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James Callaghan's speech at Ruskin College, Oxford in October 1976 is widely considered a pivotal moment in modern English educational policy. Whilst it is not our intention to challenge this fundamental point, the paper will critically interrogate some long‐held assumptions about the motivation that led Callaghan to deliver his speech at Ruskin College. Specifically, the paper will argue that the Ruskin Speech, which spawned a subsequent great debate on education, was motivated by a desire to protect and support comprehensive education, rather than generate more fundamental and radical educational reform away from those principles. Where successive governments have referred back to the ideals espoused by the speech as justification for subsequent educational transformation away from comprehensive ideals, this has only served to imbue the Ruskin Speech and Great Debate with motivations that were not shared at the time by Callaghan and his Labour government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents findings on students' views and experiences of tiering in Northern Ireland and Wales from a children's rights perspective. It considers the extent to which tiering fulfils the rights to education, best interests, non‐discrimination, and participation under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It emphasises that while the majority of students were supportive of tiering, their responses highlighted a range of negative effects of tiering on students taking foundation tier. Students described the impact of being placed in the foundation tier on their self‐esteem and relationship with their peers, indicating that being allocated to foundation tier can have a labelling effect. Students who were taking foundation papers, or a mixture of foundation and higher‐tier papers, were more likely than those taking higher‐tier papers to report that they wanted to change tier and to raise issues overall regarding tiering. Furthermore, students who were faced with these difficult choices often had a poor understanding of several aspects of tiers. The article argues that alternative forms of differentiation should be considered, and presents students' perspectives on some of these. It argues that we must ensure that young people have a good understanding of tiering and that their views and experiences of tiering are taken into account when considering further reforms to GCSEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender stereotypes in the natural sciences may discourage girls from pursuing STEM fields, thus contributing to the differential STEM pathways of males and females. This paper exploits quasi‐experimental data from a vignette study to investigate teachers' gender bias in STEM at the transition to upper secondary school in Denmark—a key stage in students' educational trajectories. I investigate if teachers have a higher probability of recommending a STEM track to a (vignette) male student compared with a (vignette) female student and if teachers' STEM recommendations interact with their demographic characteristics. Results show that, while there is a gender gap of 10 percentage points in the likelihood of being recommended a STEM track, the difference is not statistically significant. Furthermore, teachers' gender bias is influenced by the teacher's own gender and cultural capital. Consequently, the paper shows that teachers' gender bias varies with teachers' demographic characteristics and teachers with high levels of cultural capital can push back against gender stereotypes in STEM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers queer feminist interruptions as a way to halt, reverse and rethink internationalisation in UK higher education (HE). These points of intervention are situated within the queer development studies literature, which provides a framework for understanding internationalisation practices alongside other strategies of Western extraction, critical of claims that internationalisation is important for enhancing diversity. Throughout, the paper confronts the problematic, colonial narratives of global LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) human rights progress as framed by the global north, and how UK internationalisation strategy often reproduces or doubles‐down on these narratives. The central questions addressed are: (1) how does queer liberation help academics think differently about promoting, participating in and developing UK HE internationally? (2) What can academics learn from those working to centre queer feminist practices in their transnational research and teaching? In conversation with critical internationalisation studies scholarship, this paper contributes to ongoing research about internalisation with a queer sensitivity. As such, the paper highlights the limiting binary logics and heteronormativity in internationalisation, as well as new directions for collaboration across communities working for radical liberation on campus beyond agendas of inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the impact of the global COVID‐19 pandemic in terms of school closure and the sudden shift to online learning has started to be explored, little has so far been written about the impact on teachers. This paper addresses this gap by drawing on the first author's autoethnographic experiences of working in the growing body of 'non‐traditional' international schooling in Shanghai, China, during the first wave of the pandemic in early 2020. These experiences are complemented by insights from other teachers from the author's school site, leading to a hybrid (auto)ethnographic perspective. By utilising and developing the emergent concept of 'precarious privilege', we can see that whilst the pandemic has restricted teachers' movements and agency in a physical sense through lockdowns and travel restrictions, this immobility also fosters new symbolic and physical spaces, which in turn give rise to new forms of privilege. The privilege in this context is not financial, as is often the case, but rather existential (reclaiming a more authentic self) and spatial (the school offers teachers security) in nature. This fresh, nuanced approach to discussing precarity is timely and necessary. Given the novelty of the situation we now find ourselves in, new positionings are required to orient the individual and the researcher to a post‐pandemic world. This paper offers one such positioning in the form of autoethnography for (re)imagining precarity and privilege in international schooling within the context of an emerging new world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK's Quality Assurance Association for Higher Education (QAA) recommend that all undergraduate courses at UK universities include in their curricula elements of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education; and Education for Sustainable Development. This paper examines the detail of the QAA's recommendations and finds that they are significantly influenced by critical pedagogy. While the potential benefits of the QAA's recommendations are readily apparent, the paper identifies a number of potential risks, including opportunity costs for students, dumbing down and political bias. Alongside this theoretical analysis, this paper presents a case study which examines in detail the course materials of a cross‐curricular module piloted at King's College London called the ‘King's First Year: Gateway to King's’ which covered essentially the same themes. It appears that many of the risks identified with the QAA's approach would have been realised had this module been introduced as a compulsory module for all undergraduates at King's College London as was originally planned. As student take‐up was low, it was abandoned after the pilot, and so ultimately the risks were not realised. When introducing significant curriculum changes such as those proposed by the QAA, it is important to be certain that the benefits outweigh the risks. For this reason, a case study of an unsuccessful educational intervention is valuable and may correct for the possibility of publication bias in the literature if institutions choose not to publicise their less successful projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shortage of teachers from Black, Asian and minoritised groups is well documented. Over the past decade, a body of research has confirmed that discrimination and inequality is a factor in the recruitment of teachers from Black, Asian and minoritised groups in England. Drawing on findings from the 2017 Runnymede Trust Report, which highlighted Bristol's lack of racial diversity within the teaching community, this paper explores the experiences of a group of pre‐service teachers on university teacher education routes who are minoritised