TCELT Research seminar - December 2025

Abstract

Pupil school mobility describes the phenomenon of children moving school outside standard promotional and structural transitions. This type of mobility affects a significant amount of school children and has been found to have an impact, not only on the children who move, but also on the schools they move to and from and on non-mobile classmates. The School Moves project is a large mixed-methods study of pupil school mobility currently being carried out in England (2024-27). It investigates and explores pupil school mobility through literature reviews, quantitative analysis of mobility funding and data from the National Pupil Database, and qualitative interviews with children, families, teachers and local authority staff. In this talk, Clara Rübner Jørgensen and Laura Cristescu present emerging findings from the project, identifying some of the many characteristics, circumstances, contexts and outcomes associated with pupil school mobility and reflecting on potential implications for educational practice.

Speaker biographies

Clara Rübner Jørgensen is an Associate Professor within the Department of Disability, Inclusion and Special Needs at the School of Education, University of Birmingham. She is a social anthropologist by background and has done qualitative and ethnographic research in a range of educational settings, including in the UK, Spain and Latin America, where she has explored educational inequalities, school policies and practices, inclusive teaching strategies, and children and young people’s schooling experiences and friendships. Clara is the principal investigator on the School Moves project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation (2024-2027). 

Laura Cristescu is a Research Fellow working on the School Moves project, in the Department of Disability, Inclusion and Special Needs (DISN) at the School of Education, University of Birmingham. Laura completed her MEd in Autism (2017) and PhD (2023), her thesis focusing on developing the teaching practice in an autism specialist school to support students’ self-determination.  Her current work focuses on conducting meaningful participatory research with communities with lived experience in the areas of autism, intellectual disability, and school mobility.

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