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This paper is concerned with the me of the 'competency' movement in education and beyond. It argues that 'competency' should be understood in terms of a change in the social control of expertise in society involving a move from a relatively autonomous form of liberal professional community to more direct State control. This, in turn, is located within a broader analysis of the nature of regulation in late modern societies and draws upon the recent work of Giddens and Bernstein in order to analyse the positioning of expertise between its primary theoretical base in higher education and the social relations of everyday life with which it is concerned. The move by the National Council for Vocational Qualifications into the area of graduate level occupations ('NVQ level 5') is discussed with reference to the role of 'functional analysis' as a methodology for translating expertise into 'competencies' and controlling professional practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women constitute a very small minority of the full time academic staff in British universities and are concentrated in the lower grades. Statistical evidence points to the fact that an important reason for this is that discrimination exists within the academic profession. However, there is very little empirical information on the nature of this discrimination and the institutional processes that serve to maintain it. The study reported here seeks to identify and illuminate these processes through the experiences and perceptions of women academies themselves. A total of 43 women were interviewed at length using a semi-structured interview schedule, exploring issues such as recruitment and selection, probation, career development, appraisal, positions of power and the roles of women academics. It is suggested, in this paper, that we can begin to understand some of the factors which limit women's access to and success within the profession by examining the evidence of women who have survived within the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The market alternative in education is gaining ground in policy-making circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Parental choice and school competition are seen as ways of achieving reform and raising standards while at the same time reducing State intervention into education planning. This paper interrogates the arguments made for markets and against public monopoly schooling,, and it is argued that on both counts of advocates are partial and flawed. The failure to address the bases and effects of inequalities of the market are given particular attention. It is argued that markets in education provide the possibility for the pursuit of class advantage and generate a differentiated and stratified system of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an ethnographic study of vocational students in a tertiary college in England who intend entering a service industry which expanded in the 1980s and is predicted to expand into the next decade. The paper focuses on a social class and gender mixed group of mainly 17-19 year-old Business and Technology Education Council National Diploma students in the second year of their course at "Gastronomic Tertiary College" in a northern heavy-industrial city. The field-work was conducted throughout the academic year 1988-1989, the author being a participant observer with a group of about 20 students throughout their time in college. The majority were from working-class backgrounds, mostly skilled social class III, and the minority from social class II. The data are derived from recorded individual and group "conversations with a purpose" held during the college day, together with field notes. Although the concept of correspondence has been invoked, it has been argued that the dynamics of reproduction take place on contradictory cultural terrain, characterised by contestation and conflict, no matter how latent and corporate.

Debate on teacher quality and quality in teaching and teacher education has been as vigorous in Australia as it has been in the UK and the USA In Australia, however, reform in teacher education has been subsumed within a national metapolicy of corporate federalism which is an amalgam of beliefs or discourses including neo-corporatism, economic rationalism, corporate managerialism and human capital The paper analyses the most recent document on reform of teacher education in Australia (the Ebbeck Report) and shows how its policy formulation is influenced by the discourse of corporate federalism It also shows how micro-economic reform in this sector is related to reforms in other sectors of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships between sociology, democracy and education. Its main argument is that post-modernist theory (in spite of its own inherent inconsistencies) can be interpreted as a constructive challenge to the hierarchical presuppositions of academic sociology. It can thus help to provide a theoretical framework for formulating a new set of institutional arrangements for social inquiry, which would reconstitute sociology as a democratic educational practice. In order for this to occur, sociology must recognise that the problematic nature of the social relationships of authoritative interpretation constitute a key theoretical problem: a 'democratic' sociology must re-focus its efforts on formulating methods for critique which would help to enfranchise practitioners in the rigorous analysts of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critique of neo-liberal political economy of education. It is argued that neo-liberal ideology trades off democracy against 'economic efficiency.' However, the consequence of the application of neo-liberal principles to education is that overall standards of education are likely to decline, thereby creating the conditions for a low skilled, low morale workforce. It is suggested that this outcome is consistent with the Neo-liberal creation of a low wage low technology economy. On the basis of the critique, an alternative education system concerned with meeting the aims of an education for a democratic, economically sophisticated, society is sketched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between the Conservative 'educational reforms' in the 1980s, which purported to give parents more democratic rights as consumers and participants in education, and changes in family life in Britain. It focuses on those demographic, familial changes, in particular in gender relationships, towards mothers having more public and private responsibilities for children and their education. It looks at whether these changes in family life have, in fact, been taken account of in 'educational reforms'. It asks the question about whether 'education reforms' which give more democratic rights to parents in general allow for more democratic rights for women as mothers, in the contexts of lone motherhood, maternal participation in paid employment and adult/higher education. On the other hand, are the implications of such education changes to increase the private responsibilities, rather than democratic rights, of motherhood? Although family is on the education policy agenda, it is not clear that gender is on the agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the Queensland Department of Education's Equal Opportunity Policy for Girls and Boys and the Implementing Guidelines for that policy within the context of the pedagogical practices of one secondary school. Most recent movement in sociology of education has been the recovery of human agency as a dynamic force within schools which had been previously seen as determining structures. This paper attempts to address this recovery of agency within a structural theory of education. The assumption of the individual as a passive recipient of society's message through institutions such as the school failed to account for the lived experience of the practitioners and students and precluded the possibility of transformative work. The theoretical purpose of this article is directly linked to attempt to understand gender relations as integral to the structure of schooling and the subjective positions made possible within such structure. There are a variety of difficulties associated with this work which are raised at appropriate places in the article.

