ABSTRACT Children and young people regularly report suppressing aspects of their spirituality due to fears of ridicule or dismissal, both in and out of school. This situation contributes to spirituality becoming hidden, which is further compounded by disconnects between informal and formal settings involving religious, spiritual, and moral education. This article proposes that the child’s voice(s) can potentially bridge these informal and formal contexts. However, achieving this requires adults to both recognize and understand spirituality from young people’s perspectives, which can be challenging. The argument is made that adopting an attitude of epistemic humility can help facilitate self-awareness and reduce dialogical tension. Examples of children and young people’s spiritual voice(s) are offered to illustrate continuums of adults’ epistemic un/ease and dialogical flow/tension in responding to them. These range from acceptance and empathy with moments of awe and wonder, through to the challenges posed by reports of divine encounters. Suggestions for cultivating epistemic humility are offered, while acknowledging the inherent difficulties. The article concludes that dialogical tension can be a positive force when approached with curiosity about children’s worlds and perspectives. In this way, intergenerational engagement in and across diverse educational settings is facilitated to support the flourishing of young people’s spirituality.

ABSTRACT The focus of this article is leadership for inclusive education. The work presented explores a three-year (2021–2024) place-based pedagogical partnership (PBPP) with schools and higher education (HE) leading change for inclusion and school improvement across Plymouth city’s secondary school network. National and international governments emphasise the role HE has in partnering with its local communities to achieve equal education access, inclusive pupil progress and student equality. The aims of this project and partnership were firstly to build meaningful relationships across secondary school leadership teams, local council, regional government and two city universities, and secondly to develop sustained practices that had evidenced impact on inclusion. The data reported highlights how the project co-created new practices, communication channels and policies, which contributed to school improvement, inclusive education and the development of new pedagogy. A pedagogical partnership model was established, taking a critical collaborative approach in aims and working from a place-based, contextual space. Findings show how the partnership impacted on the collaboration style of school leaders; improved pupil attendance, attainment and achievement developed new Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programmes; developed alternative education provision; and established a mentoring programme for school pupils. Outcomes and findings contribute knowledge to the evolving discourse of inclusive education, emphasising the relevance and impact of place-based pedagogic partnerships working across institutions to lead inclusion.

ABSTRACT This paper is about accountability, surveillance, and a concerning kind of leadership that not only remains unaddressed in many schools but also in the education literature: toxic leadership. Distinct from the typical conceptual and empirical contributions researchers make to the literature on accountability, surveillance, and leadership in education, I engage in autoethnography and draw on my own past but lasting experiences. In doing this, I bring the under-researched issue of toxic leadership to the fore, positioning it as a specific kind of leadership distinguishable from other types of dark leadership, and, significantly, I illustrate how the effects of accountability, surveillance, and toxic leadership can be perennial. In order to make a difference to policy and practice, I call on members of the research community to both think differently about teachers’ working conditions and toxic leadership and research differently by taking atypical approaches.

ABSTRACT The gaokao, China’s annual college entrance exam, profoundly impacts Chinese students and their families; their singular performance will determine their university pathway. It is the exam of their lives. While studies often focus on rural, low-income, and middle-class experiences, little attention has been paid to how wealthy families circumvent the gaokao altogether. This study addresses that gap through a case study of ‘Lennus’, an elite school offering an alternative international track. We define elite schools as top-ranked and highly selective institutions serving socially advantaged families; yet ‘Lennus’ embodies a dual form of elitism. It is academically prestigious, but it also admits students who, though not academically exceptional, leverage socio-economic privilege and guanxi (social connections) to bypass the gaokao. In doing so, such schools become complicit in constructing privileged exit routes from the domestic exam system. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory, our analysis of interview data shows how elite families strategically convert wealth and guanxi into educational advantages. This process illuminates the reproduction of class advantage while offering fresh insights into the interplay of capital, privilege, and elite schooling in contemporary China.

