For all social and educational researchers schools and classrooms have a familiar ring about them, not least because most researchers have spent around ten years as pupils in schools and classrooms and several have experience as teachers. Furthermore, schools and classrooms are very similar in their physical features with blackboards, noticeboards, chairs, desks and tables. In addition there are also broad similarities in the social composition of schools and classrooms where teachers and pupils engage with each other in the teaching-learning process that surrounds subject areas of the curriculum. It is on this basis that Delamont [21] has argued that the world of schools and classrooms may be “all too familiar" with the result that researchers have difficulty in moving beyond the “routine”, the "every day” and the "orderliness" of the school and classroom.