Search

Cognitive science-informed approaches have gained considerable influence in education in the UK and internationally, but not much is known about how teachers perceive cognitive science-informed strategies or enact them within the contexts of their everyday classrooms. In this paper, we discuss the perceptions and experiences of cognitive science-informed strategies of 13 teachers in England. The paper critically explores how the teachers understood and used cognitive science-informed strategies in their teaching, their views of the benefits and challenges for different subjects and groups of learners, and their reflections on supporting factors and barriers for adopting the strategies in their schools. The teachers' accounts illustrate some of the many complexities of adopting cognitive science-informed approaches in real-life educational settings. Drawing on their narratives, the paper emphasises the importance of acknowledging different contextual dimensions and the dynamic interactions between them to understand when and how teachers enact cognitive science-informed approaches in their classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-visits contestation and critique over the nationwide introduction of comprehensive secondary schools in post-war England. In so doing, it considers the contribution of scholar-activist Caroline Benn (1926–2000) and a network of progressive educators who were challenging ideas about fixed ability or potential and aspiring to build a better, more inclusive education system fit for the times. The recent availability of Benn's personal papers opens an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the politics of comprehensive education, to consider the meaning and significance of the policy as our historical perspective lengthens, notably the question of whether legislation was needed to implement so major a reform and foster cultural change in a society characterized by substantial inequalities in income, status and power. It will be argued that we need to challenge contemporary political narratives that seek to normalize academic selection as a force for social justice and high attainment and maintain a belief in the myth of meritocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK Government's PREVENT strategy to counter radicalisation and extremism has been the subject of criticism. Concerns arise over clarity of purpose, clarity of terminology used and potential human rights impacts. Where the policy engages with schools, one human right potentially engaged is the right of parents to transfer their religious beliefs to their children. This paper looks at how PREVENT risks negatively impacting on this right. It proposes a way that this risk can be reduced by adopting a proactive approach to the Government's security concerns which is centred on human rights education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers new insights into the effects of neo-liberal education policies on some Muslim majority schools in Birmingham. It critically reveals how the implementation of neo-liberal education policies, pursued by both Labour and Conservative Governments, has contributed to the failure of some mechanisms of school leadership and governance. The move away from agreed collective public and civil values to individualistic and private values as the guiding principles of public education has produced confusion in role, function and relationships. This is considered within the context in which secular liberal education aims to allow different minorities to flourish and recreate themselves. The paper outlines how the state has entered more fully into the lives of children and families through limitless government regulations and how OFSTED appears open to political interference by government regularly changing the framework for inspectors to suit the latest priority. Accordingly, the judgements of OFSTED have become contestable especially as the framework becomes the means through which every aspect of school life is to be considered, including ‘extremism’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses Basil Bernstein’s work on pedagogic discourses to examine a largely neglected facet of the history of vocational education – the liberal studies movement in English further education colleges. Initially, the paper discusses some of the competing conceptions of education, work and society which underpinned the rise and fall of the liberal studies movement – if indeed it can be described as such. The paper then draws on data from interviews with former liberal and general studies lecturers to focus on the ways in which different variants of liberal studies were, over time, implicated in inculcating certain forms of knowledge in vocational learners. Whilst it is acknowledged that liberal and general studies always represented contested territory and that it was highly variable both in terms of content and quality, the paper argues that, at least under certain circumstances, liberal studies provided young working-class people with the opportunity to locate their experiences of vocational learning within a critical framework that is largely absent from further education today. This, it is argued, can be conceptualised as an engagement with what Bernstein described as ‘powerful knowledge’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the continuity and changes in Clarke’s ideas about the State and community in education, especially in relation to a rapidly changing political situation in England in the 1930s and 1940s. His ideas evolved in the intellectual context of British idealism. Moreover, in response to the threat to democracy arising from Fascism or Totalitarianism, the distinction between the State and community was a key theme in Clarke’s ideals of liberal democracy. Additionally, this paper also proposes the implications of Clarke’s ideas for future educational development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the origins of the concept of personalisation in public sector services, and applies it to school education. The original conceptualisation stressed the need for ‘deep’ rather than shallow, personalisation, if radical transformation of services were to be achieved. It is argued that as the concept has been disseminated and implemented through policy documents, notably the 2005 White Paper, it has lost its original emphasis on deep personalisation. The focus in this article is particularly upon gifted and talented students whose education provides the best case example of how the theory of personalisation might work in practice. Two examples of the lessons in a sixth form college are