within the general teaching population. The identified lack of diversity in the teacher workforce extends beyond race to other aspects of identity and representation in the classroom and is mirrored in teacher education. A series of focus group interviews were conducted across a 9‐month period. Results are presented as vignettes to capture the voice of minoritised participants. The findings have implications for the recruitment and retention of a diverse teacher workforce, as well as highlighting the need to ensure a sense of belonging for all pre‐service teachers entering the teaching community. This paper proposes a model relating to the analysis of critical incidents, which aims to inform future research into how pre‐service teachers respond to critical incidents regarding their identity. This model seeks to clarify tensions in the diverse lived experiences of pre‐service teachers and helps to explore the importance of context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three questions: (1) (How) Is democracy promoted in secondary schools in England? (2) How is the promotion of democracy understood in education and teacher education policy? and (3) To what extent does existing education policy benefit the promotion of democracy in schools in England? To explore these questions, we first discuss the policy landscape surrounding democratic education in England. We then outline our data collection and analysis methods, which comprised (a) the coding of ten different policy documents, including curriculum specifications, teaching standards and inspection frameworks, and (b) the utilisation of an original survey of more than 3000 teachers working in approximately 50% of all secondary schools in England. Together, our data allow us to raise three important points. First, education and teacher education policy neglects to specify 'how' democracy should be promoted and by 'whom'. Second, schools are offering scant provision of democratic education. Third, the majority of teachers feel fundamentally underprepared to teach democracy. We conclude this paper by arguing that, if policymakers do wish to promote democracy, there is a need for a cohesive policy and teacher education approach that guarantees democratic education for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pekrun and his colleagues highlight the significance and diversity of emotion in education. Their analysis suggests that these emotions can be categorised by their stimuli into those related to the classroom: activities, outcomes, relationships, topics and knowledge processes (epistemic). Most research in this area has focused on achievement emotions, with relatively limited research exploring topic emotions. This paper develops a framework for conceptualising topic emotions. It reports on a design‐based study that captured children's expressions of emotion in response to a climate change education programme using picturebooks. The data brought together emotional responses to climate change, to learning about climate change and to climate‐related picturebooks. Qualitative analysis of these responses highlights how they differ not only with regard to the emotions expressed, but also the structure of the emotional experience. Emotional responses to the broad topic of climate change were expressed as ongoing analytical judgements, where those related to learning about climate change were immersive and finite. Reading climate‐related picturebooks involved exploring how emotion is communicated and evoked. This supported quasi‐emotional experiences, where the reader imagines the emotions of the characters. The picturebooks are also shown to create vicarious emotional experiences, involving ethical‐based responses to the behaviour and circumstances depicted. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes a framework for disaggregating these differing emotional experiences related to topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research evidence has the potential to improve classroom practice, research–practice gaps continue to persist not least owing to the limited relevance of research findings for practice. A common approach in healthcare to address the research–practice gap is to form research priority setting partnerships (PSPs) in which stakeholders identify questions they would like research to answer. This paper presents the results from such a PSP in education with a focus on cognitive science research, which has received increased attention in the past few years owing to its potential to explain memory and learning processes and inform classroom practice. Over 400 questions from teachers were collected using an online survey. The final 15 research priorities highlight the need for research on a wider range of subjects, settings and phases as well as research designs that take the complexity of classrooms into consideration and aim to answer how different teaching strategies interact with each other as well as student motivation and agency at the micro‐ and macro‐level. The role of teacher expertise vs. fidelity to original research designs should also be investigated further. Overall, this paper highlights the importance of taking teacher voice into account to ensure that new research in the field is both academically rigorous and practically relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in education that do not show an impact regularly focus on the intervention and how it failed to impact on expected measures, with typologies identifying persistent critical points of failure. This paper uses one such RCT—the Integrating English programme—to exemplify the application of a new model to explain failure in RCTs. To do so, the paper develops a set of categories of context drawing on the wider social evaluation field: backdrop, design, operation and interpretation. Thus, the paper exposes critical weak points in the commission and interpretation, as well as the implementation, of an RCT. Our aim is to work towards more robust evaluations by demonstrating that it is not simply the programme design, implementation and evaluation that can contribute to a lack of impact; there can be more fundamental system issues at play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, co‐authored between three adults and five children aged 8–11, adopts a 'collaborative writing as inquiry' approach to examine and discuss the authors' experiences of a participatory research project through the lens of critical dialectical pluralism. In the original project, children formed two 'young advisory panels', one online, comprising children from all over England, and one in a primary school in a suburban area in North England, informing and collaborating on the creation of 45 educational activities supporting critical digital literacy. Rather than focusing on the original research itself, the paper focuses on making a methodological contribution, through detailed and collaborative reflections on notions such as agency, power and control. Over a period of four 60 to 90 min‐long meetings once the actual research was completed, adult and child authors considered their respective roles in the project, as well as detailing their understanding of the project as a whole. In co‐framing our perceptions of participatory research, we problematise adult anxieties and highlight the importance of exploring 'silence as voice', arguing for an extension to participatory research projects, going beyond the research itself and creating a 'third space' which is un/familiar to all participants, openly inviting engagement with discomfort and normalising uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to raise questions about the role that cultural capital might have to play in English schooling. With the term being used by both the Department for Education and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted, the English schools' inspectorate) as a means of describing certain key characteristics of a school's curriculum, the authors of this paper consider what the term actually now means in this educational context. To ground this consideration in a real‐world context, we present some data from a 2‐year study, which evaluated an intervention programme for disadvantaged young people in one English local authority. One aspect of this programme was the development of cultural capital for disadvantaged young people, and in the course of the evaluation a number of teachers were interviewed about how they saw this role and what cultural capital meant to them. As we explore in the paper, while English policymakers' and regulators' views of cultural capital are both narrow and perhaps, in some senses, deviate from both traditional and contemporary definitions of the term, teachers take a much richer and more flexible approach to the idea. With this in