Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.
There were five key objectives to this research project : to examine the teaching approaches experienced by year 2 pupils in inner city schools since the introduction of the national curriculum and assessment; to examine how Teacher Assessments (TAs) and Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) were being carried out in English, Mathematics and Science, with particular attention being focused on bilingual children and children with special educational needs and where they were not being carried out, to establish why; to compare the learning outcomes of pupils in inner-city schools and examine how such outcomes are related to background factors at the level of the individual pupil; to investigate whether there is any evidence that particular teaching and learning approaches benefit certain kinds of learning outcomes and/or particular groups of children; to examine children's attitudes towards teaching and learning and where possible to relate these to teachers' expectations and pupils' learning outcomes.
Main Topics:
The topics covered include : Key Stage 1 data LEA data : students' year, term and month of birth, English language fluency, Key Stage 1 English, Mathematics, Science and Technology subject testing data, gender, eligibility for free school meals, Statements of Special Educational Needs. Headteacher questionnaire : years as headteacher, number of pupils with Statements, percentage of pupils with other educational needs, pupils' socio-economic backgrounds by percentage of those from non-manual, skilled and semi-skilled manual, unemployed households; percentages of pupils from refugee, traveller and lone parent families; percentages of pupils not fluent in English language, whether mobility of pupils due to family movement causes problems for school, parent interest and involvement in pupils' education including parent helpers, changes in school population, reading schemes and methods and book usage, mathematics schemes, class demographics, teacher changes, percentage of time spent in whole class teaching and group teaching, grouping of pupils by ability, topic coverage, paid classroom help, teaching plans, aims for students' educational and social development. Completeness of data Head teacher questionnaire : includes complete data from 65 schools spread unevenly across four inner city local education authorities. Key Stage 1, 1992 : partial pupil data, comprising English, Mathematics, Science and Technology subject levels and corresponding subject profile components plus assorted pupil background variables. Details are given in the codebook. As the four local education authorities who provided this data wish to remain anonymous, no original recording sheets are included.
Purposive selection/case studies
Postal survey
Compilation or synthesis of existing material
From the Key Stage 1 data, common pupil background variables were created where possible from those provided by each LEA. Only these together with the subject level and profile component data for each pupil were then matched to the head teacher questionnaire responses for the corresponding school.
