Value-added measures can be used to allocate funding to schools, to identify those institutions in need of special attention and to underpin government guidance on targets. In England, there has been a tendency to include in these measures an ever-greater number of contextualising variables and to develop evermore complex models that encourage (or 'impose') in schools a single uniform method of analysing data, but whose intricacies are not fully understood by practitioners. The competing claims of robustness, usability and accessibility remain unresolved because it is unclear whether the purpose of the measurement is teacher accountability, pupil predictability or school improvement. This paper discusses the provenance and shortcomings of value-added measurement in England (and the Pupil Level Annual Schools Census that informs it) including the fact that although the metrics are essential for School Effectiveness Research, they fail to capture in its entirety the differential effectiveness of schools across the prior attainment range and across sub-groups of students and subjects.

IntroductionRecent policies towards more school-based training have significantly changed the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) landscape. With an emphasis of trainees spending more time in school, rather than at universities, this might mean that networks of support, for example through peers, university mentors or school mentors change as well. As previous research indicates that networks can play an important role in trainees' development we set out to investigate how trainees' networks developed throughout the Academic Year 2014-2015. We focus here on mathematics and science trainees as shortages in maths and science trainees have made it important to study the way trainees form relationships in more detail. It is our expectation that this might provide valuable insights in the way we might (re-)organise ITE provision. Hence, this paper reports on a project which involved researching the support relationships of trainee (student) teachers on initial teacher education programmes, and the impact of these networks on trainees' perceived progress through their programme of study.

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In the last decade, automated captioning services have appeared in mainstream technology use. Until now, the focus of these services have been on the technical aspects, supporting pupils with special educational needs and supporting teaching and learning of second language students. Only limited explorations have been attempted regarding its use for research purposes: transcription of audio recordings. This article presents a proof-of-concept exploration utilising three examples of automated transcription of audio recordings from different contexts; an interview, a public hearing and a classroom setting, and compares them against 'manual' transcription techniques in each case. It begins with an overview of literature on automated captioning and the use of voice recognition tools for the purposes of transcription. An account is provided of the specific processes and tools used for the generation of the automated captions followed by some basic processing of the captions to produce automated transcripts. Originality checking software was used to determine a percentage match between the automated transcript and a manual version as a basic measure of the potential usability of each of the automated transcripts. Some analysis of the more common and persistent mismatches observed between automated and manual transcripts is provided, revealing that the majority of mismatches would be easily identified and rectified in a review and edit of the automated transcript. Finally, some of the challenges and limitations of the approach are considered. These limitations notwithstanding, we conclude that this form of automated transcription provides 'good enough' transcription for first versions of transcripts. The time and cost advantages of this could be considerable, even for the production of summary or gisted transcripts.

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This article focuses on four case study schools that have adopted innovative competence‐based curriculum (CBC) projects in Year 7 for a variety of educational and social reasons. The article discusses the issues and challenges posed by the CBC for teachers in the daily life of the classroom. Philosophical ideas about the purpose of education vary because they are driven by ideological positions. Consequently the nature and structure of the curriculum influenced by the stance adopted inevitably affects approaches to teaching and learning. It is contended that changes to the curricula in the case study schools have revealed tensions between traditional approaches to teaching and learning with ‘strong’ classification and framing and the new, more progressive approaches with ‘weak’ classification and framing. These tensions impact on teachers’ identities and this can make effective classroom practice problematic. The article concludes that managing the tensions between traditional and more progressive pedagogies is worthwhile as this will enable students to become more fully integrated, and successful participatory members of twenty‐first‐century society rather than simply reproducing the socio‐economic status quo, or the requirements of current dominant educational discourse in England.

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The development of communication networks of pre-service teachers on a school-led and university-led programme of initial teacher education in England Brouwer, Jasperina; Downey, Christopher; Bokhove, Christian