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May Parkinson outlines her project.

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'Rewriting failure narratives: Student and staff experiences of the GCSE resit policy, using a participatory action informed approach'

May Parkinson

"My research explores the experiences of UK college students resitting English GCSE. This has been called a 'dispiriting cycle' where failure is experienced repeatedly (Camden, 2023), but little research has explored this (Crisp et al., 2023). This study explores students' experiences and considers the impacts the re-sit has. The study uses Participatory Action Research methods. I am currently in the initial phase, where student and staff workshops focus the broader aims of the project. I am using a range of participatory approaches such as group level assessments (Brydon-Miller, 2024) and problem trees (Fine & Torre, 2021) to achieve this.