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The period when the British Educational Research Association (BERA) was founded was one in which there was an increasing recognition amongst the research community that a wind of change had stirred up the settled traditions of educational research. It was a time which celebrated the promise of alternative paradigms for research. Ten or so years on we are entering another era where the emphasis is not on the reconceptualisation of what research is but on how it is organised. I think one can discern at least two factors, not wholly separate from each other, that will increasingly influence how a substantial part of research will be organised. These two factors are the changes which have taken place in the composition of the research community and the direction of current Government policy concerning the school system. I aim to show how these are leading to a fruitful form of collaborative research at local level which should be encouraged and supported —not least by BERA.

This article deconstructs the language of the 2010 UK Coalition Government's White Paper, The Importance of Teaching. It uses analytical frameworks related to rhetoric established by Aristotle and Cicero. It explores the mechanisms of language using both critical discourse analysis and content analysis, offering quantitative data on the content of the paper and qualitative data on the literary strategies employed. It is concerned not only with how what is communicated persuades but also the ethics of persuasion; what is suggested and to what end. The article suggests a mutually reinforcing relationship between poverty of language and poverty of thought. The Coalition Government asserts an heroic stance to act radically to free victimised teachers from the burdens of bureaucracy imposed by the previous government. However, rather than radical action to make change, the findings suggest that the White Paper presents an illusory carapace of change that conceals fundamental continuity. It reassures all of the commitment of government and audiences to change while sustaining education as fundamentally unchanged.

Book reviewed in this article: New Labour's Policies for Schools: Raising the Standard? Jim Docking (Ed.) Taking Education Really Seriously Michael Fielding (Ed.) Schools Achieving Success (White Paper) Department for Education And Skills The Learning Country (Paving Document) National Assembly For Wales

In a comment to the Conference of the National Foundation for Educational Research in October 1982, the Minister of Education remarked that educational research on classroom teaching is patchy and urged researchers to make good use of their findings by helping teachers employ them in the classroom (TES, 1982). This was followed by the White Paper Teaching Quality (HMSO, 1983) and about a year later by advertisements for research in teacher education by the ESRC. I suggest that the White Paper and the ESRC guidelines are recipes for exactly the kind of research that the Minister was bemoaning. The message that is coming from the Department of Education and Science and associated bodies is that research on teaching and teacher education will be subject or age group specific. There will also be a strong emphasis on selection and on assessment of teaching competence. Taken with the fact that over 50% of all government educational research funding is for work on testing and examinations, one gets a flavour of type of problems being addressed (Nisbet & Nisbet, 1985). There is no mention of work related to the improvement of teaching. There is no evidence of any thought that there might be generic teaching skills, that is, skills that are common to all learning situations. Insofar as it is possible to detect any conception of pedagogy, it seems to adhere to the traditional apprenticeship view, a view that is supported by the heavy emphasis on the virtues of practical experience. The confused nature of these views is apparent when one considers their implications. If teaching skills are subject specific, what, or who is the arbiter of the level of specificity to which they relate? And if they are specific, is there an implication that pedagogy is a fragmented and incohate study with no hope of general utility? 167

In 2020, the global number of refugees reached record levels, pressuring asylum countries to determine more effective methods for facilitating integration. This paper explores an array of stakeholder practices towards refugees in Surrey and Greater Vancouver, Canada. It is based on questionnaires and interviews that elicit the perceptions and struggles of 40 settlement workers, health and mental health professionals, members of parliament, educators, librarians, scholars and grassroots organizations, who work with refugees. The findings show that stakeholders often feel isolated, ‘working in silos’ and wasting time and money due to uncoordinated services and a lack of interagency communication. They feel it is also unreasonable to expect Government-Assisted Refugees (GARs) to learn English and complete job training in preparation for independent living within one year of support. Both refugee adults and children suffer from high levels of trauma, often compounded by interrupted or no schooling. Since education is essential to refugee success, I argue that teachers play a role in filling the gap, often uniquely positioned to form ongoing, safe and trusting relationships with refugee students, and their families. For many teachers, it is an ethos of care, compassion and social justice acquired in teacher education programmes that increases refugee resilience, sense of belonging and wellbeing. This paper identifies what new collaborations between teachers and other stakeholders might accomplish, including communication back to government policymakers. Recommendations encompass initiating online registries of services and low-cost housing in neighbourhoods where community schools and services are interlinked, possibly achieving holistic care for all refugees. &nbsp

This paper 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 the current system of tiering fulfils the provisions in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, including the rights to education, best interests, non-discrimination, and participation. It emphasises that while the majority of students were supportive of tiering, their responses highlighted a range of negative effects for 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 tiering. The paper 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 be taken into account when considering further reforms to GCSEs, to ensure that any methods used respect the rights of all students.

