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Education reform is increasingly portrayed as a quest to achieve a ‘world class’ education system through a process of identifying and adopting the practices of those systems whose pupils perform best in league tables of achievement. This is the rationale for the range of new policies proposed by the coalition government in the schools White Paper published in November 2010, which promotes whole-system reform in England. This article examines the White Paper and analyses the sources and nature of the evidence for reform and the congruence between the policy intentions and their associated policy actions. The analysis suggests that the evidence for the proposed reforms and policy actions is at best tenuous. Both the White Paper and its key sources of evidence are characterised by: a selective use of data: a propensity to mix and match the sources of comparison; and an overall tendency to employ comparisons with high-performing systems elsewhere as a façade to legitimate preferred policy options. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In response to growing pushback to decades of privatization and disinvestment in high-poverty communities of color, elected officials and business leaders in the United States have turned to 'community-engaged strategies' to advance education reform. This qualitative case study of a California school district, the Oakland Unified School District, from 1989 to 2019 uses a Gramscian analysis of hegemony to illuminate the shift from coercive practices of financial audits to building consent through the district's formal engagement strategies as tools to manage public dissent around divisive decisions. Findings reveal that a manufacturedscrisis facilitated the 2003 state takeover of OUSD to further advancesausterity measures and audit processes that served as racialized formssof fiscal surveillance. When local resistance to these measures intensified, district actors shifted tactics to 'engage' community members through a portfolio strategy to manage school choice options and other public-private partnerships. Oakland public schools are a prime case of how democratic mechanisms serve as the vehicle to manufacture public consent for district redesign by way of marketization. This paper contributes new insights into local and global debates on educational privatization by critically examining the role of parastatal audit agencies in shaping community support for public-privateeducation governance along with tracing the shifting tactics of elite policy actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen the spread of a litigation culture in the UK education sector, with members of the public increasingly seeking recourse to the law to appeal, complain, or achieve compensation. The increasing tendency of people to resort to litigation suggests that recourse to the law is seen as a more immediate form of taking education services to account. While in theory an effective accountability tool, this development has unfortunately produced some less than desirable consequences in educational institutions, most notably the avoidance of risk. This paper argues that such consequences need to be understood as a reflection of the limits placed on legal regulation, once it encounters the already highly regulated world of educational institutions. To flesh out this argument, this paper examines these limits as a set of consequences relating to the following: increasing juridification; the intersection of law and mechanisms of accountability, judgement and professional discretion; and the relation between risk and trust. The argument draws on the 'law in context' literature, as well as recent debates over the pathologies of legal freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines workforce reform in early childhood education in England, specifically the policy trajectory that led to implementation of the Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS) qualification in 2014. Taking a critical perspective on policy analysis, the paper uses rhetorical analysis to make sense of the how EYTS is understood within workforce reform. From an assemblage of salient policy documents, we report our critical analysis of two key texts: Foundations for Quality and More Great Childcare. Both documents identify policy levers and drivers for reform, but from markedly different perspectives and with contrasting recommendations. By using rhetorical analysis to examine how these policy texts construct not only problems but also preferred solutions, we illustrate the paradoxical nature of early childhood policy in England as it relates to aspirations to raise the status of the sector and improve quality through the implementation of EYTS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of expanding global educational privatization and shifting policies on how to fund educational facilities in many states in the US, this study engages the lenses of critical policy analysis and fiscal sociology to examine educational privatization in the school facilities industry in California. Employing critical policy document analysis to examine approximately 40 primary and secondary source documents including propositions, bills, government and education codes, facilities reports, and state public debt data, this paper addresses the following research question: How have education finance policies shaped the system of school district facilities financing over time, specifically with regard to the field of private actors involved in the school facilities industry? This paper examines the historical policy context for privatization in school district facilities financing, evaluating how policies have evolved, been implemented, and affected stakeholders over time in the broader neoliberal context. Findings indicate that policies promoting privatization in education finance impact school districts’ abilities to provide equitable facilities to their students. Also, the complex and intermittent process of financing school facilities has facilitated the rise of specialized private actors in the school facilities industry that has now organized to engage in private-sector policy setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), inclusive