ABSTRACT By reviewing and critiquing the research on children’s spirituality, this article considers the implications for how the spiritual overlaps with the moral and religious dimensions of children’s lives and for how these can be nurtured. While how spirituality is defined and understood is elusive, common themes relate to its innateness, the need for descriptions to apply in both religious and other frameworks and the search for identity, meaning, purpose and connectedness. A holistic, cross-curricular approach which seeks to strengthen children’s sense of agency and dispositions such as empathy, kindness and open-mindedness is advocated. This requires reciprocal, trusting relationships in inclusive, hospitable and caring environments which provide time, space and sensitive guidance and modelling. Such an approach, broadly based on virtue ethics, runs counter to current educational and socio-cultural assumptions, such as the emphasis on knowledge acquisition, immediacy and individualism, associated with neo-liberalism and messages from the media.

ABSTRACT To persist is not merely to perform, but to recover. In high-pressure academic contexts, resilience is increasingly seen as a dynamic capacity to rebound, endure, and transform adversity into growth. Grounded in Social Cognitive Theory, this study examined how self-efficacy contributes to resilience both directly and indirectly through learning engagement. Data were collected from 298 Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduates majoring in English. Structural equation modeling with bootstrapping, conducted via SPSS 29.0 and AMOS 23.0, revealed that self-efficacy significantly predicted academic resilience and learning engagement. Learning engagement, conceptualised as a positive, study-related psychological state (Schaufeli et al. 2002), was found to partially mediate the relationship between self-efficacy and academic resilience. Notably, the total effect accounted for 62% of the variance in academic resilience, with the indirect effect (via learning engagement) outweighing the direct effect. These findings underscore a motivational-affective process, whereby efficacy beliefs generate a positive engagement state that scaffolds resilient functioning in linguistically specialised academic settings.

ABSTRACT Character education has become an established field within education research. However, no overview of this rapidly evolving field is available, and several previous methodological concerns about the field, including the use of valid measures and of robust quantitative research protocols, remain unaddressed. The purpose of this review is to fill this gap in the literature, addressing the following research questions: RQ1: What is the current publishing landscape of character education research? and RQ2: Is the quality of character education quantitative research a cause for concern? We searched the Scopus and Web of Science databases, and, following abstract screening, generated a pool of 981 articles for analysis. Of these articles, 38% were published in a journal without a Web of Science journal impact factor, and only 10% conducted intervention studies. Regarding quantitative character education research, 72% of quantitative studies did not use a valid measure, and, for intervention studies, only 8% used an active control, 61% did not randomise, and 75% did not report a standard error, effect size, or both. Our recommendations include a greater depth of empirical character education research in most contexts, the development of more character-related measures, and the increased use of active controls and randomisation.

ABSTRACT Although some research is available on interculturality within volunteering in global sports events, one area that remains underexplored is intercultural dialogue and learning in encounters between local volunteers and international elite athletes. In this paper, we examine official and informal (multifaceted) intercultural dialogues between Chinese Student Volunteers (SVs) and athletes at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. SVs’ narratives are used to identify moments of intercultural dialogue and learning. The analysis focuses on the types of intercultural dialogues that SVs reported, potential opportunities for reciprocal dialogues with the athletes and the kinds of learning that seemed to be occurring during volunteering. The results show that the SVs carried out their tasks with the highest level of professionalism, following the rules guiding the kind of dialogue that they could allow themselves to have. What is referred to as ‘informal’ intercultural dialogue with elite athletes (reciprocity, developing different forms of connection) was minorly reported in the data, and yet SVs revealed original reflections on, e.g. identities, power relations and interculturality. This study outlines new methods for preparation in both intercultural and volunteer settings.

ABSTRACT The aim of human flourishing can be assessed in educational institutions with the Human Flourishing Measure. Educational institutions could more effectively promote human flourishing, especially the formation of character and the virtues, with concepts that correspond to the five domains of human flourishing and deepen their understanding and practice. These concepts are moral sources and culture (for the domain of happiness and life satisfaction), anthropology (for the domain of physical and mental health), agency and motivation (meaning and purpose), performance and context (character and virtue), and love and pedagogy (close social relationship). In view of the diversity of educational settings in the UK and USA, each concept is elaborated in thick and thin versions to guide evaluation and implementation.