A breadth of research explores gendered professional identities, practices and spaces across a range of UK educational institutions (Barber, 2002, Murray, 2006, Ringrose, 2010, Warin, 2017). One focus has been on links between gender, care and education in early years settings and primary schools, although less attention has been given to caring within secondary schools (see Laurent, 2013, Gillies and Robinson, 2013 as important exceptions). Drawing upon qualitative research conducted in London within an in-school Seclusion Unit, this paper brings together a Lefebvrian conceptualisation of space with feminist theorisations of care to explore how the Unit (conceived as a space of control, discipline and punishment) also became an unlikely space of care. In doing so, the paper explores complex intersections between gender and care and how everyday caring practices in schools are inextricably linked to and embedded within broader institutional and spatial agendas and processes.

Contract cheating is currently a concern for universities and the HE sector. It has been brought into the spotlight in recent years through the growth of online essay mills, where students can easily commission and purchase written assessment responses. This study contributes to the wider literature on academic integrity in HE by examining the phenomenon of contract cheating from a from a supply side perspective, thereby considering the essay mill offering and student interaction with it. The authors covertly engage with five essay mills, before successfully completing an assignment purchase with two of these providers. The pre-purchase stage of an assignment transaction is first examined, unpacking ten reassurance cues used by essay mill providers in the text of their websites. These reassurance cues help to ensure the attractiveness of the essay mill product to potential student consumers. The analysis then moves to explore the ethical discourses around academic integrity that essay mills provide, revealing inconsistencies in their stance towards the potential for academic misconduct from the use of essay mill services. Finally, the paper explores the quality of the essay mill product, through grading and Turnitin® reports for the two purchased essay mill assignments. Following recent calls for the outlawing of essay mills, this paper provides a timely addition to current understanding of this phenomenon, and the associated challenges of contract cheating in HE.

Teacher education in England now requires that student teachers follow practices that do not undermine “fundamental British values” (DfE, 2013, p. 14), where these practices are assessed against a set of ethics and behaviour standards. This paper examines the political assumptions underlying pedagogical interpretations about the education of national identities through documenting how a group of student teachers uphold the institutional demand of promoting fundamental British Values in relation to their discursive constructions of Britishness. Empirical data exemplifies potential political understandings guiding educational practices. Analysis suggests that pedagogies of national education are mediated by (i) educators' understandings of the nation as an essential entity or a social construct and (ii) their understanding of national identities as being open or closed to competing interpretations. The paper concludes by examining implications of different political and pedagogical positions for practice and research.

In a highly globalised world with increasing ethno-nationalistic tensions and conflicts, the importance of intercultural education has never been greater. The challenge remains, however, as to whether educating for mutual respect and social cohesion can be achieved through traditional modes of schooling or whether additional approaches that are not necessarily school-centric are required. Drawing on in-depth qualitative data including video diaries, narrative interviews and focus groups with Australian secondary school students and semi-structured interviews with teachers, this paper discusses such an endeavour in which a museum exhibition on identity and belonging is employed as an interactive space for meaningful encounter among students and as a form of professional learning that enlivened teaching practice. Using the concept of reflexive ethnicity, this paper examines whether cognitive and affective encounters outside the ‘school gate’ create opportunities for critical learning about ethnicity that can complement and enhance school curricula and classroom learning. More importantly, the paper explores how the possibility of building on such activities to create and sustain teaching practice can challenge entrenched static notions of ethnicity. The paper concludes that reflexive encounters with ‘difference’ within an interactive museum space can unsettle prejudice and provide a deeper and more meaningful understanding of ethnic identity that goes beyond rote classroom learning.