education has become the main alternative to special schools for the schooling of children with disabilities. In order to promote the global implementation of inclusive education, a variety of stakeholders form networks to transmit and exchange information and knowledge concerning political strategies. However, little is known about the actors and actor groups involved in these networks. In the present paper, we draw on general network theory and policy network theory to examine the Twitter communication network that has formed around the topic of inclusive education. Using exploratory and inferential social network analysis, we show that disabled persons' organizations and international organizations, such as the United Nations, hold a particularly central position in the network. This position enables them to potentially exert influence on the content and flow of information within the network. Aside from that, business actors are active participants in the network. Moreover, the Twitter network shows some structural patterns that can also be found in policy networks. Our findings help to map the global sphere of inclusive education promotion and can contribute to a broader understanding of global processes in inclusive education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we report on our investigation of news coverage of accountability reform in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal during the implementation and assessment of New York's Race to the Top-inspired teacher evaluation system. In systemically analyzing how these prominent media outlets narrated this contentious moment in educational history, this study seeks to identify major narrative features pertinent to the ideological and representational dimensions of teachers in the era of consequential accountability. Specifically, we examine character prevalence, the characterization of prevalent characters, and the valuations ascribed to prevalent characters. This analysis, thus, aims to account for the mediatization of accountability reform. Our findings suggest that both periodicals constructed a one-dimensional conflict between education reformers and resisters of the newly implemented accountability policies while narrating those most affected by the policies as passive bystanders to the ideological conflict being waged by those with more power and influence. This reductionist narrative gives voice to reformers' audit-based notion of accountability while omitting the relational responsibility of educators – the form of accountability long associated with teachers' work. In accounting for ideological and representational features of journalists' narrative construction, we illuminate how prominent media outlets mediatize accountability policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment is a major component of education, significant in directing what is identified as valued student learning. This paper is framed within an understanding of imperative and exhortative policy. Two paradigmatically different, and potentially contesting, assessment policy directions in Australian education – educational accountability to monitor school and teacher performance, and teacher assessment practices to improve learning (assessment for learning [AfL] or formative assessment) – are examined for their impact on teacher professionalism. Both approaches have official endorsement in Australian policy. Mandated participation in national tests is indicative of educational accountability assessments under national direction. While also endorsed nationally, AfL implementation is reliant on state and territory direction. Our examination reveals tensions in the alignment of both policies. This is evident in the impact of accountability assessment on AfL implementation, in particular, teachers' understandings of valued assessment evidence. We conclude that a paradigmatic shift to support student learning in Australian schools is a policy imperative that includes the need for professional development and learning support for teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apocalyptic crisis discourses of mental health problems and psycho-emotional dysfunction are integral to behaviour change agendas across seemingly different policy arenas. Bringing these agendas together opens up new theoretical and empirical lines of enquiry about the symbioses and contradictions surrounding the human subjects they target. The paper explores the relationship between behaviour change policy, enduring philosophical and political scepticism about the viability of the rational, autonomous subject of liberal and neoliberal governance, and the contemporary cultural privileging of its vulnerable, anxious and stressed counterpart. Weber’s accounts of authority illuminate dangers arising from an ad hoc, shifting, unaccountable state-sponsored intervention market that targets the vulnerable subject, proselytised by new types of ‘therapeutic entrepreneurs’. Using an education-based example of statutory legislation for counter-terrorism in schools and universities, the Prevent strategy, the paper argues that jettisoning the rational, liberal subject has extremely worrying implications for education and democracy. It concludes with questions about the implications of these under-researched cultural and political phenomena for assumptions about the subjects of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a new heuristic device for the analysis of educational policy. Through an examination of the Evaluative State and the work of Brian Fay, the paper considers the way in which educational policy is subject to rational and linear forms of policy action and implementation. To counter this, positioning theory is deployed to consider the way in which we are produced both by discourse and the language of the ‘moment’ in discursive acts. Using the work of Gee, the paper contends that policy texts and policy Discourse ‘themselves form policy, that is, they position policy-explanation and policy-framing within the bounds of the institution and so give policy form’. Problematically, such mechanisms may succumb to the ‘death of subject’ and accordingly I offer a third method by which we might conceive of education policy: the discursively produced position