mind, we explore both the term itself and what it means for these teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines ideas about mental health, wellbeing and school education to illustrate important issues in the relationship between mental health and education. The Covid crisis has amplified the pre‐existing mental health problems of children and young people in England and recognition of the opportunities in schools to address these. The paper gives an overview of child and adolescent mental health services and how they position the role of schools. It examines prominent concepts of mental health and their relationship to wellbeing, setting this in a discussion of 'mentally healthy' schools, mental health in special educational needs and whole‐school approaches. This analysis shows how the relationship between mental health and wellbeing has not been adequately worked out, using this as the basis for arguing for the dual‐factor mental health model which separates mental illness/disorder from wellbeing as two related dimensions. The paper then translates the dual‐factor model into a two‐dimensional framework that represents the distinctive but related aims of school education (wellbeing promotion) and mental health services (preventing, coping, helping mental health difficulties). This framework involves a complex conception of wellbeing, with schools playing an important role in promoting wellbeing (beyond emotional wellbeing), tiered models and establishing school‐wide social emotional learning. It is about a whole‐school curriculum approach that involves considering what is to be learned and how it is taught. It contributes to a more nuanced concept of wellbeing that has a place for meaningful learning and challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of targeted additional funding for school‐age education, intended to improve student attainment, is a widespread phenomenon internationally. It is slightly rarer that the funding is used to improve attainment specifically for the most disadvantaged students – often via trying to attract teachers to poorer areas, or encouraging families to send their children to school. It is even rarer that funding is used to try and reduce the attainment gap between economically disadvantaged students and their peers, and almost unheard for the funding to be intended to change the nature of school intakes by making disadvantaged students more attractive to schools. These last two were the objectives set for Pupil Premium funding to schools in England. The funding started in 2011, for all state‐funded schools at the same time, so there is no easy counterfactual to help assess how effective it has been. The funding is a considerable investment every year and it is therefore important to know whether it works as intended. This paper presents a time series analysis of all students at secondary school in England from 2006, well before the funding started, until 2019, the most recent year for which there are attainment figures. It overcomes concerns that the official attainment gap between students labelled disadvantaged and the rest is sensitive to demographic, economic, legal and other concurrent policy changes. It does this by looking at a stable group of long‐term disadvantaged students. It is argued that this group would have attracted Pupil Premium funding if it had existed in any year and under any economic conditions. After 2010, these long‐term disadvantaged pupils became substantially less clustered in specific schools in their first year and throughout their remaining school life. This improvement cannot be explained by economic or other factors used in this paper, and so it looks as though the Pupil Premium has been effective here. The picture for the attainment gap at age 16 is more mixed. It is partly confused by changes in the grading of assessments in 2014 and again from 2016. The reasons why the improvements are less clear than at primary school are discussed, and they involve the nature of evidence available to secondary schools to help them improve the attainment of their most disadvantaged students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the importance of 'time spent' in understanding the international student experience. Short‐term mobility programmes (involving stays of between 1 week and 2 months) attracting less privileged students, such as the relatively new Turing Scheme in the United Kingdom, have been hailed as a potential 'solution' to the fact that, traditionally, wealthier individuals have been far more likely to engage in study abroad. However, we do not yet know how short‐term and longer duration programmes compare in terms of the value they confer to students (in relation to their experiences and outcomes). How likely is it that short‐term mobility at undergraduate level is as valuable, according to different measures, as mobility lasting 6 months to several years (as with degree mobility)? This paper reviews some of the evidence to date on shorter duration mobility, addressing how value in international study is constructed and conferred and how this relates to 'time spent'. The paper concludes by arguing that the picture is mixed: although short‐term mobility will be beneficial to students, those engaging in longer term exchanges (usually more privileged students) are likely to derive greater benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following lockdowns in 2020 owing to Covid‐19, schools needed to find a way to ensure the education of their pupils. In order to do this, they engaged in digital learning, to varying extents. Innovations emanated from all school staff including, for example, teachers, leaders and teaching assistants. Some were already innovating in this area and brought forward and implemented digital strategies, while others engaged with digital learning for the first time. While research is emerging about the effects of the pandemic restrictions on pupils and staff in relation to key issues such as mental health and educational attainment, very little is known about the impact on school leaders' strategic planning processes. To address this gap, this paper draws on a UK Research and Innovation funded study adopting a strategy as learning approach to report on 50 qualitative interviews with school leaders to examine digital strategy in English secondary schools, before, during and after July 2021, when restrictions were lifted in England. It draws on strategy as learning literature to evaluate if schools have changed their strategic planning for digital learning, as a direct response to having learned and innovated during the pandemic. The paper concludes that there is evidence that digital innovations during the pandemic have changed the ways in which leaders think about their digital strategy, thus supporting a strategy as learning approach. However it also concludes that although there is ample evidence that the pandemic has changed the way many schools view digital learning, for some schools, there remain persistent barriers to digital integration and planning. These emanate both from material and cultural considerations, as well as leader vision and belief in digital learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School bullying attracts significant research and resources globally, yet critical questions are being raised about the long‐term impact of these efforts. There is a disconnect between young people's perspectives and the long‐established psychology‐based technical definitions of school bullying dominating practice and policy in Australia. This dominant paradigm has recently been described as the first paradigm of school bullying. In contrast, this paper explores the potential for reorienting school bullying research towards the concerns of young people and away from adult‐derived technical definitions. Borrowing from paradigm two, which emphasises the social, cultural and philosophical (among others) elements of school bullying, in this paper, I approach bullying under the broad banner of 'social violence'. This approach addresses some of the inherent limitations of the first paradigm to conceptualise social and cultural dynamics. I argue that a 'social violence' approach reveals that the exclusionary effects of the social phenomenon of youth continue to be overlooked. Furthermore, the term 'violence' in bullying research could benefit from integrating contemporary sociological insights on this phenomenon. This paper draws on qualitative insights from a small group of young people in secondary schooling in South Australia gained through prolonged listening to peer conversations in a series of focus groups. In addition, 1:1 interviews were conducted pre and post the focus group series. I argue that these participants' insights reveal the exclusionary effects of youth and the