Despite a cultural positioning of care at the margins of academia, student parents now represent a significant proportion of the higher education population in England and in other Western countries. Research shows that, beyond the diversity of their experiences, time, childcare, financial, and well-being related issues prevail among them. However, extant research concentrates mostly on the experiential level – often alluding to policies, yet rarely focusing on their role in compounding or easing the issues experienced by this group. Using the lens of sociological and feminist theories and drawing on data collected in ten English higher education institutions, this paper addresses this dearth of research. It does argue that, through policies that overall tend to be geared towards childfree students, universities contribute to the marginalisation of student parents within higher education. However, despite the prevalence of such policies, attempts to redefine the student body/ies in more inclusive ways are also identified, suggesting a partial transformation of academic cultures. Through its identification and discussion of various institutional policy approaches to student parents, this paper attempts to further the development of a sociology linking areas of society and of people's lives (in this case, care and academia) which have historically been constructed as separate, and to understand how institutional policies reproduce or challenge this binary.

This paper considers the effect of recent education policy on assessment practices in English primary schools and how these affect relationships between teachers and pupils in an increasingly market-driven school system. Previous research has focused largely on the effect of markets at a systemic level, but less attention has been paid to how marketisation plays out in teachers' work at classroom level. Similarly, research on assessment has tended to examine teachers' practices in relation to pupils' learning rather than examining it in terms of the role it plays in teachers' professional working lives. This paper brings these ideas together, using the latter as the context for understanding the former. In particular, it focuses on recent policy changes to the way schools in England are evaluated, moving from final attainment to pupils' progress ‘in-year’, and considers their potential for altering the dynamics within schools rather than just between them. It draws on a small-scale, interpretive, empirical study involving interviews with primary teachers in England. Data from this study are used to illustrate how tensions can arise for teachers and how internal market competition can be set up between them in which pupils' achievements become a commodity to be made use of, encouraging teachers to consider pupils' achievements as private, rather than public, goods. The paper thus provides a starting point for exploring the effect of market-orientated education policy on teachers' assessment practices at the in-school level and briefly examines some of the implications of this effect.

The term ‘boundary-work’ is used to refer to the constant effort to draw and re-draw the boundary of science; it has long been portrayed as constructed by the stakeholders of science to demarcate science from non-science to establish the authority of science. Twenty-nine semi-structured interviews were carried out with students from one university in England, originally to explore their views about genetically modified (GM) food. However, the distinctive repertoires adopted by students of natural science as opposed to humanities and social sciences were striking. As a result, the focus of this study shifted to examine the discourse students adopted to talk about a controversial scientific topic, using GM food as a case study. This paper shows that the boundary between scientific and non-scientific academic disciplines is heavily ingrained in university students' discourse and it is collectively constructed by both actors that are included in, and excluded from, the institution of science. The innate authority assigned to the institution of science is found to have deepened the gap between scientific and non-scientific disciplines. In this study, science disciplines were portrayed as coherent and consistent, following similar scientific methods and philosophy whereas humanities and social sciences disciplines were merely considered as ‘non-science’ disciplines. Hence, this paper suggests the wide scope of science should be better recognised and acknowledged in the education system. Finally, this paper demonstrates that people's role in relation to the institution of science has an impact on their discourse about and, perhaps subsequently, their views towards, science and technology.

The word wellbeing is ubiquitous in political discourse, and concerns about childhood wellbeing are particularly rife. This paper identifies, in the context of Scottish policy, how different professional discourses of wellbeing have migrated into education policy and it examines how this relates to learning. Taking a view of policy enactment as recontextualisation, the paper also explores how teachers and policy actors understand their role in supporting wellbeing. The paper shows how Scottish policy portrays wellbeing as personal skills of self-management (discourses of health promotion, and of social and emotional literacy) fostered through a caring environment. Health and wellbeing is represented as a prerequisite for learning, rather than an outcome of education. The contribution of teaching and learning to childhood wellbeing is over-shadowed. While some interviewees repeated or reinforced the main messages of policy, others took a more nuanced view, identifying how a high quality learning experience could enhance the lives of children in the present and the future. Moreover, teacher interviews showed how good relationships were not simply a foundation for learning; they were also a product of the shared pedagogical endeavour. The paper concludes by suggesting that the relationship between learning and wellbeing can be considered at different levels. At a basic level psychological and physical wellbeing enhances opportunities to engage in education, but at a more complex level, the choices that teachers make about content and pedagogy can create opportunities for young people to lead lives they have reason to value.

