This paper reports on a study designed to examine teachers' craft knowledge of their practice of ‘inclusion’ in terms of what they do, why and how. The research approach offers an important alternative to studies of students with ‘additional needs’ and the search to articulate the specialist knowledge and skill required to teach them. Through classroom observations and interviews with 11 teachers of students across the full age range in two Scottish primary schools, we investigated how teachers make meaning of the concept of inclusion in their practice by exploring theoretical assumptions drawn from the literature about inclusive pedagogy. The analysis enabled us to identify practical examples of inclusive pedagogy that met the standard of extending what is generally available to everybody, as opposed to providing for all by differentiating for some. Examples of the inclusive pedagogical approach are provided.

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Whilst recent decades have seen significant progress in research on inclusive education, many teachers still feel that the research literature does not fully address their professional concerns about how to enact a policy of inclusion in their classrooms. To help to bridge this gap, we drew on the concept of craft knowledge to undertake a detailed study in two Scottish primary schools of the practice of class teachers who are committed to meet the needs of all learners. This paper describes the processes involved, and considers how these helped us to develop a greater understanding of what constitutes inclusive practice, whilst also contributing to a more robustly theorised knowledge of what we have termed inclusive pedagogy, or the inclusive pedagogical approach. Methodological complexities arising from the use of the concept of craft knowledge are also explored.

This article examines partnerships between universities and schools that focus on the generation of educational knowledge through practitioner research and enquiry. It draws on a seven‐year study of a partnership between the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge and a group of eight secondary schools. The article explores what has been learned about such partnerships, including the benefits and challenges arising from some fundamental differences between the nature of schools and universities as organizations and the roles and perspectives of teachers and academics within them. It considers different understandings of the notion of knowledge generation, including which forms of knowledge are valued and found to be useful. Conditions, structures and organizational arrangements that are necessary to support such research within school–university partnerships are discussed.

This article examines the Framework for Participation: a research tool established to support a recently completed study. The research was undertaken to explore the relationship between achievement and inclusion because headteachers and teachers in some schools continue to resist becoming more inclusive in their student intake on the grounds that doing so has a negative effect on the academic achievement of other students and will lower overall standards. Embedded in these professional concerns are a number of assumptions about the nature of educational inclusion and achievement, as well as how they affect each other and how they might be measured. Therefore, the aim of the research was to gain a nuanced understanding of the relationship between inclusion and achievement. As part of this work, the Framework was devised, providing a valuable structure for the collection, analysis, and presentation of detailed qualitative and quantitative data within a multi-site case study approach. The article explores the development of the Framework's principles, purposes, and structure, and describes how it was used in the project. In doing so, it examines ways in which the use of the Framework in case study research is methodologically distinct from other studies with similar concerns and interests.

Recent developments in the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) have produced a national pupil database (NPD) that contains information about the attainments of individual pupils. Every child in the country has been allocated a unique pupil number (UPN), which means that the academic progress of individuals can be tracked over time. It is possible to combine data on attainment with the demographic information which is obtained from the pupil level annual schools census (PLASC). These innovations make it possible to combine ‘value added’ information about pupil progress from one key stage of education to the next with data from the PLASC, which contains pupil background information, to produce a single matched data set. Thus the NPD and the PLASC are able to provide much of the necessary information to explore issues of individual pupil performance over their school careers. Notably, more specific information about the academic achievement of pupils who are described as having ‘special educational needs’ is now available. Lani Florian, lecturer in inclusion and special educational needs, Martyn Rouse, senior lecturer in inclusion and special educational needs, Kristine Black‐Hawkins, senior research associate, and Stephen Jull, research associate, are all based at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education. In this article, drawing on their work in the ‘Inclusion and Achievement Project’, they explore the problems and possibilities for researching issues of pupil achievement and inclusion through the use of these new national data sets.

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