employment of bullying to trivialise young people's experiences and concern for harm. There is a need to reprioritise young people's knowledge in school bullying research and the exclusionary effects of youth alongside other social forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Households with children eligible for Free School Meals are at risk of food insecurity. This paper reports on a rapid‐response study that investigated the impact of the school food voucher scheme during the COVID‐19 crisis on young people, families and schools. It pays close attention to the reliance of the state on the goodwill of society and its citizens in feeding those most in need. The Capabilities Approach is used to highlight factors that inhibited and restricted the use of the vouchers to produce the capability of having good nutrition for children in need of Free School Meals. The approach moves towards creating a society where children and young people are able to lead a life of their own choice and contribute to key policy decisions. This qualitative study funded by the British Education Research Association was conducted between September 2020 and March 2021. The study posed two research questions: (1) how have schools responded to COVID‐19 in relation to food during holiday provision; and (2) what have families identified as barriers to accessing the school food voucher scheme? Data collection involved online interviews with young people, schools and organisations (i.e. public health, director from the food industry. etc.). The findings highlight the difficulties with accessing and using the school food voucher and implications for future policy directions. Owing to this being a small‐scale study, it is not generalisable to the wider population but does highlight localised issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turn to ‘evidence‐based education’ in the past three decades favours one type of evidence: experiment. Knowledge brokers ground recommendations for classroom practice on reports of experimental research. This paper distinguishes field and laboratory experiments, on the basis of control and precision of causal ascription. Briefly noting problems with knowledge brokers’ extrapolating from field experiments, the paper's main focus is on extrapolating from laboratory experiments, using the case of ‘interleaving’. It argues that knowledge brokers often extrapolate from laboratory experiments as if they are field experiments. By considering both laboratory and ‘extra‐lab’ interleaving studies, it suggests that an alternative extrapolation—creating laboratory effects in the classroom—has little pedagogical value. The conclusion suggests focussing on mechanisms, contexts and outcomes as a more useful basis for brokering pedagogical knowledge from laboratory experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Equal opportunities in the context of education can be interpreted as ensuring equitable access to certain kinds of education (e.g. an academic track) or as equal opportunities to lead a fulfilling life regardless of the educational route followed (e.g. vocational or academic). These interpretations are in tension: the former implies a hierarchy where some forms of education are considered better than others, whereas the latter requires that they are all considered valuable. This paper presents a case study of a secondary school in the Netherlands that pursued both interpretations of equal opportunities and made systemic reforms to achieve this. Building on interviews, focus groups and participant observation with students, staff and management, the paper analyses the tension these actors experienced between the two interpretations of equal opportunities. It is argued that this stems from a societal context that endorses the first interpretation of equal opportunities but aligns less with the second interpretation. The analysis shows that individual institutions like schools have limited power to shift narratives surrounding educational tracks, especially when these do not align with prevailing trends in society. Additionally, the paper underlines the value of applying analysis of different interpretations of equal opportunities, which is usually undertaken by theoretical work, to empirical data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the experiences of education for girls at risk of permanent exclusion from mainstream secondary schools in England. The number of girls being permanently excluded from school is a growing issue, and data suggests that girls are being excluded at a percentage rate which exceeds boys, yet they have continued to receive comparatively little attention, either in policy, research or the media. This study uses ecomapping and semi‐structured interviews to examine the challenges girls face and the resources they use to address or ameliorate them. The paper provides an overview of the data collected, considers how the prevalent challenges reported by girls compare to existing research and suggests a number of approaches which could be taken to support girls. It reflects on girls' lack of visibility and voice in policy and research on school exclusions, how this has continued to affect the services and support available to them, and schools' responses to their behaviour. It concludes by reviewing the recommendations previous studies have advocated to support girls at risk of exclusion and reflects on the progress made towards these, noting how current issues of school funding, teacher recruitment and attrition, performativity and accountability have impacted on the scope of action it is possible for individual schools to take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an examination of identity in and as practice as it relates to a group of educational practitioners known as middle leaders. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures as a site‐ontological approach for conceptualising educational leading, the paper considers an individual's identity as being informed by, and accomplished amidst, the sayings, doings and relatings of practice. Although theorising the connections between identity and practice is not new, a central argument presented is that identity occurs at the nexus of the individual and social practices. Data are drawn from an empirical study of the practices of nine middle leaders responsible for facilitating a district‐wide initiative aiming to improve literacy pedagogy in their particular primary schools. Thematic analysis of semi‐structured interviews with the middle leaders revealed 11 identity–practice framings which evolve over time and space, negotiated in response to site‐based conditions. Findings contribute to understandings about the dynamic multifaceted nature of middle leaders' identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This critical interpretive paper deploys Walter Mignolo's geopolitics of knowledge concept to examine higher education internationalisation in Kazakhstan. Amidst growing concerns about economic and environmental sustainability, elitism and cognitive justice, among other critical issues, internationalisation remains a vital government policy. By tracing Kazakhstan's development since independence from the Soviet Union and focusing on key higher education development policy frameworks, the paper argues and illustrates that: (1) the internationalisation of higher education in Kazakhstan promotes a specific representation of the world that is considered universal and modern; (2) the internationalisation of higher education in Kazakhstan illustrates the existing hierarchical global higher education system that is dominated by the West as centres of knowledge and learning while allocating other countries peripheral roles; and (3) the geopolitics of knowledge concept enables the reading of higher education internationalisation beyond what is knowledge to who, why and where knowledge is produced. The data for this paper came from a qualitative study that involved 15 semi‐structured interviews with graduates who studied abroad at Western universities through the government‐sponsored Bolashak Scholarship. Three focus group sessions with 21 graduate students at Nazarbayev University complemented the interviews. The qualitative data suggest that Mignolo's geopolitics of knowledge offers a close‐to‐perfect description of the internationalisation of higher education in Kazakhstan. The conclusion drawn from this post‐Soviet study is the universalisation of Western knowledge as nations utilise it for meaningful development, despite decolonial and cognitive justice concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the world's refugees live in Global South countries, where they struggle to find quality education and opportunities for decent livelihoods. This paper explores the underexamined