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Framed as being in response to terrorist attacks and concerns about religious bias in some English schools, 'British Values' (BV) curriculum policy forms part of the British Government's Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, 2015. This includes a Duty on teachers in England to actively promote British Values to deter students from radicalisation. This paper, first, traces the history of Britishness in the curriculum to reveal a prevalence of nationalistic, colonial values. Next, an ensemble of recent policies and speeches focusing on British Values is analysed, using a psycho-political approach informed by anti-colonial scholarship. Finally, we interrogate two key critiques of the British Values curriculum discourse: the universality of British Values globally, and concerns over the securitisation of education. Findings indicate that the constitution of white British supremacist subjectivities operate through curriculum as a defence mechanism against perceived threats to white privilege, by normalising a racialised state-controlled social order. The focus is on 'British' values, but the analytic framework and findings have wider global significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominant focus in this paper is on issues of school context and, in particular, on the dimensions of context at a large English comprehensive school that enable it to thrive within the current demands of the contemporary audit culture. Featuring interview data gathered from a number of senior educators, the paper draws on Braun et al's. (Braun, A., S. Ball, M. Maguire, and K. Hoskins. 2011. "Taking Context Seriously: Towards Explaining Policy Enactments in the Secondary School." Discourse: Studies in the Politics of Education 32 (4): 585 -596) heuristic device for thinking about the 'situated', 'professional' and 'external' dimensions of context at the school. This device supports an analysis of the school's intake (in particular the high cultural and class related aspirations of parents and students) and its values (namely the school's traditional ethos of academic and behavioural excellence). The central argument of the paper is that these contextual dimensions contribute significantly to the school's capacity to forge a worthy school identity within the current hyperaccountable and competitive environment where academic achievement (along increasingly narrow and conservative lines) and maintaining standards in relation to this achievement are utmost priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper presents the case of a relatively low-profile policy initiative that has been successively reframed as part of larger policy ensembles within UK schools over a six-year period, and translated during this time at national and school levels. The policy examined is that of study support or out-of-hours learning. The trajectory of this policy is traced as it is first launched within an educational policy ensemble around the raising achievement agenda and then re-framed as part of the then New Labour government’s major educational and social policy agenda of Every Child Matters. Drawing on interview data from head teachers and teachers, the ways in which study support policy was translated in two contrasting schools over this period is explored, highlighting different tensions with national policy and local agendas. The ‘fate’ of study support as an initiative is questioned following a change of government in the UK and in the context of global education policy developments. This analysis of the re-framing of a low-profile policy adds to our understanding of the cycles of policy ensembles and their translation by different agents in different sites over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ideology without competence is a dangerous vice. But competence without ideology is a limited virtue. (D. Miliband, Minister of State for School Standards, DfES) Opportunistic attempts have been made by successive governments to establish--some would say impose--sets of criteria against which the effectiveness of not-for-profit organizations like schools can be gauged. Most have been subjective: the extent of staff involvement in decision-making, the appropriateness of the leadership shown by senior managers, the percentage of inspected classes regarded as 'good', and so on. Lately, UK government rhetoric, using a lexicon borrowed from Business and Economics, suggests a willingness to move to new systems of reportage; centred on improvement rather than blame, on critical friendship more than on confrontation. There appears no longer to be the puritanical tendency among policy-makers to adopt measures that cause pain in the belief that they alone can be right, but do they constitute (as critics like Thrupp suggest) a random collection of well-intentioned but poorly theorized policies, or can they be cogently conceptualized into a whole? Previously, improvement measures judged schooling simply, in terms of external stakeholder outcomes, but failed to capture the essence of what it was to be (or what it took to become) a successful improving school. This paper suggests that current government policy, whether knowingly or not, is essentially describing improvement from a different perspective--an internal perspective of 'intellectual capital'. The paper knits together government policy statements on school improvement with a re-conceptualization of intellectual capital specifically designed for schools, offering an imposed coherence to government policy that could potentially change the way we think about inspection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines ethnic segregation in schools as a field where policy inaction, or non-decision making, is rife. A theoretical