The generation, processing and circulation of data in digital form is now an integral aspect of contemporary schooling. Based upon empirical study of two secondary school settings in Australia, this paper considers the different forms of digitally-based ‘data work’ engaged in by school leaders, managers, administrators and teachers. In particular, three distinct aspects of school data work are explored: (i) the distinction between official ‘mandated’ data requirements from external government agencies, and the unofficial efforts to generate and work with ‘useful’ data; (ii) the highly mediated nature of digital data work within schools; (iii) the ways in which digital data lead to compromised knowledge and ‘work arounds’. These findings, it is argued, illustrate the embedding of digital data within secondary schools as a technology of (self)control in ways that tend to reinforce dominant cultures of school administration and management. As such, the paper considers how the restrictive forms of data governance currently at large within school systems might be problematized and acted against.

This paper is set against a backdrop of contemporary concerns about Britishness. It explores the dominant view that unprecedented levels of cultural diversity within western contexts such as the UK are undermining social cohesion and are attributable to minority groups’ failure to connect or assimilate with mainstream ‘British’ (read White Anglo) culture. The paper focuses on how these issues play out for several of the key teachers at ‘Hamilton Court’, a large English comprehensive multicultural school. Despite the school being a socially cohesive space, these teachers were concerned with students’ lack of affiliation with ‘British’ culture. The paper examines these concerns through critical lenses that problematise reductionist and racialised understandings of Britishness and assumptions that associate an affiliation with Britishness with generating social cohesion. Against this backdrop, the paper provides further warrant for continued critical discussion about issues of Britishness, multiculturalism and schooling.

In the context of the international problem of ‘early school leaving’, this paper explores the issue of sustained participation in upper secondary education in England. It focuses in particular on the position of middle attainers, who constitute a large proportion of the cohort and whose progress will be vital in realising the Government’s goal of ‘Raising the Participation Age’ to 18 by 2015. The paper draws on evidence from national research undertaken as part of the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training in England and Wales and analysis of New Labour and Coalition policy between 2000-2012. It uses a three-year local study of 2400 14- and 16-year-olds in an established school/college consortium to illustrate the effects of policy and practice on middle attainers. We argue that this important group of young people was ‘half-served’ by New Labour, because of its incomplete and contradictory 14-19 reforms, and is now being ‘overlooked’ by Coalition policy because of its emphasis on high attainers. We conclude by suggesting a range of measures to support the 14+ participation, progression and transition of middle attainers in the English education and training system

This paper, based on some findings of a wider three-year study, sets forth the issue of languages used and taught in education as a dimension of inequality and highlights its implications for widening participation and access in the multilingual context of Pakistan. The paper takes secondary education in private and government schools in Pakistan as a point of departure, and through themes that emerge from a qualitative multiple-case studies account of 32 participants (final year graduating students and their same-sex five- to six-years older siblings) explores issues of inequality with reference to Amertya Sen’s capability approach and Pierre Bourdieu’s social critical theory. The findings revealed that the concurrent processes of (a) hegemony of English; (b) its discriminatory distribution through schooling; and (c) devaluation of local languages, led by the language policy and mediated through educational institutions, diminished the transformative impact of education in expanding opportunities for widening participation and access. Issues of inequality continue to haunt the underprivileged despite their secondary education. The paper highlights the importance of considering the political economy of languages chosen and taught in formal education as a means of evaluating social justice in educational contexts and considering languages in education decisions with reference to national language policy.

Teacher effectiveness research now informs the rationale of much Australian education policy aimed at redressing student under-achievement. The approach draws a ‘straight line’ between teacher practice and student outcomes, ‘controlling’ for and ultimately dismissive of other possible influences. The paper calls into question this conception of teaching–learning relations, particularly the extent to which teaching practice can be reasonably quantified and improvements in students' academic achievement can be solely attributed to and/or sole responsibility placed on the pedagogic strategies employed by teachers. Drawing on the theoretical resources of Foucault and Bourdieu, the paper argues further that teacher effectiveness research is flawed in both means and ends. It concludes that in its ranking of student and teacher performance, such research actually works against the purposes of education; specifically, authentic teaching and learning.

