What a busy but successful week. After 6 weeks spent on making sure this research has rigorous ethical protocols it has finally been approved by the ethics committee (certificate of approval uploaded to Participant Documents). It has and is important for me to make sure that anybody involved in this research does not come to any harm, nor that any participant school and key informant can be identified. This lengthy ethical research and approval has led to a dedicated ethics chapter within my thesis, along with creating a dedicated ethical hand-out for perspective participants to highlight the lengths taken to maintain confidentiality and anonymity.
On another note, schools for participation in this research have now been selected around England. A total of 146 schools will be written to in the next 3 weeks asking if they would like to take part. Schools were selected using the EduBase database and Ofsted statistics. The careful selection of these schools took around 8 weeks. This was to make sure that schools could not be identified based on 3 criterion: region; type of school and religious affiliation or not.
Lots of admin over the next week.
Have a good weekend to you all.