In this paper an analysis of the concept of agency is undertaken. The traditional or agonistic definition of agency which assumes that to be a person is to have agency is rejected, in favour of a definition that shows the way in which agency may be discursively constructed as a positioning made available to some but not to others. This analysis is then applied to an episode in a primary school classroom to see whether the discursive practices in that classroom can be said to position the students as agentic. The particular classroom was chosen on the basis of the teacher's explicit wish that his students be agentic, but what the analysis shows is the extreme complexity involved in actually carrying this off given all of the contradictory beliefs and practices that militate against children actually being agentic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the processes of reproduction in education one must not only take account of the resistances of subordinated groups, but also of the counter-resistance which develops in response to these. Proponents of resistance theory have tended to ignore the responses of powerful groups to emerging resistances. Two major reasons are suggested for this, one being the failure of reproduction theorists to take cognisance of unique cultural and political contexts within which reproduction takes place, and the other being the lack of attention given to educational mediators. Taking the case of Irish second-level education, it is shown how unique cultural, historical and political forces contribute to the development of counter-resistance. In particular, it is suggested that the post-colonial status of the country is central to understanding the reproduction processes within it. The paper also highlights the inadequacy of defining the parameters of the reproduction debate in terms of an interplay of interests between social classes and the State alone. While the State and social classes are key actors in the educational site, so are educational mediators, viz those who manage and administer educational services on a day-to-day basis. It is proposed that educational mediators (whose character varies from one society to another) are often powerful agents of counter-resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the special issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy journal entitled Education, Training and Economic Performance. In a speech to the annual conference of the Association of Colleges of Further and Higher Education in London on February 15, 1989, Kenneth Baker, British Secretary of State for Educational and Science, speaking on Further Education a new strategy, talked about the problems of sludge speak, which dominates the rhetoric of further education and has to be translated into everyday language. If one examines the sludge speak of his speech and the vision of further education he has, then it is clear that in everyday language people might conclude, in polite phraseology, that is a real mess. This series of papers from the Oxford Review of Economic Policy provides a clear set of well-argued articles which students of the field should find more than useful in their essays and dissertation work. The special issue begins with a historical review of education, training and economic performance and quotes a lecture in 1852 on Industrial Instruction on the Continent which argued that improvements in technical education were urgently required if British manufacturers were to maintain their lead over foreign competitors.

