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This article is based on the findings of an externally funded, mixed-methods research project conducted at one English university. This small-scale project aimed to examine leadership, barriers to becoming a leader and the support needed to overcome them, from the perspectives of disabled staff. An online questionnaire was sent to all 66 members of staff who had disclosed their disabled status to the university and 22 responses were received. Twelve participants were then interviewed as two focus groups to discuss their views on leadership and its relation to their role. Six more respondents opted for individual face-to-face/telephone interviews. The findings indicated that over half of the respondents were already engaged in 'formal' leadership and even more exercised 'informal' leadership. This key finding seems to contradict the under-representation of disabled academics in leadership reported in the literature. Despite their engagement in leadership, disabled staff faced several institutional and personal barriers. The findings suggest that having an impairment per se might not necessarily deter disabled staff from exercising leadership. A number of support strategies are recommended to facilitate their participation in (formal) leadership.

Much research on bullying in schools positions individual children within a deficit model of personal variables, categorising and cataloguing them with high levels of aggressiveness, low levels of empathy and so on. While less than optimal school characteristics are sometimes noted, the expectation for change is on the children. This article proposes a reconsideration of "the school" as an unproblematically benign institution inimical to bullying and reframes it as a social system in which current arrangements are conducive to peer aggression. Using theoretical constructs drawn from outside the usual field of bullying, it critically examines some taken-for-granted features of schooling in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The medical and social models of disability are deployed to illuminate the philosophical differences between psychological and sociological paradigms in bullying research, to call for more research on bullying that critiques political and systemic factors in education rather than ever more funding that frames children as psychological deviants.

Neil Duncan suggests that because of the theoretical perspectives of many of the main researchers involved in investigating bullying, important aspects of this phenomenon have been neglected. Based on findings from research into sexual bullying, it is suggested that the sexual identities formed during adolescence play an important part in producing the kinds of behaviour which are involved in bullying in general. The research findings reported here were the result of structured interviews (themselves developed from earlier work) undertaken with single-sex groups of boys and girls. The data that these interviews generated have important implications for both researchers and those working with young people in secondary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]