Staff
Miss Rosie Ridgway
Biography
Rosie Ridgway is a Teaching Fellow in Primary Education. Rosie studied social sciences at Glasgow University, before attending Durham University to do her PGCE in Primary Education. She then went on to teach in schools around county Durham whilst continuing to study part time for her MA, and Ed D at Durham University. She left the classroom and moved to Durham University in January 2012, after teaching for eight years in special schools and mainstream settings, working with pupils aged 2-16 years.
Her interest in inclusive practices which support the learning and achievement for all her pupils prompted her to conduct a doctoral study into effective interaction approaches with students with low social tolerance and complex needs, such as PMLD.
She has first hand experience of being a teacher researching effective classroom practice with a group of students marginalized in traditional literatures, and the challenges inherent in that process. The study required the development of an innovative research methodology to explore the effects of different interactions with pupils who are hard to reach.
Rosie’s observations of the processes of inspection and high accountability of schools, where they had little recourse to question the quality or robustness of the measures led her to discuss the perverse application of ‘statistical’ measures on school performance at key stage 2, and the implications this had for primary schools with class sizes of 30.