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Schools in many countries are beginning to take on extended roles, working with families and communities as well as with students. However, the rationales underpinning such developments are often unclear. This paper reports on case studies of 20 schools developing new roles as part of the national extended services initiative in England. It reports in detail on two of these schools, exploring the rationales for their extended roles elicited in the course of a theory of change- based evaluation. It finds that schools saw no contradiction between their traditional and extended roles because they saw students' academic attainments as shaped by a wide range of personal, family and community factors. It argues that the schools' rationales were coherent, but by no means fully articulated and concludes that dialogue between practitioners, policy makers and researchers is necessary to develop these rationales further.

This paper draws on a longitudinal qualitative study exploring the influence of the social class identities of novice teachers on their emerging teacher identities. The paper focuses on the ways in which, even at an implicit level, many novice teachers appear to recognise that their own (or perceptions of their own) class identity and the associated cultural capital that they bring might not be equally valued in all school settings. Thus, whilst some novice teachers are constrained/restricted by their class identities, others, often those with middle-class identities, are more able to play strategically with their class, minimising the potential disadvantages of a perceived lack of appropriate cultural capital. This paper therefore sets out to explore these responses given that they yield strong support for the self-reflection, problematisation and critique of novice teachers' identities in initial teacher education and training programmes.

This paper reports a small-scale research project which took place in one primary school in the north-east of England. The study aimed to listen to children's views about how the practices of teachers helped and/or hindered their sense of inclusion in classrooms. Inclusion was understood here in a broad sense rather than specifically relating to children with special educational needs. Participatory research tools were used as part of group interviews with children from three different year groups. Even though the children were mostly happy with their school experience, it was noticeable that there were some areas for concern for some children that related to four interconnecting themes: unfairness, shouting, loneliness and seating plans. All of these themes seemed to be connected with children's interpersonal relationships - with teachers and with each other - and can be seen as crucial in terms of understanding inclusion in schools and further developing existing practices.

This article focuses upon the classed and early professional experiences of middle-class novice teachers in England experiencing and contemplating working in schools serving socio-economically disadvantaged communities. Through an examination of the visibility and invisibility of social class in education set within an increasingly unequal and changed social landscape, the article reports upon research which seeks to better understand the class identities of these teachers. Evidence is presented of the key, yet complex, role that social class occupies within the working lives of new teachers and reveals the different ways in which teachers respond to the classed dimensions of their early professional experiences. It is concluded that the fundamentally important role that social class plays in terms of shaping early professional experiences in teaching suggests the need not only for a commensurately enhanced focus as part of early professional development, but also for attention that is sensitively attuned to the class identities of teachers.

Although there is widespread agreement that poverty and poor educational outcomes are related, there are different explanations about why that should be the case. The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual synthesis of some of the research literature on poverty and education. From our readings the debates cohere, to a greater or lesser extent, around three different foci: ones that focus on the individual and that we have termed the "micro-level"; some that focus on "immediate social contexts" that might be located in families, communities, schools and peer groups and that we have termed the "meso-level"; and others again that focus on social structures and/or are linked to notions of power and inequality and that we have termed the "macro-level". In addition, the various literatures highlight a fundamental difference in the way they understood the role of education in producing what we might call the "good society"--and hence what counts as "good education". These two broad positions we have termed as functionalist and socially critical perspectives and together with the micro-, meso- and macro-foci provide a mapping framework by which we organise the literature and through which we examine a number of educational policy interventions in England that have focused on educational outcomes and disadvantage/poverty. The analysis suggests that perhaps too much policy intervention focuses on the more accessible and amenable meso-level (and to lesser extent the micro-level) with too little emphasis on the macro-level. At the same time many interventions appear disjointed, often lack coherence and seem to eschew issues of power. Different ways of responding to these apparent deficiencies are explored through current developments and potential in full service extended schools and through notions of democratic pedagogy and governance possibilities suggestive of the "new localism" agenda. (Contains 1 note.)