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This Paper Describes An Exploratory Study In One School Where The Governors ...

This paper describes an exploratory study in one school where the governors have bought into the National Wellbeing Programme for The Poplars Primary School An analysis of the data collected from an initial on-line survey show that the teaching staff at Poplars feel particularly stressed. School leaders are concerned to identify the reasons for this, and hence, this study has been implemented to identify some of the dimensions of the problem .

Many of the perceived stressors reported by teaching staff at The Poplars are supported by numerous findings from research into teacher stress and can be generalised, I would suggest, to most primary school settings; namely, excessive workload (Johnstone,1993; DfES, 2001 and SNCT, 2006); long hours (Kyriacou, 2001); initiative overload/the pace of change (Travers & Cooper, 1997); evaluation apprehension (Capel,1997); inadequate and /or poor resources (Chen & Miller, 1997) and lack of technical/administrative support (Brown & Ralph,1992).

The Poplars School is recognised as a centre of excellence for its inclusive practices and attracts many children via the parental preference route; a phenomenon described aptly by MacBeath et al (2005) as the ‘magnet effect'. It has a well-above national average number of children (OFSTED, 2006) with complex medical, social and emotional difficulties; currently 33% of its children are on the SEN register and 76% of these children live outside the school's catchment area.

This study employs a Grounded Theory approach to a triangulated, mixed methods study aimed at answering the question: ‘Inclusion: at what cost?' The combination of a self-administered questionnaire, personal logs or journals and semi-structured interviews provide rich data for a structured yet inductive form of theory generation from which the author will develop a model of the ways in which inclusive education affect teachers and the ways these effects in turn influence practice.

2. Literature Review

The concept of stress has been researched across a variety of disciplines including the biological, psychological, sociological and management and human resource sciences (Swanson,1997). Given that the different disciplines highlight different aspects of stress (Cordon,1997), it is hardly surprising that substantial disagreement exists over an exact definition (Orlans,1991).

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