Rosemary Webb has had a varied career in primary education as a teacher, a professional officer at the National Curriculum Council, lecturer and researcher and became a Professor in the School of Education at the University of Manchester in 2006. She is a past Chair of the Association for the Study of Primary Education (ASPE) and convenor of the British Educational Research Association/ ASPE Special Interest Group on primary education. She has researched and published widely on primary education and on qualitative research.

This book evaluates the research methods the researchers have used in some original and topical primary education projects. It describes issues of access, analysis, validity and ethics that arose and how these were addressed.

This book was published as a special issue in Education 3-13 International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early years Education.

1. Introduction: Researching primary education: methods and issues Rosemary Webb 2. Randomised controlled trials in education research: A case study of an individually randomised pragmatic trial Carole Torgerson 3. Evaluating the social impacts of inclusion through a multi-method research design Elias Avramidis and Alison Wilde 4. Researching 'teachers in the news': The portrayal of teachers in the British national and regional press Anders Hansen 5. Missing out? Challenges to hearing the views of all children on the barriers and supports to learning Jill Porter 6. About face: Issues in visual research with children Caroline Lodge 7. Children researching their urban environment: Developing a methodology Elisabeth Barratt Hacking and Robert Barrett 8. Talk in primary science: A method to promote productive and contextualized group discourse Martin Braund 9. Using qualitative research strategies in cross-national projects: the English-Finnish experience Graham Vulliamy and Rosemary Webb