yet highly relevant interlinkage between sustainable livelihoods and adult learning among urban refugees residing in three major cities in India. It speaks to the tight intersection of education, livelihoods and aspirations of five refugee communities: Afghan, Rohingya, Somali, Chin and Tibetan. Building on interviews, focus groups and participatory drawing sessions involving 66 refugee and staff respondents, the study highlights the refugees' extremely limited learning opportunities, which result in low skills and being forced to take discriminatory and undignified work in the informal sector. By integrating the capabilities approach with sustainable livelihoods, the paper argues for more diverse educational opportunities and a broader understanding of refugee livelihoods that goes beyond pure economics to encompass consideration of freedom and human dignity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores teachers' conceptions of climate change knowledge, contributing to the growing body of work on the geographies of climate change. The paper focuses on the data generated through in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with a sample of 48 teachers in India to address the research question: What discourses about climate change knowledge are being constructed by teachers in India? We argue that teachers' lesson planning and searches for information are at the forefront of the changing ways in which individuals engage with, find out and construct meaning about climate change. These teachers' beliefs about climate change are very strongly held, even in the face of a perceived lack of expertise or understanding: climate change is described as the 'need of the hour', which this work understands as not only involving material impacts and processes but also important epistemological, collaborative needs through which education might contribute to public reasoning about climate change. Through this analysis we present a 'certainty problematic' as a heuristic device that foregrounds tensions between the inherent uncertainty of knowledge and (against climate denialism) certainty about anthropogenic climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generating data from small group interviews with 41 boys aged 10–11 years from two London schools in 2022, this paper contributes to the field of gender by introducing a new form of non‐hegemonic and positive masculinity, which I am calling 'blended' masculinity, and which was the most common formation in each school. Although its features differed a little in each setting, this blended formulation broadly consisted of orthodox qualities of masculinity (e.g. athleticism, assertiveness, confidence, independence), combined with feminine‐associated traits (e.g. kindness, caring, sociability, emotional literacy). I argue that this blended form is different from previous conceptualisations of hybrid masculinity in the gender literature and is more akin to recent conceptions of hybrid femininity. There were no dominant forms of masculinity with hierarchical connotations of superiority, and no hegemony that legitimated unequal relations, with obvious subordination of other masculinities or femininities. Boys and girls generally got on well with each other and there was also no evidence of homophobia or misogyny. The paper also explores notions of peer‐group popularity, which was based on a series of resources, and delineates the characteristics of a fictional, 'ideal', schoolboy, whose features and attributes were connected to the different versions of masculinity on show. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the tensions arising between Reception teachers' professional beliefs and knowledge, and the school readiness agenda in England. It scrutinises how the increasing academic expectations placed on children to ensure they are 'ready for school' may conflict with teachers' understanding of how young children learn, their pedagogical philosophies and classroom practices. In this paper, cultural‐historical activity theory (CHAT) is utilised as a methodological and analytical framework, specifically harnessing Engeström and Sannino's work on 'manifestations of contradictions'. This theoretical lens is applied to elucidate the specific contradictions that surface at the policy–practice interface and to explore how teachers navigate these conflicts and tensions. Data were gathered through interviews with two Reception teachers and analysed to identify four distinct contradiction categories: dilemmas, double binds, critical conflicts and conflicts. The findings make a critical contribution to ongoing debates about the implications of the school readiness agenda on teacher beliefs, professional knowledge and the impact on children. Furthermore, this paper extends an original contribution to the practical application of CHAT in Early Childhood Education (ECE) research and emphasises the utility of identifying linguistic cues as an effective strategy to reveal contradictions in textual data, thereby furthering understanding of policy–practice tensions in ECE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research highlights the potential of physical education and school sport (PESS) to provide personal, social and educational benefits for young people. As such, it is suggested that PESS contexts could be particularly relevant to pupils who might be considered marginalised or 'at risk'—including care‐experienced young people—affording opportunities to gain skills, connections and experiences to aid a positive educational trajectory. This paper presents findings from an empirical project that explored the role of sport/physical activity within the day‐to‐day lives of care‐experienced young people in England. A participatory methodology, underpinned by a youth voice perspective, was employed to generate data via semi‐structured, activity‐based focus groups with care‐experienced young people (aged 8–21 years) and via narrative interviews with care leavers (aged 23–32 years). Data were analysed using inductive and deductive procedures in a process also informed by the work of Bourdieu. Drawing on data related specifically to PESS contexts, this paper looks to theorise the potential of PESS to support the educational engagement, transitions and outcomes of care‐experienced young people. It demonstrates how this context can support the acquisition of physical, social and cultural capital, which can both facilitate engagement and support personal outcomes. In addition, it documents how social support provided within/through PESS can be promotive of positive transitions into further and higher education contexts. As such, it can be recognised as a valuable site within the educational landscape for care‐experienced young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the higher education (HE) literature highlights how the sector is designed for a typified imagined student, the issues are particularly acute for care‐experienced students. The dominant HE discourse assumes that all students will be able or want to participate in 'stereotypical' aspects of student life and have stable networks to offer emotional, practical and financial support. Here, we deploy Holland et al.'s formative heuristic of figured worlds to interrogate how socially and culturally constructed realms and artefacts establish 'givens'. People 'figure' who they are through navigating different realms which are conceptually and materially produced. We take particular inspiration from figured worlds' focus on unequal power in social space; socially and institutionally endorsed understandings of how things 'should' be celebrate certain subjectivities and ways of 'doing' university while marginalising others. The paper discusses biographical‐narrative interviews and collaborative analysis with six students with experience of foster, residential and kinship care, all studying at a post‐1992 English university. Crucially, conversations highlighted participants' exceptional maturity, educational passion and tenacity. Yet challenges remained. This paper focuses on four domains where our participants felt forced into peripheral subjectivities: student accommodation, wellbeing support, societies and curricula. Halls became hostile spaces through high rents, late‐night/loud drinking cultures and their transitory nature. Wellbeing services felt inimical when designed for quotidian anxiety and stress, neglecting more complex stories. Similarly, society membership fees, requisite team kits and 'cliques' materially and symbolically constricted participants. Finally, specific areas of curricula and pedagogical delivery posed problems, namely when traumatic and/or painful content (e.g. domestic violence and safeguarding) was not assumed to relate to anyone in the classroom. Despite these barriers, participants