This paper is based on research that examined intergenerational dynamics amongst British South Asians regarding education and family life. The study investigated the perspectives of grandparents, parents and young people to establish how family attributes and education were perceived by these three groups. The methods used to gather data were focus groups and individual interviews. These were complemented by digital ethnography, which involved using photographs taken by the young people for reflection during interviews. Drawing on Bourdieu, Putnam and Coleman’s theses of cultural and social capitals, the paper forwards the concept of educational capital, as the findings suggest a high emphasis on the acquisition of educational capital for upward social mobility amongst all groups.

This paper explores the possibilities for pedagogy inherent in the reading practices which emerged from an extra-curricular graphic novel reading group set up in a Scottish secondary school. The research is presented within the framework of the New Literacy Studies and its focus on ‘practices' and ‘events' but, more specifically, it uses the framework developed by researchers working on the Literacies for Learning in Further Education project conducted recently in the United Kingdom. This framework allows a more detailed exploration of ‘events' by unpacking the fine-grained aspects that compose a literacy practice. This paper aims to identify, trace and analyse the aspects of the emerging new practice of this Reading Group. While the framework it employs is based on an opposition between curricular and non-curricular practices, the data presented in this paper derives from an extra-curricular activity uniquely positioned inside the school but outside of the official curriculum. By focussing on notions of identity and process in particular, the paper presents a critique of the ways in which literacy practices which take place outside of the classroom have been undervalued or ignored by educational policy and practice.

The paper is theoretically grounded in Cultural Historical Activity Theory, which holds that human development is founded within participation in social and cultural practices. In particular, the teaching of literacy is shaped not only by the curriculum as designated by policy makers and the institution in which it is located, but also by the individuals' understanding of what literacy and learning involves and how they act to achieve their goals. The paper explores data from a project that investigated the relationship between classroom talk and the teaching of writing in six early‐years classrooms. Participants' own understandings of teaching and learning need to be taken into account by researchers and policy makers. Cultural Historical Activity Theory has been used to explore the dynamic relationship between activity at societal, institutional and individual levels. It is argued that researchers and policy makers need to take account of the wider socio‐cultural context in planning and evaluating curri...

In this paper, the focus is on how a group of Australian educators support student equity through cultural recognition. Young’s theorising of justice is drawn on to illuminate the problematic impacts arising from the group’s efforts to value students’ cultural difference associated, for example, with quantifying justice along distributive lines and with essentialising student difference as negation and lack within a frame of cultural imperialism. These theoretical tools draw attention to, and support a critical examination of, the social rules and relations within the school that create barriers to equity. Towards reconciling discrepancies relating to how student difference might best be supported, the paper endorses the prevailing imperative of centring students’ perspectives and experiences. Such centring remains crucial to educators recognising the partiality and interest within their attempts to ‘help’ marginalised students and disrupting the relations of teacher privilege and authority that reinscrib...

Civic participation of young people around the world is routinely described in deficit terms, as they are labelled apathetic, devoid of political knowledge, disengaged from the community and self‐absorbed. This paper argues that the connectivity of time, space and social values are integral to understanding the performances of young people as civic subjects. Today’s youth negotiate unstable social, economic and environmental conditions, new technologies and new forms of community. Loyalty, citizenship and notions of belonging take on new meanings in these changing global conditions. Using the socio‐spatial theories of Lefebvre and Foucault and the tools of critical discourse analysis this paper argues that the chronotope, or time/space relationship of universities, produces student citizens who, in resistance to a complex global society, create a cocooned space, which focuses on moral and spiritual values that can be enacted on a personal level.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and elsewhere are having a hard time, pushed into the marketplace with the turn to ‘academic capitalism’ and now suffering the effects of the economic downturn. Increasingly, the discourse of ‘excellence’ is being invoked as HEIs are held to account and public funding for research is predicated on the basis of ‘impact’. What effect is this having on the long‐established ideals appealed to in the idea of a university (if such an idea can be said to exist)? This paper adopts an autoethnographic approach in order to examine the ways in which dominant discourses are operationalised in the university through everyday communications and how, in turn, this impacts on the development of academic identities. The aim of this paper then is to examine the often uncomfortable point of insertion between the personal and the institutional in and through which subjectivities and identities are constituted as a means to understand the state we’re in.