In this paper, the argument is made that forms of consciousness, knowledge, sentiments and values that teachers use as part of their cultural repertoires in schools are the result of social constitution The `social' is composed of a number of overlapping discourses that are characteristic of schools everywhere `Teacher culture' is a signifier for the production and consumption of these discourses Recent trends to emphasise the plurality of teacher culture(s) are countered by a review of work that suggests more uniformity in teacher culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on gender and education has burgeoned since the mid-1970s Inequality in the classroom has been one theme in such research, including the charge that teachers give preferential treatment to boys. Another has been the identification of school processes and practices which convey particular conceptions of and boundaries between masculinity and femininity Less often studied is the teacher herself of himself. In particular, the question arises of why, after a decade or so of feminist research on sexism and education, teacher appear to make relatively little effort to implement antisexist initiatives. The paper considers four possible explanations for this situation. Antisexist initiatives may be particularly uncongenial or threatening by their nature or mode of introduction. Characteristics of teachers such as age, sex or social class may influence receptivity to reform. Teacher ideologies about gender or education may set limits to what appears acceptable Conditions under which teachers work may not be conducive to enthusiastic innovation. The Challenge for sociologists is to tease out interrelationships and assess the relative weights of these factors, the challenge for feminists is to transcend the gap between principled scholarship and practical strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study was designed to elucidate the ways in which the distribution of school knowledge contributes to processes of cultural and social reproduction. Three schools in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre were studied for this purpose a private institution serving an upper class clientele, a public school serving children of the middle class, and a public school attended by working-class children. Two classrooms at each of the tree schools were intensively observed during one semester. Teachers and staff were interviewed concerning their pedagogical views. Patterns of instruction and control observed at the tree schools suggest that children from different social classes receive substantially different kinds of schooling. The most obvious distinction in ideological discourse observed among staff members at the three schools concerns the existence of an explicit pedagogy endorsed at the private school and the concomitant absence of any such similar rationale at the other two schools. The final sections of the paper discuss the implications of these findings for processes of cultural and social reproduction and their relation to relevant literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the social organization of news sessions in infants and primary classrooms. We argue that these events are essentially occasions for the initiation of pupils into aspects of school knowledge and culture, although they are ostensibly spaces in the school day where children may introduce their own topics and interests. We show, through a detailed conversational analysis of varieties of morning news events, how these activities are stage-managed, what the nature of the children's contributions are, and how these are organized legitimize school knowledge and to define pupil-teacher relationships, especially the teacher as primary receiver and announcer of news. The transformation of children into pupils is seen to occur in news sessions as much as in any other classroom activity. The distinctive feature of news sessions in the first years of schooling is that these are early instruction in how the private/personal realm can be fitted to the contours of the public/official curriculum, how everyday life interests are subordinated to and appropriated by the culture of the school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Directions in schooling for tribal Aborigines in Australia have long been influenced by psychological and anthropological perspectives. This paper argues that these are inadequate and cannot account for the frequent failure of school to meet community expectations. It is argued that there is a need for new directions based on analysis of the social relations of Aboriginal education. The possibilities opened up by such an analysis are discussed with reference to recent Aboriginal initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical educationalists have analysed work-experience as an activity which provides poor quality and unreflected experiences for school students and serves to `mystify capitalist relations of production'. Using data gathered from a case-study which examines the experiences of a group of students who had recently returned from a week in a place of work, this paper suggests that such a view may be misleading. Furthermore, the experiences of students in this study suggests that work placements may constitute the site of an activity through which the validity of capitalist social relations of production and the labour process may be challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue, 'what is new in the new vocationalism?' It concentrates on 'behavioural occupationalism', i. e. the derivation of 'educational' objectives from behaviourally defined occupational skills as constructed through occupational skills inventories. It contrasts this approach to 'the world of work' with that current in the ROSLA period under the influence of the Newsom Report. It is argued that the two approaches present radically different ways of contextualising 'the world of work' within educational discourse. The distinction between the behavioural and the liberal education approaches is explored in terms of a proposed restructuring of educational practices in terms of their relationship to (a) elaborating and potentially critical knowledge and (b) production as represented in a particular ideological form. It is argued that the 'new vocationalism' is expressing a new 'hidden curriculum' of the possessive individualism of market economics and that this reflects political and ideological imperatives rather than the immediate needs of the economy. The 'new vocationalism' is seen as an ideology of production regulating education rather than as an educational uteology servicing production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to Professor Swanwick's further