Extended schools in England : emerging rationales

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

The statistics of fixation times for systems with recruitment

We investigate the statistics of the time taken for a system driven by recruitment to reach fixation. Our model describes a series of experiments where a population is confronted with two identical options, resulting in the system fixating on one of the options. For a specific population size, we show that the time distribution behaves like an inverse Gaussian with an exponential decay. Varying the population size reveals that the timescale of the decay depends on the population size and allows the critical population number, below which fixation occurs, to be estimated from experimental data

Noise-Induced Bistable States and Their Mean Switching Time in Foraging Colonies

We investigate a type of bistability where noise not only causes transitions between stable states, but also constructs the states themselves. We focus on the experimentally well-studied system of ants choosing between two food sources to illustrate the essential points, but the ideas are more general. The mean time for switching between the two bistable states of the system is calculated. This suggests a procedure for estimating, in a real system, the critical population size above which bistability ceases to occur.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. See also a "light-hearted" introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m37Fe4qjeZ

Developing inclusive schools: three perspectives from England

Dieser Artikel befasst sich mit den Entwicklungsbedingungen von inklusiven Schulen und macht deutschsprachige Leser/innen mit den Ergebnissen einiger englischer Untersuchungen bekannt. Bei der ersten handelt es sich um einen systematischen Überblick über englischsprachige Forschungsliteratur zum Thema "inklusive Schulen". Die zweite umfasst eine Reihe von Fallstudien über Schulen, die einen relativ hohen Anteil von Schüler/inne/n "mit besonderem Förderbedarf " unterrichten. Die dritte Studie befasst sich mit Lehrerteams, die die Bedingungen an ihren Schulen erforscht und gemeinsam daran gearbeitet haben, ihre Schulen inklusiver zu machen. Wenn man die Ergebnisse dieser Studien zusammenfasst, kommt man zu dem Ergebnis, dass es zwei Möglichkeiten gibt, wie inklusive Schulen sich entwickeln können. Die erste setzt für die Entstehung inklusiver Schulen außergewöhnliche Umstände und ein außergewöhnliches pädagogisches Engagement voraus. Die zweite geht davon aus, dass inklusive Schulen gewöhnlichen Schulen eigentlich recht ähnlich sind und sich ganz undramatisch aus Reflexionsprozessen der Lehrerschaft und mit Hilfe einer unterstützenden Schulverwaltung entwickeln. Der Autor vertritt die Auffassung, dass das letztere Modell vor allem dann für die Entwicklung inklusiver Schulen gut geeignet ist, wenn es von einer Bildungspolitik getragen wird, der an einer zunehmenden Inklusivität des gesamten Schulwesens gelegen ist. (DIPF/Orig.)This paper makes available to a German-language readership the findings of three studies undertaken by the author in the field of inclusive schools. The first is a systematic review of the English language research literature on inclusive schools. The second is a series of case studies of schools educating high proportions of students with \u27special educational needs\u27. The third is a study of teacher research teams working to make their schools more inclusive. Synthesising these studies, the author concludes that there are two models of inclusive school development. One assumes that they arise out of exceptional circumstances and commitments. The other assumes that they are much like other schools and arise out of undramatic processes of teacher reflection and policy support. The author argues that this latter model is particularly appropriate where policy makers are trying to encourage inclusive approaches across a school system as a whole. (DIPF/Orig.