continued to navigate their HE journeys with skill and creativity. Although this paper's perspective is partial, we argue for theorising the holistic student experience through the lens of figured worlds. This reveals how norms and practices make dominant subject positions hard to access for care‐experienced students, contradicting and undermining their obvious value. In concluding, we discuss how locating problems as structural speaks back to deficit discourses, challenging us to reimagine and reconfigure HE through alternative discourses of worth. Attention is needed within and beyond the classroom; students' lives are multifaceted and played out in multiple figured worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International migration is attaining new records, diversifying nations' cultural–social landscapes. The number of international migrants is estimated to be about 272 million globally, with nearly two‐thirds being labour migrants, surpassing historic projections. Concomitantly, migrant teachers are becoming more prevalent in educational markets; spaces that may serve as institutional vehicles promoting social cohesion and tolerance. Acknowledging that such spaces have an increasing share of faith‐based schools—settings that foreground particular groups' cultural and social values—this critical analysis seeks to identify how migrant teachers' aspirations are shaped and ethically negotiated in seemingly exclusive educational sites. Drawing upon migrant teacher interviews from American and Australian faith‐based schools, and utilising concepts of motility and institutional viscosity, this paper captures the schools' 'viscous' conditions and complex facilitation through which educators professionally move and ethically navigate their practice. Bourdieu's thinking tools of field, habitus, capital and symbolic violence provided a supplementary theoretical framework that draws attention to the evolving discourse of the subordinate 'invisible foreign educator' in the faith‐based educational setting. The paper portrays strategies of initial institutional welcoming; enabling migrant educators a smooth spatial mobility into the field but challenging them to work against their social mobility aspirations. It illustrates the educators' failed attempts to negotiate intra‐institutional transitions; experiencing feelings of trepidation about future professional moves and ethical conflicts between their obligation to adhere to institutional procedures and commitment to operate from an ethic of care. The paper argues for education policies that enable motility over time and empower ethical skilled migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing consensus that existing arrangements for policy making in education are far from optimal. This paper is about policy making and the roles of—and relationships between—elected officials, civil servants and academics in the making of policy. It aims to open up a conversation about new ways of making education policy that make better use of academic expertise by shedding light on policy making from the perspective of a former policy broker. With specific reference to England, experiences of the world of policy are drawn on to provide an account of the following: the disconnect between academic research and policy; what good policy advice looks like; and, most significantly, what an expert policy advice mechanism in education could look like. The mechanism put forward is one possibility for further discussion within the academic community in the first instance: an independent group of diverse academic experts to provide trustworthy and transparent policy advice to the education ministry. It is envisaged that by bringing a set of insights together here, understandings of the world of policy making will be enhanced and further thinking and conversations about mechanisms for expert policy advice in education will be induced, starting with this flagship journal's readership. The subsequent accumulation of these discussions may then, in time, lead us towards better policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how participants in a Swedish secondary school do gender talk with comics. Swedish schools are tasked with working with gender, but this can be a challenge for many teachers, and finding materials to work with gender aspects can be difficult. Meanwhile, literary research on comics has shown them to be a potential tool for problematising gender, but little educational research has investigated the gender discussions that comics can promote. Therefore, using conversation‐analytical methodology, we have documented situated classroom talk through video observations, focusing on the social construction of gender. Five excerpts are shown, where different aspects of gender talk are displayed and discussed. Results indicate that although students deconstruct and criticise gendered binaries in characteristics and behaviour from comics' imagery, this critique remains superficial, revolving around the hypersexualised body imagery of the muscular superhero the Phantom or the outdated femininity of the girly Daisy Duck. Although comics present an opportunity for discussions of norm critique in the classroom, we suggest that more social‐realistic comics, wherein gender roles are more subtle and nuanced, be used for furthering the research on this topic and allowing students more width when it comes to deconstructing gender binaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University Technical Colleges (UTCs) are newly established (since 2010–11) technical and vocational secondary schools in England, catering for young people aged 14–19. The schools focus strongly on delivering vocational, alongside Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)‐focused academic, qualifications. The colleges have been introduced as a new means of improving technical and vocational education and training—a sector which in England has faced problems of low quality and low esteem—and in a wider international context of STEM‐trained worker shortages. University Technical Colleges have been advertised as offering state‐of‐the‐art vocational learning, involving access for students to the latest equipment and technologies in key industrial sectors, alongside extensive project‐based learning in partnership with employers. However, how have UTC students fared in these respects since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and associated lockdowns in 2020? In this paper we report on results from a survey of 252 students across two UTCs in England, exploring the technical and vocational learning experiences of these students during the exceptional 2019–20 academic year. Findings from the survey reveal lost learning and training opportunities during the pandemic, particularly where courses with practical elements relied on specific equipment and facilities that became inaccessible during lockdown. The survey also highlights disruptions to apprenticeship arrangements, work experience plans and other engagement with employers. Students in some instances have been effectively forced to stay on in education owing to reduced apprenticeship and employment opportunities for school‐leavers. We find evidence of students adapting their aspirations and career goals to the new economic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the development of food charity in schools in England. Growing numbers of schools, often in partnership with charities and businesses, are directly providing food to parents who are struggling to feed their families. This paper analyses how and why this is happening and its broader significance. The growth of food charity in schools is explained through a mixture of a retreating welfare state, an ongoing cost of living crisis, the continued diffusion of charitable food aid as a socially accepted response to poverty and hunger in the United Kingdom, and schools having to adopt increasing responsibility for making sure that children's basic needs are being met. Drawing on semi‐structured interview data gathered from school staff, this paper highlights how schools are becoming a new frontier for charitable food aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents and discusses the relationship between the generation of research income and the REF2021 results for universities who submitted a return to Unit of Assessment 23—Education. Research Excellence Framework exercises tend to be time intensive and come with income streams of Government Quality Research funding as well as reputational gains and risks. Based on REF2021 research environment research income data, freely available on the REF2021 website, analyses have been undertaken to investigate the strength of relationships between different types of fundings streams and grade point