In Northern Ireland, where the majority of children are educated at schools attended mainly by coreligionists, the debate concerning the role of schools in perpetuating intergroup hostilities has recently been reignited. Against questions regarding the efficacy of community relations policy in education, the research reported in this paper employs qualitative methods to examine social identity and intergroup attitudes amongst children attending a state controlled Protestant school and the school’s response to dealing with issues of diversity and difference. Findings suggest a relationship between ethnic isolation experienced by children and negative intergroup social attitudes and the discussion focuses on issues germane to the separateness of the school that are likely to contribute to strong ‘own’ group bias, stereotyping and prejudice. The implication of the school’s separate status for its engagement with a policy framework for relationship building is also considered. The paper concludes with some po...

In my work with white teachers, predominantly female, I assert that ‘desire’ is functioning to produce silent discourses that serve to perpetuate a continuation of white privilege. Based on a qualitative research study exploring the nature of silences in teacher education classrooms, this paper seeks to explore how desire is functioning to produce such silences and how they can be productively understood. Using the concept of desire as presented by Deleuze, this paper engages a notion of desire that is not spawned from lack but a desire that is generative and seeking, resulting in the production of privilege, power and voice.

This paper presents data collected in individual case studies that aimed to investigate children and their families who succeeded against the usual ‘odds’ of disadvantage. Funded as an extension of EPPE 3–11 by the Cabinet Office for the Equalities Review, the study focused particularly closely upon the performance of disadvantaged children from White and minority ethnic groups. The study found that disadvantaged families often have high aspirations for their children and provide significant educational support through ‘concerted cultivation’. The paper discusses the implications for policy and for practice and argues that much of the popular criticism of state policies related to social exclusion fail to acknowledge the need to engage with the policy in action as well as in theory. It is also argued that these policies offer significant and valuable contexts for supporting efforts on the part of families and individuals to achieve success in education ‘against the odds’.

In this paper we describe a UK‐based participatory action research project that looks beyond the discourse of tolerance to investigate and challenge heteronormative processes in primary schools through reflective action research. This 28‐month ESRC‐funded project supports 15 primary teachers working in schools in three regions of the UK to develop action research projects that address lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in their own schools and classrooms. In this paper we will examine how the original principles on which the project design was based have manifested themselves throughout the course of the project, drawing upon examples of classroom practice and reflective discussions among project team members. We will explore how designing intentionally for collective participation has produced spaces for people to do and think in ways that have not only gone beyond what we imagined but have also challenged and sometimes contradicted our own ways of thinking.

This paper examines young British people's conceptualisation of identity and citizenship. Data were gathered through a questionnaire survey from 442 young male and female citizens of majority and minority ethnic origins, aged 14–24 years and at different stages of education, employment and non‐employment. This was followed up by in‐depth interviews with a stratified sample of 40 participants. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, and by closely examining the two key concepts of identity and citizenship, the paper analyses the ways in which young Britons perceive their multiple identities and citizenship status. The research shows that education and career are the major priorities of these young people. They have clear notions of identity and citizenship and most are comfortable with their own identities and feelings of citizenship. However, some of those who are from a minority ethnic background have doubts about being viewed as British citizens because of racial harassment or stereotyping, partic...

This paper addresses the question of interaction between home and international students using qualitative data from 100 home students at two ‘teaching intensive’ universities in the southwest of England. Stephan and Stephan’s Integrated Threat Theory is used to analyse the data, finding evidence for all four types of threat that they predict when outgroups interact. It is found that home students perceive threats to their academic success and group identity from the presence of international students on the campus and in the classroom. These are linked to anxieties around ‘mindful’ forms of interaction and a taboo around the discussion of difference, leading to a ‘passive xenophobia’ for the majority. The paper concludes that Integrated Threat Theory is a useful tool in critiquing the ‘internationalisation at home’ agenda, making suggestions for policies and practices that may alleviate perceived threats, thereby improving the quality and outcomes of intercultural interaction.