call. Subsequently, I propose a tri-partite theory for the examination and understanding of policy: policy-explaining, the production of policy texts; policy-framing, the ways in which all can be positioned by texts and Discourse to produce the meanings imbued upon policy; and, policy-forming, the impact of moment-by-moment conversational acts for their production of the policy text itself, that is, the ways in which policy is locallyformedrather than locallymediated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is an attempt to think aloud about the current policy proposals in circulation in England that address pre-service teacher education. Rather than dealing with details of policy and points of specificity in practice, the focus of this paper is with how propositions are justified and the overall ways in which meanings are being managed; a fundamental aspect of policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the growing ‘teacher quality’ discourse, early career teachers have increasingly been positioned as problematic in Australian education policy discourses over the past decade. This paper uses a critical policy historiography approach to compare representations of early career teachers in two key education policy documents, from the late 1990s and mid-2010s. Starting with the Government response toA Class Act: Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession(1998) and moving to the Government response toAction Now: Classroom Ready Teachers(2015), it explores changing representations in the context of broader shifts in education policy related to teachers’ work over this timeframe. It argues that the early career teacher ‘problem’ is articulated in very different ways in these two timeframes, explores the antecedents of key tenets of the current policy settlement, and, using the theory of practice architectures, considers the implications of these for the preconditions that shape and frame teachers’ work in contemporary times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the vexed educational policy aspects of area-based interventions (ABIs) in neighbourhoods designated as 'disadvantaged' in an Australian context. We find that the way in which the policy of ABIs is supposed to operate and impact education is highly problematic. What we present instead in this paper is a much more complex process by which aspirations are formed, sustained, contested and maintained by young people who regard themselves as 'ordinary' and as being engaged instead in a process of navigating educational opportunities on the basis of resources available to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Resilience' has become a popular goal in research, social policy, intervention design and implementation. Reinforced by its conceptual and political slipperi-ness, resilience has become a key construct in school-based, universal interven-tions that aim to develop it as part of social and emotional competence or emotional well-being. Drawing on a case study of a popular behavioural programme used widely in British and American primary schools, this paper uses a critical social understanding that combines bio-scientific and social construc-tionist ideas in order to evaluate key challenges for policy, research and practice framed around resilience. The paper argues that although critical social perspec-tives illuminate important contemporary manifestations of old problems with behavioural interventions, and challenge narrow, moralising definitions of 'risk' and 'vulnerability', they coalesce with behavioural perspectives in a search for better state-sponsored responses to the shared question of how to build resilience amongst 'vulnerable' groups and individuals. Instead, we argue that critical sociologists need to resist responses that offer more sophisticated behavioural interventions and generate new forms of governance and subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to contribute to the sociological analysis of power through the study of the structuration and retrieval of information on the internet. The main argument of the paper is that, paradoxically, in an age when the availability of information has increased exponentially, there is a risk that diversity in the use of sources for the construction of knowledge becomes more restricted than in the past and that information search moves towards greater objectification and centralisation. Knowledge management systems increasingly shape the ways in which we think about the questions we ask and how we try to answer them, which raises fundamental and largely neglected questions for education policy. The paper illustrates these trends with particular reference to the use of Google and Google Scholar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commitment to establish a ‘school-led’ system of teacher education in England, announced by the Coalition Government in 2011 and relentlessly pursued thereafter, represented a radical departure from previous kinds of initial teacher education partnership. While it is entirely consistent with a neoliberal agenda, with its strong regulatory framework and appeal to market mechanisms, it is also underpinned by a particular conception of teaching as a craft – ‘best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman’. In 2014, the government established a Review of Initial Teacher Training, led by a primary school head teacher, Sir Andrew Carter. This signalled the recognition of teacher education as a ‘policy problem’, adopting Cochran-Smith’s term. The ensuing report, published in early 2015, was more nuanced than might have been anticipated, although a number of profound tensions emerge from a closer analytical reading; four of these tensions are similar to those previously defined by Cochran-Smith and two are newly emergent. This paper identifies and discusses these tensions as they appear in the Carter Review and relates them to wider debates about the links between teaching, teacher education, evidence and research and to policy-making processes in education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To varying degrees, education policy reforms around the world are driven by educational discourses relating to globalisation. At the same time, national and local