averages. The results demonstrate strong variation in funding capture across the different universities with Russell Group members tending to generate more income from prestigious funders such as UK Research and Innovation. However, several post‐1992 universities managed to capture significant income from funders like UK and EU governments, without this necessarily translating into higher grade point averages or 4* scores. While generating research income is perceived as an important part of academic life, the paper concludes that achieving research excellence seems more complicated than just following the money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth, internationally, in professional doctorates over the last 25 years has been well documented, as are the forms, fields and disciplines that such doctorates embrace. Yet relatively little is known about the professional tensions teachers encounter, in relation to their positionality, when carrying out doctoral research in the schools where they work. This paper draws attention, not only to the contribution the Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) makes to research as a whole, but also to the significance of teachers as invaluable members of the research community. Findings will be presented from interviews with 30 senior teachers from schools in England who are carrying out practitioner research as part of their doctoral studies. The paper draws attention to how power relations in the research process ferment the structural and agentic concerns of the participants in this study when discussing their researcher positionality. The scholarly significance of this study is its contribution to knowledge of how schools are increasingly becoming both sites of research and research‐rich environments. With its focus on researcher positionality the paper draws attention not just to the tensions and dilemmas these participants encounter on their doctoral journey, but also to the importance of teacher researchers and their role in research knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International student mobility contributes to a knowledge‐based economy and forms an important component of a highly educated migration. This paper aims to identify how far political factors—including political discrimination, restrictions, freedom, UK migration policies and social cultural norms and policies—enhance or inhibit individuals' capabilities to become mobile. It offers a novel conceptualisation of mobility, drawing on structuration theory and the capability approach, to reveal the link between structure, capability and agency in the mobility process. Semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were conducted with 40 PhD students, two professors from Turkey in the United Kingdom and three international education experts. A capability list established shows how mobility occurs when students' capabilities (freedoms) fail to flourish and they lose their power (capacity) to influence society due to the political environment in the home country. 'Impo‐mobility', derived from the word 'imposed', is proposed to refer to highly educated people having to become mobile as a result of impositions placed upon them by home and host‐government political practices. An appealing political environment is necessary if Turkey is not to lose highly educated individuals and the United Kingdom is to remain a global player in international higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although fostering values is promoted within environmental and sustainability education (ESE) and a shift in values is seen as essential for a sustainable future, recent international findings indicate that this aspect of ESE is being neglected. Previous research has shown there to be common ground between ESE and the field of character education (CE), a form of values education. Bringing together these two strands of theory and practice has the potential to be fruitful in terms of strengthening current, and introducing new, practices in both fields, particularly through drawing on existing evidence‐based strategies within CE to inform ESE. While there has been some work in this regard, this has been almost exclusively theoretical and there has been little research regarding the practice of such integration. This paper details an instrumental case study exploring an existing case of where ESE and CE come together in practice. A study was conducted at a Scottish, independent, all‐ages, holistic education‐oriented school, exploring how ESE is carried out. Data were gathered via teacher interviews, school observations, field notes and document analysis. Thematic analysis revealed four themes: the school as a sustainable organism; holistic learning; fostering a connectedness with nature; and nurturing the whole person. The data were then analysed from a CE perspective revealing multiple points of ESE–CE intersection, e.g. school climate/ethos, role‐modelling and service‐learning. The findings reveal commonalities between ESE and CE and provide examples of integrated ESE–CE practice, demonstrating potential for collaboration or shared ESE–CE practice. Avenues for further research are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite extensive research on attainment grouping, the impact of attainment grouping on pupil attainment remains poorly understood and contested. This paper presents evidence from a study conducted with 2944 12–13 year olds, from 76 schools in England, who were allocated to between‐class attainment groups ('setting') in English and mathematics over the first 2 years of secondary schooling. After controlling for prior attainment, pupils in the top set performed significantly better than pupils in the middle and bottom sets in both English and mathematics. The findings indicate a widening gap in attainment, especially in the case of English. Findings, especially in the case of mathematics, provide more evidence of a relative benefit for pupils placed in top sets than a relative detriment for those in bottom sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research evidence has the potential to improve classroom practice, research-practice gaps continue to persist not least owing to the limited relevance of research findings for practice. A common approach in healthcare to address the research-practice gap is to form research priority setting partnerships (PSPs) in which stakeholders identify questions they would like research to answer. This paper presents the results from such a PSP in education with a focus on cognitive science research, which has received increased attention in the past few years owing to its potential to explain memory and learning processes and inform classroom practice. Over 400 questions from teachers were collected using an online survey. The final 15 research priorities highlight the need for research on a wider range of subjects, settings and phases as well as research designs that take the complexity of classrooms into consideration and aim to answer how different teaching strategies interact with each other as well as student motivation and agency at the micro- and macro-level. The role of teacher expertise vs. fidelity to original research designs should also be investigated further. Overall, this paper highlights the importance of taking teacher voice into account to ensure that new research in the field is both academically rigorous and practically relevant.

This paper, co-authored between three adults and five children aged 8-11, adopts a 'collaborative writing as inquiry' approach to examine and discuss the authors' experiences of a participatory research project through the lens of critical dialectical pluralism. In the original project, children formed two 'young advisory panels', one online, comprising children from all over England, and one in a primary school in a suburban area in North England, informing and collaborating on the creation of 45 educational activities supporting critical digital literacy. Rather than focusing on the original research itself, the paper focuses on making a methodological contribution, through detailed and collaborative reflections on notions such as agency, power and control. Over a period of four 60 to 90 min-long meetings once the actual research was completed, adult and child authors considered their respective roles in the project, as well as detailing their understanding of the project as a whole. In co-framing our perceptions of participatory research, we problematise adult anxieties and highlight the importance of exploring 'silence as voice', arguing for an extension to participatory research projects, going beyond the research itself and creating a 'third space' which is un/familiar to all participants, openly inviting engagement with discomfort and normalising uncertainty.

