We shall not cease from exploration
by George Julian*

It’s almost nine years ago that I had my PhD Viva, bits of it I remember like it was yesterday, lots of it I couldn’t recall if my life depended on it. In fact, if I’m really honest I think I could say the same about my PhD itself. I was reading a news story recently about a special school in Oxfordshire and I couldn’t recall why the name rang a bell, until I realised it had been one of the schools I visited as part of my PhD research. It was one of the schools I spent a week in, conducting observations and making fieldnotes, to complement the mass of interview data, questionnaire survey data, census data and additional fieldnotes and documents collected for document analysis. Despite that, it was lurking in the distant realms of my mind; at the time if you’d have suggested I’d forget the names of the schools I’d studied I’d have laughed it off, as a truly ridiculous suggestion, these schools had featured so heavily in my life for four years, I’d spent more time looking at and thinking about them than I had anything else in life. (more…)