This chapter describes a peer enquiry process developed by headteachers in Wales. Peer enquiry was one of the key collaborative school improvement approaches used within a regional challenge that aimed to develop a more ‘self-improving system. The chapter discusses the potential of peer enquiry for bringing about system change by gradually replacing ‘vertical’ accountability structures by more collaborative and reciprocal ‘horizontal’ approaches. The key differences for those involved in undertaking a peer enquiry, rather than a peer review, arose as much from the context in which it took place as they did from any substantive differences in the processes used.

Over the past two decades, the use of ethnographic research methods, in combination with a range of discursive, conversational, and multimodal analytical approaches, have provided vivid accounts of the complex nature of social workers' everyday communication. This paper discusses the potential and the problems of combining a video-stimulated recall methodology with an explicit theoretical framework, in order to generate critical reflexive "insider" accounts of social workers' direct encounters with children. The framework employed was based on an adaptation of Goffman's concepts of "framing" and "footing," which were integrated into an analytical process designed to theorize social workers' critiques regarding the nature of their communication with children. Three detailed case exemplars are used to demonstrate the potential of this methodology to explore the "delicate" agency required by social workers in the practice of authentic communication in complex professional inquiries with children. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the theoretical and practical issues associated with utilizing reflexive methodologies in professional contexts.

Communicating and engaging with children is a foundational component of child care social work practice, but all too frequently, in the wake of serious incidents, it is the focus of criticism. Drawing on findings from a large-scale ESRC-funded research project conducted in the four U.K. nations, this paper explores, through a psychosocial analytic lens, how social workers anticipate, enact and reflect on their encounters with both children and their families. Close analysis of what social workers said about their practice alongside what they were observed to do in practice revealed perceptions, patterns and processes of communication that, first, minimize emotions and the complexity of the professional task and second, overly privilege verbal interaction. Drawing on Sennett's (2012) ideas this paper offers a reconceptualisation of this professional task, from a communicative to a co-operative one. It affords and creates a space in which social workers can develop more attuned communicative practices that include rituals, gestures and the minimal use of force. The theoretical insights and evidence-informed practice recommendations arising from this research have conceptual significance for the social work discipline and practical significance for the child care social work profession, across national and international contexts.

The ways in which social workers experience a range of emotions that are evoked in their professional relationships with children and families is an area that is little focused upon and yet the processes involved in their expression and management can have profound implications for all involved. Theoretically informed by sociological concepts and combining data from a two-year, UK four-nation, ESRC-funded research project, Talking and Listening to Children (TLC), this paper explores the ways in which social work organisational contexts and dynamics give rise to feeling rules in the workplace and the impact of these on social workers relationships with children and families. Using Hochschilds (1983) emotional labour analytical framework, the paper highlights that the management and expression of social workers feelings are filtered through personal, professional and organisational contexts. The implications of these pervasive and powerful processes are explored. The paper concludes by considering the significant, wide-reaching implications of this focus on the experience, expression and management of emotion for everyday social work practice in both children and families settings specifically and other social work practice contexts more broadly.

The idea that school systems should become self-improving is a growing trend internationally. Put simply, this involves the strengthening of links between schools so that they can provide mutual support and challenge. So far, however, there is little research that throws light on what is involved in attempts to introduce this approach for the first time. Drawing on its authors’ privileged access over a 4-year period, this paper analyses what happened as one education system explored such a move. In particular, it looks at the challenges involved in strengthening collaboration between schools within policy contexts that continue to emphasise competition as a means of achieving improvements. It also examines the nature of the transitional arrangements that are required in order to move from existing organisational conditions to more collaborative ways of working. Drawing on lessons from these experiences, the paper concludes with a series of principles that are intended be useful to those in other policy contexts that are involved in introducing similar reforms.

The paper argues that case study will need to play an increasingly important role in the evaluation of leadership development programmes as both formal and substantive theories of leadership place greater emphasis upon the role played by organizational context on leaders ability to bring about change. Prolonged engagement within a case study provides researchers with opportunities to capture the dynamics between leaders and their organisational contexts. However, adopting a case study approach is no substitute for inadequate theorization of the link between leadership approaches and leadership effects. The paper argues for the use of inclusive and expansive theoretical notions of leadership and its relationship to organisational context. The evaluation used to illustrate these arguments was based on a longitudinal multi-site case study methodology. The case studies ran over a three-year period and tracked the effect of 42 leaders on the quality of provision in some 30 early years settings. Both individual and collective theoires of leadership were used to trace leaders' steps, paths and routes to improvement. Three overlapping theoretical lenses were used to study the dynamics of these leaders interactions with a key aspect of their organisational contexts - the existing formal and informal leadership structures - and how these affected their attempts to improve the quality of provision of their settings. The analysis, and related findings, were tiered in order to provide progressively more detailed descriptions of the relationships between leaders' approaches and changes in their settings' quality of provision. Each layer of analysis operated with a causal logic that became gradually less general and linear and increasingly more 'local' and complex.