histories, cultures and politics mediate the effects of globalisation discourses. This paper employs methods of analysis that draw on the concepts of ‘vernacular globalization’ and ‘policy archaeology’ in order to examine the ways in which the effects of globalisation on National Curriculum policy reform are mediated by conditions and priorities that are specific to national contexts. The enquiry focuses on three curriculum policy problems that are associated with the English school curriculum and have recently been identified as requiring reform: inappropriate curriculum knowledge, the skills deficit and the one-size-fits-all curriculum. The paper concludes by summarising the results of the analysis, identifying some curriculum issues arising from it and offering reflections on the methodological approach it has employed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a critical analysis of the Australian government’s education revolution policy as promulgated in the media release document, Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools. It seeks to problematize the government’s claim to marry quality and equity, via an analysis of the discursive strategies of the Australian government’s revolution talk. My analysis draws on the work of political theorists Jason Glynos and David Howarth and their synthesis of key ideas from Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory into a framework of explanatory ‘logics.’ This framework provides conceptual tools for conducting critical policy analysis, including: characterizing a discursive regime on a synchronic plane; accounting for its constitution, reproduction, and/or subversion on a diachronic plane; and explaining the ways in which it grips or seduces subjects at a nonrational level. Overall, the analysis of the education revolution in this paper demonstrates the value of this framework of explanatory logics for education policy analysis, in the process shedding some new light on the Australian government’s education revolution policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three decades of neo-liberal education in western countries, particularly English-speaking countries, have not served most children well. The evidence is mounting that the neo-liberal experiment has been a failure on many grounds, not least because of its deprofessionalizing effect on teachers. The disciplinary effects of neo-liberal policy frameworks on education remain powerful, but there are numerous teachers and schools who have resisted the regime of managerialism and accountability. This paper celebrates such activists. It argues that the internal focus on the delivery of instruction and test-taking inside schools ignores the point that the major influences on the school performance of children exist outside rather than inside the school. The paper argues that young people who have been ‘othered’ and put at a disadvantage by the neo-liberal education system deserve to be treated in a more dignified, engaged and respectful manner than seems to be the case within the ideology of accountability and top-down managerialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of CCTV in schools is now commonplace in the UK. It is estimated that 85% of all UK secondary schools currently have CCTV systems in operation. The introduction of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) (enacted in March 2000) meant that for the first time CCTV had direct legislation governing its use in the UK. This paper attempts to apply the decree to the widespread introduction of CCTV technology in schools and argues that the various elements of statute are impractical or inappropriate to educational institutions. The ill-defined and vague legislation presented in the DPA 1998 provides very little protection to the data subjects in schools (mainly pupils and teachers). In addition, the ubiquity of CCTV in schools in the UK far surpasses the enforcement capabilities and resources of the Information Commissioner's Office and as such any contravention of the scant provisions of the Act is likely to go unidentified and under-enforced. In consideration of the DPA, the paper elucidates numerous examples to suggest that a large number of schools are in contravention of the law. The paper outlines the need for bespoke policy to govern and regulate the use of CCTV in schools. Whilst the paper focuses on the case of the UK, it speaks to an international audience in concluding that the use of CCTV and surveillance technologies in schools requires greater scrutiny and regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which has become a major and influential component of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) educational work. This measure of comparative performance of educational systems of member and other nations is based on tests commissioned by the OECD. The paper discusses the role of the OECD in establishing the 'comparative' turn and also describes PISA, its management and effects. It provides three examples of the impact of PISA in Finland, Germany and the UK before moving the focus to its impacts at the transnational level, through an examination of how key European policy actors see PISA and its effects. The paper concludes that PISA, through its direct impact on national education systems in Europe and beyond, has become an indirect, but nonetheless influential tool of the new political technology of governing the European education space by numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we illustrate the relationships between Teach For America (TFA) and federal charter school reform to interrogate how policy decisions are shaped by networks of individuals, organizations, and private corporations. We use policy network analysis to create a visual representation of TFA's key role in developing and connecting personnel, political support, and financial backing for charter reform. Next we examine how the networks unfold at a local level by zooming in on a case study of New Orleans. By mapping out these connections, we hope to provide a foundation for further investigation of how this network affects policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates continue about how high-stakes testing regimes influence schools at all levels: their impact on teaching practices, distribution of resources and curriculum provision, and whether they achieve the intended increases in student achievement in targeted areas. In 2008, the Australian government introduced a national testing scheme, the National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), in which all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are required to participate, and a national website, MySchool, was established in 2010 to publish the results of all schools. This paper reports on the first national study of educators' views on the impact of NAPLAN on Australian schools and students. Over 8000 educators from all states and territories participated in the study, and the findings indicate that the testing regime is leading to a reduction in time spent on other curriculum areas and adjustment of pedagogical practice and curriculum content to mirror the tests. The findings suggest that the modification of teaching and curricular practices is in response to concerns regarding the use and reporting of NAPLAN data and the potential impact on schools. This confirms findings of researchers in other countries on the capacity of high-stakes regimes to distort teaching practices, constrain the curriculum and narrow students' educational experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last three decades have witnessed significant changes in the social and economic context of young people’s lives. There is increasing evidence that for young people growing up in the UK, this is fuelling a disparity between those with resources and those without. What this means in terms of social justice, however, is difficult to discern. In Scotland, promoting greater social justice so that all its citizens are included has been held up as a key vision of successive Scottish administrations since devolution began in 1999. Scotland therefore makes an interesting case for the examination of policy discourses in relation to young people. In order to do this, the paper draws on a theoretical framework of justice developed by Nancy Fraser which is oriented on the norm ofparticipatory parity. Combining this framework with an approach informed by critical discourse analysis, the current policy context in Scotland is examined in order to discern if it contributes to all young people achieving participatory parity and subsequently social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reflects on the key actors in education policy making in Zimbabwe. It looks at the contextual complexities that characterized policy-making in this country to make sense of the contestations that the state had to confront and accommodate. The policy network approach is employed as an analytical framework to clarify how, in particular non-state actors, have had an impact (or not) on educational governance through influences on policy. Policy documents, research reports and the reactions of non-state actors to these aspects are examined to explore the impact of the latter on policy making. The significant roles of the various policy networks are also given attention to establish how they have affected the reconfiguration of the state. The argument developed is that in spite of the ostensibly strong state, education policy formulation has been a product of compromise between policy networks and the predilections of those in office. As a political and contested enterprise it had to accommodate both local and international concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International tests of achievement narrowly measure specific academic subjects, but have larger educational policy implications. These tests come to summarize national education systems and are used in national and international discourse. However, students with disabilities are being entirely excluded from participation in the discourse of achievement. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, and Programme for International Student Assessment all actively exclude students with disabilities from being measured when the testing agencies set up ‘desired target populations’ and report out on testing participation. This exclusionary discourse establishes that students with disabilities do not belong in a culture of achievement and educational evaluation, which has an impact on policies concerning educational equity and maintains the oppression of low expectations. US policy requires that 95% of all students take achievement tests and be given reasonable accommodations. This paper concludes that international achievement tests should follow the same standard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, one policy response to the problem of classed school choice experiences in England is examined. ‘Choice Advisers’ are employed by government to provide advice and information to working class and disadvantaged parents with the aim of ‘empowering’ them to exercise school choice and aspire to ‘better’ schools for their children. However, Advisers have been subjectified by contradictions inherent in policy, expected to solve the problems of school choice in a context of significant structural limits to choice for working-class parents. Interviews with choice Advisers show that difficulties of the job in addition to insecure working conditions within local authorities have led to depoliticised, contradictory advice and Advisers bearing the brunt of policy both in terms of overwork and the venting of parental frustrations. Agency, both for parents and for Advisers themselves, is described as being something possessed by individuals rather than collectives, so there is little sense overall that underlying inequalities within the education system might be challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The swift nature of school reform enacted by the new Conservative-led coalition government has sparked debate over the future of state education in Britain. While the government rhetoric suggests a decisive break with past policies, there is evidence to suggest that these reforms constitute the next stage of a long revolution in education reform, centred around neoliberal market discourse. In the following paper, I examine the current government’s education policy discourse and, by employing techniques of post-structuralist