framework rooted in historical institutionalism and combining critical junctures with path dependencies enables the study of non-decision making and policy inaction. Moving from non-decision making as a general phenomenon to the specific case of British education policies, the focus is on ethnoreligious segregation between White British and South Asian Muslim students, which has become a salient issue in British politics and society. After a general discussion, the article zooms in on a North English town presenting typical constellations of ethnic segregation and mixing in neighbourhoods and schools. The subsequent policy analysis shows how, from the mid-1980s until recently, non-decision making has been predominant. Given the ongoing problematization of ethnic segregation in British politics and society, a reversal from policy inaction to formal decision-making seems possible. The article offers insight into the inner workings of non-decision making that have wider application, transcending any given locality and policy sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the system in the UK as a case study, this paper begins by examining the relationship between the rise of the ‘new managerialism’ in the public services and the ideological framework that was provided for this by the convergence of key ideas emerging from the new right and new left. It looks then at the growth of the new educational bureaucracies to service this management culture and relates these to changes in the role of concepts of strategic management in the shift from the Cold War era to the present very different international configuration that has followed on from the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. It provides a critique of the pervasive, supervisory, performance management culture that has emerged in the public services by using organization theory to question the applicability of these processes to education. Most critiques of the new managerialism in education have engaged with it on sociological or political grounds without attempting to examine how these particular approaches are accounted for within organization theory. It focuses on the work of one influential theorist in the field, arguing that his work offers rich critical insights which are particularly applicable to the organizational forms of educational management. Finally it evaluates the influence of this management environment on the quality of education arguing that its obsessive focus on quantitative outcomes and the ‘measurable’ has been a key factor in the narrowing of horizons and the impoverishment of educational policy discourse under the present Government and its immediate predecessors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pupil Premium policy was introduced in 2010 by the UK coalition government to tackle the attainment gap disproportionately affecting children from low-income families. Semi-structured interviews and policy documents are examined for the way the policy has been enacted in a single comprehensive secondary school in England. In 2014, this school had a lower population of Pupil Premium pupils (18%) compared to (29%) nationally and (25%) countywide. Despite this, the study provides evidence that the Pupil Premium has become invested within and gives rise to, a number of neoliberal techniques, technologies and practices. The study bridges insights from Mitchell Dean’s ‘analytics of government’ and Ball et al.’s work on policy enactment to provide an in-depth, grounded analysis of the way the policy plays out within this school’s context. It argues that the combination of national accountability measures used to show impact for Pupil Premium, and the school’s ongoing struggle to raise overall attainment, leads school leaders and staff members to rethink the concept of disadvantage for their school population. This results in disadvantage being reconceptualised to fit a matrix of moral/pastoral obligations and efficiency/economic competitiveness, in which the tensions between these two orientations are uncomfortable and unresolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a new dataset to consider the relative effectiveness of secondary schools in England and Wales, and of different sectors of schools within Wales. It has been suggested, and is now 'enshrined' in policy documents for the new National Assembly for Wales, that students in Wales receive poorer schooling in general than their peers in England and consequently that they underachieve, but that those schools in Wales teaching through the medium of Welsh are immune from this criticism. Once local socio-economic factors are taken into account there is no evidence for either position. Students and schools in Wales appear to do as well as those in England, while schools teaching through the medium of English appear to do as well as those teaching in Welsh. This finding has important regional policy consequences, but is also an important component of a more general argument against the current 'crisis account' of British education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I use the concept of ‘re‐agenting’ to explore and explain the role of non‐state agencies, principally private companies and business entrepreneurs, as key instruments in the government’s transformation of the school system in England. Their role takes both for‐profit and not‐for‐profit forms. The outsourcing to private companies of the implementation of government education policies and the delivery of educational services to schools and local authorities has created a profitable market. Equally significant is the growing involvement of the private sector in schools through the sponsorship of specialist schools and Academies on a non‐profit basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]