Teachers' professional training and development has been the focus of intense academic and political debate. This paper contributes to this by considering Beginning Teachers' (BTs') self-views of their professional identity. The findings are derived from a mixed methods study with questionnaires (n = 886) and focus groups and interviews (n = 60) with BTs in Wales. Drawing on a socio-cultural approach, the findings illustrate how BTs' integration of competing professional identities bolstered their sense of professional agency. These findings have salience within a policy context where both teacher education and professional development are increasingly aligned with the narrow organizational objectives of the school. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This article examines children’s agency in their interactions with social workers during statutory encounters in a child protection context. It draws from a UK-wide ethnographic study. It finds that much of social workers’ responses to children’s agency in this context are best understood as a form of ‘containment’. In doing so, it offers an original and significant contribution to the theoretical understanding of children’s agency, as well as its application in social work practice.

A key issue for the social work profession concerns the nature, quality and content of communicative encounters with children and families. This article introduces some findings from a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) that took place across the United Kingdom between 2013 and 2015, which explored how social workers communicate with children in their everyday practice. The Talking and Listening to Children (TLC) project had three phases: the first was ethnographic, involving observations of social workers in their workplace and during visits; the second used video stimulated recall with a small number of children and their social workers; and the third developed online materials to support social workers. This paper discusses findings from the first phase. It highlights a diverse picture regarding the context and content of communicative processes; it is argued that attention to contextual issues is as important as focusing on individual practitioners’ behaviours and outlines a model for so doing.

One of the key requirements for any system level reform to be effective is to ensure that 'at the point of delivery' the necessary capacity is available to those responsible for its implementation (Mourshed et al., 2010; Robinson et al., 2011). The Masters in Educational Practice (MEP) was a key element of the Welsh Government's strategy for professional development and school improvement. The paper does not seek to evaluate the MEP programme's effectiveness (forthcoming) but, instead, considers its design and 'enactment' (Ball et al., 2012). The paper approached the issues of the enactment of the MEP: how the programme was shaped by the interaction of individual and collective agency in overlapping contexts, from the theoretical perspective of capacity building at a system level (Hadfield and Chapman, 2009). The analytical focus of the paper is on the nature of the temporary intermediate organisation (Asheim, 2002) constructed to lead the implementation of the MEP and the challenges it faced in accessing, cohering and aligning sufficient capacity from within, and external to, the Welsh education system.

Reports into incidents of child death and serious injury have highlighted consistently concern about the capacity of social workers to communicate skilfully with children. Drawing on data collected as part of an Economic and Social Research Council funded UK-wide research project exploring social workers' communicative practices with children, this paper explores how approaches informed by social pedagogy can assist social workers in connecting and communicating with with children. The qualitative research included data generated from 82 observations of social workers' everyday encounters with children. Social pedagogical concepts of 'haltung' (attitude), 'head, heart and hands' and 'the common third' are outlined as potentially helpful approaches for facilitating the intimacies of inter-personal connections and enhancing social workers' capacity to establish and sustain meaningful communication and relationships with children in the face of austere social, political and organisational contexts.

The fact that we find it necessary to have a separate chapter in this handbook on qualitative methods is, in part, indicative that this overlapping methodological space between effectiveness and improvement research is still actively contested. The divide between qualitative and quantitative methods has been constructed in a number of ways, from treating them as methodological traditions arising from two distinct sciences, Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft, as tools used to pursue very different forms of knowledge required by disciples of the nomothetic and ideographic sciences (Windelband, 1894), to casting them in a range of relationships in the more contemporary enthusiasm for a range of ‘mixed methods’ approaches (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2006).

Researching the efficacy of lesson study has been complicated by the manner in which it has been reinterpreted in different settings and contexts. Drawing on research into a national school improvement programme in England, this paper looks at how various reconfigurations of lesson study were affected by the different collaborative arrangements among schools and practitioners in the programme. Utilising a mixed methods approach, the paper provides and problematizes new empirical evidence concerning the effectiveness of lesson study. It concludes with a consideration of how those researching lesson study intitaives would benefit from adopting a more critical contextual analysis.