discourse analysis, reveal the government’s attempts to rearticulate education around the logics of market, responsibilisation and self-esteem, which act to shift responsibility for social problems from the state to the individual. Furthermore, I shall argue that such rearticulation has been coupled with an ideological fantasy of ‘empowerment’, which conceals the subordination of actors to these neoliberal logics by constituting the parent and, more recently, the teacher as powerful actors who have been freed from legal and bureaucratic constraints forced upon them by central government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teaching conditions have been an enduring concern for North American teachers for over a century. This paper explores this phenomenon by tracing how teaching conditions have been understood by decision makers and in educational research over time. It draws on historical research on the formation of mass public education systems to consider why the conditions teachers identify as critical to their work have been so persistently ignored by policy makers and researchers. Then we review the major ways that teaching conditions have been understood to matter in educational research, focusing first on psychological understandings about the relationship between working conditions and teacher motivation and then on the organizational factors teachers identify as critical to their sense of efficacy and job satisfaction. These two conceptualizations, however, are limited in their explanatory power because they are embedded in a bureaucratic framework where teachers are understood primarily as implementers of policy decisions made by their organizational superiors. Attempting to understand the full power of teaching conditions requires a more comprehensive understanding of teaching and learning processes closer to the ground. We provide descriptions of teachers’ work emerging from a recent study in order to demonstrate the close and reciprocal relationships between teaching conditions and students’ opportunities to learn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents how health is storied into existence by 'obesity discourse' to become part of the 'natural attitude' towards the health of individuals or populations. We draw attention to some of the major policy documentation influencing thinking on 'health' and school health education in the UK over recent years, especially, every child matters (ECM) and subsequent, related measures, for example the National Healthy Schools Programme (NHSP). We suggest that these measures have helped shape and make a 'totally pedagogised society' and 'totally pedagogised schools' in which 'health', reduced to an issue of weight, exercise and diet, becomes everyone's concern, everywhere. The analyses highlight the socio-political and psychological leanings of such policy documentation and its potential effect on the identities of children and young people when institutionalised and 'authorised' through state policies and the body pedagogies of schools and multiple other agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One area where the financial crisis has shown the limitation of neo-liberal thinking is the area of educational reform. By studying the different ranges of national responses and by understanding the differing contexts for educational change in historical periods, we can begin to think differently about educational restructuring. In this paper I report on some of the findings from a four-year study of educational reforms in seven European countries undertaken for the European Commission. The countries covered are: England and Wales, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Sweden and Greece and the research was conducted from 2004 to 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the disclosure and reporting of expenditure under the UK government's Building Schools for the Future programme. The study finds that there is little detailed and useful financial reporting, and the public's right to know under Freedom of Information Act 2000 is very limited. The lack of such information makes it difficult to understand where public money is going, how it is being used and the extent of future commitments and liabilities, thereby preventing an informed public debate about the financing of public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We seek to contribute to political and policy analyses of globalisation by attending to global flows of emotions and by developing the concept global emoscapes. In so doing we build on Arjun Appadurai's theorisation of the disjunctive scapes of the global cultural economy. As a way of illustrating the benefits of our approach, we deploy it to analyse the scapes associated with the global financial crisis. We show how emoscapes are entangled with financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in the broader context of the global capitalist economy, particularly its most recent manifestation in the form of 'financialisation'. Our overall implication is that attention to emoscapes helps to enrich critical analyses of policy and politics. We hope that this paper inspires others to build on our approach to conduct research on education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper questions the link that policy-makers assume exists between qualifications and access to employment in the creative and cultural (C&C) sector. It identifies how labour market conditions in the C&C sector undermine this assumption and how the UK's policy formation process inhibits education and training (E&T) actors from countering these labour market conditions. It demonstrates how non-government agencies ('intermediary organizations') are creating new spaces to assist aspiring entrants to develop the requisite forms of 'vocational practice', 'social capital' and 'moebius strip' (i.e., entrepreneurial) expertise to enter and succeed in the sector. It concludes by identifying a number of: (a) new principles for the governance of E&T at the national level; (b) pedagogic strategies to facilitate 'horizontal' transitions into and within the C&C sector; and (c) skill formation issues for all E&T stakeholders to address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]