This paper examines the impact of gender and ?race? on young people?s perceptions of the educational and labour market opportunities available to them after they complete their compulsory schooling in England. Its findings are based on a study of the views of girls and boys about the government-supported ?Apprenticeships? programme, which, because it reflects labour market conditions, is highly gendered and also segregated by ethnicity. The research shows that young people receive very little practical information and guidance about the consequences of pursuing particular occupational pathways, and are not engaged in any formal opportunities to debate gender and ethnic stereotyping as related to the labour market. This is particularly worrying for females who populate apprenticeships in sectors with lower completion rates and levels of pay, and which create less opportunity for progression. In addition, the research reveals that young people from non-White backgrounds are more reliant on ?official? sources of guidance (as opposed to friends and families) for their labour market knowledge. The paper argues that, because good quality apprenticeships can provide a strong platform for lifelong learning and career progression, young people need much more detailed information about how to compare a work-based pathway with full-time education. At the same time, they also need to understand that apprenticeships (and jobs more generally) in some sectors may result in very limited opportunities for career advancement.

The relationship between research and policy and practice in education is a long‐standing issue in many countries. Focusing on the UK Government, which is responsible for education in England, this paper looks at the criticisms of education research that have been made in recent years by government and related non‐departmental public bodies and stakeholders. It then looks in more detail at specific examples of the use that has—and has not—been made of research in developing policy. But rather than produce a balance sheet of pluses and minuses in policy makers' use of evidence, the paper emphasises the realities of the policy making process and the difficulties in establishing consistently and exclusively evidence‐based policy. At the same time, it argues that researchers should beware of allowing their work to be shaped entirely by the Government's call for research that is directly useful to policy by always prioritising applied or practice‐based approaches. The paper concludes by highlighting the need f...

The high achievement of British–Chinese pupils in the British education system is established in the official literature, but few studies have asked British–Chinese pupils or parents about the factors contributing to their success. This paper explores value of education as a possible contributory aspect. It investigates the extent to which British–Chinese pupils and their parents value education, and the rationale behind their constructions in this regard. Cultural issues in the transmission of values are also explored. The findings demonstrate that British–Chinese pupils and their parents place an extremely high value on education, irrespective of social class and gender. However, pupils and parents do not necessarily provide the same explanations for this value. There is evidence, though, that the discourse of ‘value of education’ is mobilised as part of a cultural construction of racialised boundaries relating to the diasporic habitus of the Chinese in Britain. The paper discusses the benefits, costs a...

Action is a highly theorised aspect of social life nonetheless it remains a relatively neglected source of data within educational research. This paper attempts to highlight the significance of the analysis of organised action within educational research. It describes and demonstrates an analytical approach to action applicable to the classroom developed from approaches to the analysis of bodily communication and action in drama education (Franks, 1995 & 1996) and from new approaches to rhetoric developed in the research project ‘Rhetorics of the Science Classroom’ funded by the ESRC (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn & Tsatsarelis, forthcoming). These approaches draw on social semiotic theories of making meaning in order to describe the complex relationship between the semiotics of social action and the situated experience of learning in the classroom. This paper describes how action realises meanings and shapes classroom interaction through the application of the schema to video data from a science lesson on energy with year nine pupils (14 years-old). Finally, it draws attention to the research and pedagogical implications of a focus on action in the science classroom and in education more generally.

The paper explores the threat of Balkanisation. Whereas in the USA the debate has focused on competing research paradigms, in the UK it is seen to result from threats to the status quo posed by the media's portrayal of government hostility to education. This has led to the creation of folk devils whose ideas spread moral panic amongst the research community. The paper identifies three such folk devils and argues that the moral panic comes from a research community that has not learned to constrain its disagreements. The paper argues a case for an educative community based on constrained disagreement that is contained by its shared desire for ethical, creative and emancipatory solutions to educational problems. An example of a small, local research community is used to outline the ‘promises and perils’ of such a solution. *Presidential Address to the British Educational Research Association given at the Annual Conference, Queen's University, Belfast, August 1998.

values are made explicit. In this paper, I look back on a programme of research on parental choice which I carried out more than 10 years ago and explain how this was related to the policy agenda at the time. After summarising the main findings, the research is subjected to some criticism-in particular for its parochialism and its failure to adopt a comparative perspective. The paper then reviews policy developments in Scotland and England since that time, describes the current policy agenda and indicates how further research might respond to this. It concludes that the key policy issue to which research should now be addressed is the relationship between choice and diversity and argues that this should be studied comparatively across a number of different educational systems through research which seeks to investigate the implications of each principle for the other and for other societal values.

