity, namely by providing conditions to improve their levels of self-efficacy.

This article proposes a critique of critical sociology of education as a means of thinking past theories of reproduction which are the doxa for our field. The article problematizes key words such as 'disadvantage' and pursues a critique of reproduction theory, drawing on Rancière's foregrounding of equality as an axiom rather than an outcome. The article goes some way towards showing how we might practically think past theories of reproduction by offering an alternative version of educational equality.

This article illustrates the links between different ways of assessing disadvantage at school and subsequent qualification outcomes at age 16 in England. Our previous work has compared variables that represent current or recent snapshots of disadvantage (such as eligibility for free school meals [FSM]) with long-term summary variables and found the latter to improve measures of both social segregation between schools and explanations of raw-score differences in attainment. This new work takes an even more detailed longitudinal approach, modeling the course of one age cohort of 550,000 pupils from the National Pupil Database through their entire schooling to the age of 16 in 29 distinct analytical steps, using “effect” sizes, correlations, and a regression model. The steps represent stages such as what is known about each pupil when they were born, who they attended school with at age 10, and where they lived at age 14. The model also includes variables representing where data are missing for any pupil in any year. Using capped Key Stage 4 points as an outcome measure, these stages can predict the outcome with R = .90. This is considerably higher than for models using either snapshots or summaries of disadvantage. Key predictors are poverty and special educational needs at age 5, and throughout schooling, coupled with prior attainment at ages 6, 10, and 13. With predictors fed into the model in life order, there is little evidence of differential progress for different language and ethnic minority groups and no evidence of regional differences or a type of school effect. The article concludes with the implications of these results for assessing disadvantage when considering school contexts and for policy makers. Given the small but apparently consistent negative school composition “effects” in every year, one clear implication is that school intakes should be as mixed as possible both socially and academically.