Today CPRT publishes Primary Schools Responding to Diversity: barriers and possibilities, by Mel Ainscow, Alan Dyson, Lise Hopwood and Stephanie Thomson, of the University of Manchester. This is the eighth in CPRT’s new series of research reviews specially commissioned to build on Cambridge Primary Review evidence and advance CPRT’s priorities. In this case, the priority is equity, and the new report stands alongside those CPRT has already published on inequality and vulnerable children.
Based on an extensive review of research evidence – which includes but goes well beyond the earlier Cambridge Primary Review report on the same issue by two of the authors – the new report concludes:
Current national policy is limiting the capacity of the English primary education system to respond to pupil diversity. In so doing, it is failing to build on many promising practices that exist in schools themselves. All of this is leading to the creation of a fragmented system in which schools lack effective support and where what look like gains in autonomy are undermined by a narrowing of the curriculum, by accountability regimes and systems of funding. The report provides an analysis of the factors that are creating these difficulties, as well as pointing to possibilities for moving policy and practice forward.
Download the full report here.
Download the four-page briefing/executive summary here.
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