The aim of this paper is to explore the social relationships and friendships of children aged 8 to 10 years old in four mainstream primary schools in England and Cyprus with a particular focus on those identified as having special educational needs and disabilities. Despite growing interest in the field of social inclusion within education, important relational factors that shape or contribute towards inclusion and participation remain largely unexplored. For example, the interactive relationship between social and academic aspects of inclusion (Mamas, 2012) calls for more research in the field of inclusive and special education. Porter et al. (2008, 2010) found that disabled pupils reported that positive and negative aspects of peer relationships acted as supports and barriers to learning respectively, and that this became increasingly important to pupils as they moved though primary and into secondary school. Our study has three objectives: 1. To take a ‘snapshot’ of social relationships and friendship networks of primary school children aged 8 to 10 years old. 2. To examine the relationship between social and academic inclusion. 3. To explore underlying reasons that lead to the formation of social and academic inclusion. A mixed methods approach was employed using a sequential transformative design (Creswell, 2009; Greene, 2007) with two distinct phases of data collection. In the first phase, a sociometric questionnaire was distributed to all 205 children. Data were analysed by employing sociometric and social network analysis tools. Social network analysis conceptualises individuals as ‘points’ and their relations to each other as ‘lines’ (Scott, 2013). In the second phase, 7 classroom teachers and 42 children took part in follow-up semi-structured interviews (individual for teachers, paired for children) to explore their views on social inclusion. Thematic and fine-grain linguistic analyses of these interviews have identified interpersonal and experiential factors (Halliday, 1985; 1994) that shape friendships and self-confidence.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). 1994. An introduction to functional grammar, pp.1-32. Mamas, C. (2012). Pedagogy, Social Status and Inclusion in Cypriot Schools. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16(11), pp.1223-1239. Porter J., Daniels, H. Georgeson J., Feiler A., Hacker J., with Tarleton B., Gallop V., Watson D. (2008) Disability Data Collection for Children’s Services. Research Report submitted DCFS-RR062. Nottingham: DCSFok of Special Education. London: SAGE. Porter J, Daniels H, Feiler A, Georgeson JM, Martin S & Hacker J (2010) Testing of Disability Identification Tool for Schools: Preparing for the 2011 School Census. Nottingham: available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/testing-of-disability-identification-tool-for-schools Scott, J. (2013) Social Network Analysis (3rd ed.). London: SAGE.