ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s I worked on a piece of research with Peter Woods that resulted in the publication of a book entitled Changing Schools: Pupil Perspectives on Transfer to a Comprehensive. The study was framed in the qualitative paradigm and focused, as the title suggests, on pupils’ experiences of moving from primary to secondary education (Measor and Woods, 1984). I am currently working on a piece of qualitative research that focuses on sex education programmes in schools, and the responses of adolescents to the programmes they were offered (Measor, Tiffin and Fry, 1996). The approach we adopted in the sex education study, which emphasizes the pupils’ perceptions of what was significant in their experiences, owes much to Peter Woods’ work. However, theoretical material that we have worked with in this research has encouraged me to look again at some of the data from the Changing Schools study.