critique of our sociological perspective on music education. We argue that criticisms made in relation to our positions on referentialism, the ability of people to appreciate music cross-culturally, and the various analytic categories of Meyer, Chester and Keil are all grounded in a desire to isolate the essence of `music' from social and cultural processes. We further argue that the difficulties perceived with our positions do not follow from a belief in the culture-specific significance of different musics per se, but rather from overly rigid and sometimes mistaken interpretation of our perspective. Finally, we point to the danger of assuming a cross-cultural category, `music', when many cultures have no equivalent word and use what we understand as `music' in ways vastly different to ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the assessment and evaluation of teachers in state provided schooling in Britain has never been simply a matter of technical competence. Judging teachers has always involved social, ideological and political considerations which have varied in different historical periods. An analysis is made of attempts to apply principles and procedures of assessment especially to teachers in urban working class schools. It is shown that these attempts have historically moved from a 'visible' strategy of direct imposition and surveillance to an 'invisible' strategy through the ethic of legitimated professionalism. Current developments in British schooling suggest, however, a possible return to more direct and visible procedures as 'teacher incompetence' is placed at the center of the education problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching and learning the various aspects of a school discipline's contents (its 'subject knowledge') are obviously part of the main agenda for high schools. While a vast body of material exists on curriculum contents, on pedagogic techniques for their dissemination and on the psychology of learning, very little attention has been paid to actual sites of learning in relation to the production of knowledge and its acquisition. This is especially so regarding the discursive practices which are the main means of teaching and learning in those places. This paper sets out to discover something of those practices and takes particular interest in the means by which 'commonsense' knowledge, i.e. knowledge which any member of a community might have, is relied upon as a resonance-both explicitly and implicitly-by teachers and students for the production and acquisition of 'formal' (or 'subject') knowledge. Our overall problematic is: assuming that learning cannot be done ab novo but must rely on whatever already existing resources can be mustered, how is the 'raw material', as it were, of quite ordinary knowledge utilized in the co-production of relatively more esoteric 'subject' knowledge? Such an approach could be taken to mean that ordinary information (knowledge that) is transformed in classrooms into 'subject' information. Doubtless this does occur. However, we should like to demonstrate some instances of the way in which teachers and students rely on procedural knowledge (knowledge how; knowledge of ways and means or methods) in order to work up knowledge of a school subject. In the present instance, it happens to be geographic knowledge that interest us, particularly as applied to ekistics, but no doubt the general problematic could be addressed to other areas of the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents several articles offering sociologists' views on cuts in British higher education as of 1984. John Brennan contributes a nation-wide view of the cuts in the public sector, outlines institutional policies and prejudices and suggests strategies for survival. His paper also shows that the distinctive ecology of public sector higher education poses both threats and opportunities for sociology. Meanwhile, Alan Waton provides a macro-view of the UGC action. Rosemary Deem writers of her experience as a County Councilor involved in working for the retention of courses in a public sector college and provides the only contribution with a happy ending. Also Ivan Reid discussed the problems and potentials of strategies for survival. According to Brennan, there never was a golden age for the polytechnics. He further said that they have experienced cuts and financial stringency over a long period of time. He also said that the effects have been gradual and have become almost taken for granted. Ivan Reid stated that it is difficult to establish whether sociology and sociology of education face threats over and above that posed to higher education in general. The intimate relationship of sociology of education with teacher education has meant that it has shared the fate of closures and cut-backs with the other disciplines of education and faced many of these well before the present situation.

This paper investigates certain aspects of the debate about the causes of unequal educational performance By analyzing two illustrative explanations of performance. It shows that the debate appears to be shaped by a fundamental theme in modern Western culture, the nature-culture opposition. This suggests that the knowledge that we have concerning educational performance is influenced not only by the social and political interests and positions of educators and researchers, but also by more basic cultural concerns, and if we want to understand both educational performance and the debate surrounding it, we need to be aware of this broad influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marxist sociology of education has been criticized in recent papers by Hickox and Hargreaves. It is argued that these writers largely misunderstand and misrepresent the work they criticize Hickox attributes a position to Marxist sociologists of education which few, if any, now hold Hargreaves makes a more powerful case, but is insufficiently familiar with Marxist scholarship to grasp the nature of the Marxist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the instructions on how a particular thesis submitted for publication in the "British Journal of Sociology of Education," must be written in order to include significant information about the paper. Pertinent information such as the name of the author, title of the thesis, the name of the university which awarded the degree, and a 100-word synopsis of the thesis as well as the author's email contact address must be included. Several sample theses are provided including "The Effect of 'Opportunity-to-Learn' and Classroom Pedagogy on Mathematics Achievement in Schools Serving Low Socio-economic Status Communities in the Cape Peninsula" and "Social Class, Pedagogy, and Achievement in Art."