This paper begins with a brief narrative of the past 20 years of gender reform for Australian schools and of recent developments — including the attention paid to boys’ education. This narrative points to the implications of changing Commonwealth federal state relations for gender reform. The second section offers an account of the micro‐politics of macro‐reforms. This draws from research on the reception of gender reform policies in schools and discusses the practices and processes of schools’ gender reform work, indicating some of the limitations and strengths of gender reform policies. The third section identifies the current contexts of gender reform, which include the more extended fields of educational policy and politics, the broader politics of the state itself and more widely still, major economic and cultural shifts. Here the paper will offer an interpretation of the ongoing process of centralised and decentralised restructuring in education and of its implications for feminist work for...

The trend towards giving British secondary schools a fuller role in initial teacher education (ITE) has been gathering pace for much of the second half of this century. The impetuses driving this development have been partly professional and partly political. However, a recent political initiative (Circular 9/92, Department for Education, 1992) precipitated the development of school‐based ITE beyond what the professional evidence supported. This paper examines teachers’ perceptions of the costs and benefits to schools of involvement in school‐based ITE, as instituted by Circular 9/92, distinguishing between tangible and intangible costs and benefits. It is based on a survey of schools from throughout England and Wales. Four groups of teachers with different levels of involvement and managerial responsibility were sampled. The paper also explores teachers’ perceptions of the relationship between costs and benefits before offering some concluding speculations on the future of school‐based ITE.

We are witnessing today the all‐embracing undermining of the absolute character of the foundations of Enlightenment thought. This has had effects on different fields of knowledge, and the educational field is not an exception. The consequences produced by this process of ‘erosion’ of foundations is, of course, different in the so‐called First, Second and Third World countries. The way in which the post‐modern condition has been conceptualised by some scholars in Third World countries, particularly in the educational field circumscribes the scope of this paper. This paper illustrates: (1) the more generalised meanings of the term ‘post‐modernity’ in Latin America; (2) the modern/post‐modern debate in the educational field held by some influential educational theoreticians; (3) my own position concerning post‐modernity as a horizon of intelligibility and as an existential condition; and (4) my own remarks about some of the effects that the post‐modern horizon offers to and demands from those concer...

In the late 1980s UK education witnessed a few highly publicised, controversial and contentious cases of white parents successfully campaigning to have their children educated in predominantly white schools. Since then educational reforms have sought to give parents even greater choice of school, while discussion around white parental choice and ‘race’ has remained largely silent. This paper reopens that debate by examining the extent to which ‘race’ is a factor in white parents’ choice of school. It draws on the quantitative and qualitative findings of the Parental and School Choice Interaction (PASCI) Study, a 3‐year longitudinal investigation into the interaction between parental choice of school and school decision‐making, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. The paper concludes by discussing the complex picture arising from the data and the implications of the findings for education policy.

This paper explores the role of professionals employed in the special education section of local education authorities (LEAs). Its examination of the political, cultural and financial contexts in which decision‐making occurs is illustrated by data collected in interviews with LEA personnel in five local authorities. The first section of the paper examines the nature and effects of professional control in special education. Depoliticisation, individualisation and a concentration on technical solutions are seen as the main outcomes of professional control. The second section of the paper analyses the discourses which underpin professional notions of special education. The paper argues that it is the nature of these discourses which renders special education vulnerable to incursions by recent public sector reforms; namely managerialism and the concomitant shift towards rule‐based decision‐making. It concludes that the dominant discourses in special education are ill‐equipped to penetrate beyond proc...

The title for this paper is partly taken from a book chapter by Anne Seller (1994), ‘Should the feminist philosopher stay at home?’ I use it because it encapsulates the ethical issues that arose for me as I did my research on the educational experiences of Muslim girls in a private Muslim girls’ school and a single-sex state school with a high percentage of Muslim students. The paper considers the methodological and ethical issues involved in doing a piece of cross-cultural research. It is a personal exploration of how I, as a white, non-Muslim and not formally religious person, worked with two different Muslim communities. It argues for a feminist and post-structural approach to the research process so that the subjectivity of the researcher is explicitly placed in any piece of research and the limitations of the research are then openly acknowledged. It further argues that using the Foucauldian notion of discourse as an analytical tool, allows for an explanation for the discursive framework in ...