Discussions of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in education that do not show an impact regularly focus on the intervention and how it failed to impact on expected measures, with typologies identifying persistent critical points of failure. This paper uses one such RCT--the Integrating English programme--to exemplify the application of a new model to explain failure in RCTs. To do so, the paper develops a set of categories of context drawing on the wider social evaluation field: backdrop, design, operation and interpretation. Thus, the paper exposes critical weak points in the commission and interpretation, as well as the implementation, of an RCT. Our aim is to work towards more robust evaluations by demonstrating that it is not simply the programme design, implementation and evaluation that can contribute to a lack of impact; there can be more fundamental system issues at play.

This paper aims to raise questions about the role that cultural capital might have to play in English schooling. With the term being used by both the Department for Education and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted, the English schools' inspectorate) as a means of describing certain key characteristics of a school's curriculum, the authors of this paper consider what the term actually now means in this educational context. To ground this consideration in a real-world context, we present some data from a 2-year study, which evaluated an intervention programme for disadvantaged young people in one English local authority. One aspect of this programme was the development of cultural capital for disadvantaged young people, and in the course of the evaluation a number of teachers were interviewed about how they saw this role and what cultural capital meant to them. As we explore in the paper, while English policymakers' and regulators' views of cultural capital are both narrow and perhaps, in some senses, deviate from both traditional and contemporary definitions of the term, teachers take a much richer and more flexible approach to the idea. With this in mind, we explore both the term itself and what it means for these teachers.

Latin is currently being trialled as a subject in 40 state secondary schools in England. This paper focuses on one of the justifications of this trial: that teaching Latin in state secondary schools provides students with cultural capital which in turn counters social injustice. By taking the example of Latin as a starting point, I reach two conclusions about cultural capital. The first is that providing students with cultural capital can be good for some individuals, and so justified on a case‐by‐case basis depending on context. However, this justification does not hold for curriculum policy making. My second conclusion is that in the long term, pursuing cultural capital as part of curriculum policy exacerbates the social injustices it purports to address. Wherever an activity is introduced for the sake of cultural capital rather than its educational value, educationally valuable activities risk being pushed off the curriculum, potentially degrading the educational value of the curriculum. In the case of teaching Latin, it may provide benefits to particular students, but as part of curriculum policy it risks exacerbating social injustices and undermining the educational value of school curricula. Going beyond the place of Latin on the curriculum, I argue that all appeals to cultural capital provide a poor basis for curriculum policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transitions from education into work, or as part of career change and development, are increasingly central to policy debate and academic inquiry. However, the role that employers play in shaping transition is often overlooked. In this paper, we examine this issue through the experiences of a graduating cohort of 'degree apprentices'. We present original analysis of new empirical data from what we believe to be the first substantive qualitative longitudinal research conducted with those experiencing this new vocational pathway in the English Apprenticeships system. Through analysis of repeat semi‐structured interviews with 22 degree apprenticeship graduates (44 interviews in total), we provide early empirical insights into experiences of this new pathway and add to existing theoretical conceptualisations of transition within the educational literature and the employer's role within it. We show that the degree apprentice to graduate transition can be broken down into three key stages: 'getting in', 'getting on' and 'going further', and that employers—at both strategic and relational levels—shape experiences at each stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discuses critical engagement with educational ideas, or at least with ideas influencing prominent debates about education. Topics include the history of certain relevant traditions of educational research; root and branch analysis of the research process of the CtP project, and framework for thinking more productively about the future of educational knowledge production in the context of a tradition of educational practice.

The division of educational systems into different tracks—academic and vocational—represents one of the key elements in explaining social stratification and inequalities. Previous research identifies teachers' expectations as a critical factor to understand the relationship between tracking and social inequality. This paper discusses how ability is represented in teachers' discourses and whether and to what extent it works as a legitimation of systemic forms of tracking. Using in‐depth interviews with 35 secondary school tutors, we analyse how teachers draw on the concept of ability to explain students' unequal transitions from a lower comprehensive to an upper tracked education system in Barcelona (Spain). The results indicate three main elements: a highly naturalistic conception of students' abilities among teachers; a remarkably dichotomised conception of theoretical and practical abilities that match with the academic and vocational tracks; and a direct association between types of student and types of track based on different types of ability at a cognitive, behavioural and personal level. Overall, the analysis contributes to opening the 'black box' of the notion of ability as represented by teachers and to identifying what we call the 'mechanisms of misrecognition' which serve to naturalise, legitimise and reproduce a highly segmented post‐16 school system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's relationship with time in preschools is an under‐researched area. Young children rarely know how to measure time using a clock, but their experiences of time may contribute to understanding children's well‐being and debates about quality in preschools. This paper brings together two empirical exploratory studies conducted in preschools in Iceland and Croatia, respectively, and is based on participatory research methods that highlight young children's perspectives on their sense of time. First, the paper provides examples of young children's understanding of the sequence of events in preschools. Most days were marked by regular routines, such as mealtimes, circle time and outdoor activities. These stepping stones were seen as providing a rhythm for the day. Children's conversations and drawings indicated an embodied sense of time that is subjective, relational and situational. Second, questions have been raised about the impact of different time practices on young children's everyday lives in preschools. In some cases, the management of time appeared to have unintended consequences for factors relating to quality in preschools. Adherence to daily visual schedules could lead to fragmented days with fewer opportunities for uninterrupted play than time management based on ‘flow’. The subjective nature of children's sense of time is complex, and shared understandings between adults and children are not guaranteed. Careful and imaginative listening is required in order to deepen understandings on this topic. This could, in turn, support teachers to further consider the impact on children's daily experiences of preschool when planning based solely on ‘clock time’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geography of school choice critically shapes families' educational opportunities. Residential segregation, social inequalities and the educational marketplace interact in complex ways and produce spatialised educational opportunities for families. This paper analyses the link between these dimensions and how they structure families' educational opportunities in the city of Madrid. Based on several administrative datasets that capture students' residential location, their socio-economic position, the schools they attend and the characteristics of school supply, our analysis reveals the uneven spatial distribution of the different school modalities in Madrid, where advantaged families and neighbourhoods have more diversified and socio-economically homogenous nearby schooling options. The results also depict the way the city is spatially divided along a continuum of 'privileged' residential and educational assets. The paper reflects on how reforms expanding school choice and diversification of the educational market undertaken by the regional government may have increased the link between residential and school segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]