This paper seeks to explore the issues and concerns that impact upon girls' and boys' friendship groups as they transfer from primary to secondary school. Using the girls' and boys' own voices, we document the extent to which their existing social relationships are disrupted as they adapt to and engage with a new school setting. Through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires conducted in the final year of primary school and the first year of secondary school, we identify students' concerns regarding their attitudes to friendship. We consider the extent to which account is taken of this aspect of children's friendships and explore and analyse commonalities and differences in their responses. We argue that the priorities of our student groups are different to those advocated by the school. We further attempt to examine how the girls and boys in our sample negotiate their new environment. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. IntroductionThe transition from primary to secondary school was loaded with added significance as my struggle to mask terror coincided with recognition of deeper existential fears. Sitting in my bed at night and literally shaking with fear. The first time I realised my own mortality is a resonant memory of my childhood, waking up when everyone else is asleep and feeling my stomach churn . . . the loss of the social milieu of the primary school, the demands of integration into a potentially hostile peer group in itself provoked deeply held fears of annihilation (Tuddenham, 1997: 2).Transferring from primary to secondary school is a key rite of passage for boys and girls, as they move from the seemingly familiar and safe environment of the primary school, to the unfamiliar and strange surroundings of the secondary school. During this transitional phase of schooling, children have to learn to read, negotiate and adapt to a very different school culture. Such a cultural shift includes meeting different teachers, adapting to a variety of teaching styles, a broader range of curricula, bigger and unfamiliar buildings and a far greater emphasis on regulatory measures. In addition, children find themselves repositioned as the youngest in the school, and This paper considers students' gendered attitudes to friendship, in terms of commonalities and differences at the point of transition from primary to secondary school. It has only been in relatively recent times that the perspective of boys' and girls' experience of transfer from one phase of schooling to the next has begun to be explored (Galton and Willcocks, 1983; School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA), 1996). Until this time research into primary school transfer tended to concern itself with the organisational arrangements, for example assessment procedures and selection, with the importance of friendship within this process of transfer being marginal to concerns of academic attainment and curricula demands. We would argue however, that the perspective brought by both girls and boys lays far greater emphasis on the importance of ...
Drawing on empirical research, this article explores the ways in which schoolteachers 'reposition' themselves in the face of rapid and extensive educational change, some of which they may view with ambivalence or hostility. Arguing that local responses to public policy are prompting teachers to become increasingly pragmatic in their philosophies and practice, the article identi es and illustrates two distinct forms of pragmatism: 'principled pragmatism', through which teachers who feel generally positive towards recent reforms feel able to strengthen and af rm their pedagogic identities by drawing eclectically on a range of educational practices and traditions; and 'contingent pragmatism', adopted by teachers in oppositional orientations to reform, whereby enforced reactions to policy change take on something of the function of a survival strategy. The article suggests that a consequence-and possible cause-of the adoption of self-consciously pragmatic teacher identities is the effective depoliticisation of teachers through an internalisation of current dominant discourses of compromise.
The years following the Education Reform Act of 1988 witnessed significant changes in the management of state education in England and Wales. The devolution of power to schools in the form of more control over finance and resourcing has contributed to profound changes in the function and role of the headteacher, who now operates increasingly as a managing director as well as a leader and visionary. Increased control over budgets, however, has been offset by considerably reduced control over curriculum, now largely set by government decree, and by greater choice for parents as to which schools to select for their children's education (Ball, 1993; DES, l992). In competition for students in the 'quasi marketplace' (Whitty et al., 1998), headteachers must therefore not only act as mediators between government policy and their staff, but as agents between the school and its 'clientele', finding ways of making the school attractive and distinctive in ways other than through appeals to largely mandated programmes of study.To complicate matters further, there exists another set of tensions for headteachers, in that they and many of their teaching colleagues might oppose on philosophical or ideological grounds some aspects of national policy that the school is obliged to put into operation, or to the very idea of having to 'compete' for students in the first place. To quote Bernstein on this issue (1996: 75), there is the possibility of a 'dislocation between the culture of pedagogic discourse [whereby teachers seek to do what they feel is essentially "right" for their students] and [a particular] management ethos which has become the device for creating an entrepreneurial competitive culture'. Responding to these tensions, as well as to those that may arise from taking into account the wishes and concerns of increasingly empowered school governing bodies, renders the current role and positioning of the school headteacher very complex indeed, and invites questions as to how far the increased financial autonomy devolved to schools really does represent an increased autonomy, or whether it is merely a rhetorical autonomy (Ball, 1999) whereby schools may have more money in their coffers but are overly constrained in their choice of how to spend it.Against this background, this article sets out to explore some of the different ways in which headteachers in England currently negotiate, accommodate, resist and mediate
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