used to illustrate the character of personalised pedagogy in practice. The implications for theory and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the somewhat neglected topic of envy and its relationship to education and social inequality in Britain. Drawing on the work of Rawls, Runciman and Crosland, the paper proposes a distinction between envy as a vice and ‘justified resentment’ aroused by perceived injustices in the social distribution of primary goods, including education. Various pejorative uses of the term ‘the politics of envy’ in UK politics are examined. The conditions necessary for a politics of justified resentment are then analysed. Current developments in higher education in the UK are discussed with reference to signs of the emergence of new social resentments among the relatively highly educated. Prospects for a wider politics of justified resentment are assessed in relation to a range of emergent policies and priorities of New Labour in government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate has grown about the legitimacy of Muslim faith schools within the British education system. At the same time, scepticism has developed towards multiculturalism as a normative approach for dealing with diversity. This article argues that it is worth retaining the normative impetus of multiculturalism by returning to its roots in political philosophy. In particular, we can draw on Will Kymlicka’s distinction between ‘internal restrictions’ and ‘external protections’ as a way to assess the legitimacy of minority claims. Having outlined this distinction, the paper applies it to the case of Muslim Schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The secondary school system in England has undergone a radical transformation since 2010 with the rapid expansion of independent academies run by private companies (‘academy trusts’) and funded directly by central government. This paper examines the development of academies and their predecessors, city technology colleges, and explores the extent and nature of continuity and change. It is argued that processes of layering and policy revision, together with austerity measures arising from economic recession, have resulted in a system-wide change with private, non-profit-making companies, funded by central government, rapidly replacing local authorities as the main providers of secondary school education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper examines variations in the extent of special education needs (SEN) in different socio-economic contexts, drawing on data from 46 English primary schools. It examines the implications of variations in SEN for individual pupils and for school organisation and processes. It reviews funding allocations for SEN and what they mean for the provision of support in different settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines understandings of community and safety for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) groups in schools in a metropolitan borough. One school in particular was identified as being the ‘Gypsy school’ and was attended by the majority of GRT children in the borough. The school was recognised as a model of ‘good practice’ reflecting its holistic approach towards the GRT community but it was also successful for wider reasons. A picture of the intersection of different communities emerged from interview accounts in which a GRT community with strong local attachments, socially negotiated and maintained, figured very strongly. The GRT community was also identified as sharing racist attitudes towards other non-white immigrants. This article examines children's perspectives of their engagement with the education process and how the strong GRT community played an important part in their understandings of safety and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to articulate a new perspective on British multi-faith religious education that both complements and, in part, subsumes existing critiques. My argument, while controversial, is straightforward: it is that British religious education has misrepresented the nature of religion in efforts to commend itself as contributing to the social aims of education, as these are typically framed in liberal democratic societies. Contemporary multi-faith religious education is placed in context and its underlying theological and philosophical commitments identified and criticised. It is concluded that current representations of religion in British religious education are limited in their capacity to challenge racism and religious intolerance, chiefly because they are conceptually ill equipped to develop respect for difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Character education is a specific approach to morals or values education, which is consistently linked with citizenship education. But how is it possible for a heterogeneous society that disagrees about basic values to reach a consensus on what constitutes character education? This article explores how character education has returned to the agenda of British education policy, having been largely neglected since the 1960s in response to unsatisfactory attempts at character education going back to the nineteenth century. Between 1979 and 1997 Conservative governments attempted to reverse a perceived decline in moral standards, established State control of the schools curriculum, imposed on State schools the duty to provide for moral and other development, and established a National Forum which attempted to articulate a set of consensus values in education. Labour has extended these developments in the curriculum, introduced compulsory citizenship education, and its White Paper of September 2001 speaks of ‘education with character’. The character and virtues Labour seeks to promote through schools are pragmatic and instrumental in intention, linked to raising pupil school performance, meeting the needs of the new economy, and promoting democratic participation. Otherwise the vision is pluralistic and evades explicit directives, and there is no explanation or analysis of its theoretical basis. The question of how agreement can be reached on what counts as character education may benefit from Sunstein's analysis of how law is possible in a heterogeneous society –‘incompletely theorized agreements on particular cases’ allow for common laws without agreement on fundamental principles. Many schools in fact operate in this way, but such a consensus is not entirely stable and runs the danger of teaching character education as a series of behaviour outcomes taught in a behaviourist fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]