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The United Kingdom has devised a set of National Learning Targets to be achieved by 2002. Revised from an earlier set of National Targets for Education and Training (NTETs), the latest ones embrace 11-21-year-olds, adults and employers and promote a credentialist approach to both economic and social development. Their primary purpose, according to the National Advisory Council for Education and Training Targets (NACETT) is to make the country more competitive internationally and to promote social cohesion. This paper draws on a study of how one occupational sector, the steel industry, measures up to the national targets for the adult workforce. The findings of the study question the appropriateness of using qualifications-based targets as a proxy for adult capability in the workplace and industrial viability. The paper argues that this credentialist approach detracts from the real challenges which the UK faces in becoming a learning society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of technologically-based 'virtual education' has been portrayed as a means of widening access to learning opportunities for those currently excluded from participation in lifelong education and training. Now in the UK these claims are being operationalized under the 'University for Industry' initiative and associated Virtual College programmes all of which aim to make real the concept of Britain as a 'learning society' for all with an emphasis on reaching those traditionally seen as non-participants in learning. This paper examines these claims in the light of current knowledge about the characteristics of non-participants in lifelong learning and the barriers that they face. It is suggested that the application of 'technological fixes' to underlying socio-economic determinants of participation will solve some problems, create others, and leave many unaffected. In this way the paper argues for independent research on the impact of the 'virtual college' movement, and begins to outline the form such research could take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On coming to power in 1997, the New Labour government promised to move beyond the 'ruthless free-for-all' of the neo-liberals. However, rather than revisiting the 'stifling statism' of 'Old Labour', the government has claimed to be developing a so-called 'third way' in which policies are put forward on the basis of 'what works' rather than being driven by any one ideological approach. Through drawing on Giddens' outline of 'first', 'second' and 'third way' politics, this paper looks at a range of New Labour's education policies and examines the extent to which they can be seen to embody a distinctively different approach. It finds that, despite some remnants of old Labour 'first way' thinking, the government's strategies have largely been an extension of second way 'neoliberalism'. Education action zones are identified as the initiative which comes closest to representing a 'third way'. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of this initiative for addressing and overcoming the failures of first and second way policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the recruitment and examination performance from 1991 to 1996 of Grant Maintained (GM) compared to Local Education Authority (LEA) schools using data for almost 300 non-selective schools in 6 LEAs assembled as part of the Impact of Competition on Secondary Schools (ICOSS) study. The data include pupil rolls, examination results, free school meals and budgets. On a straight forward comparison of the proportion of Year 11 students obtaining five or more grades A* to C and A* to G at GCSE and the rate of improvement in the former measure was higher for GM schools. A level results were very similar. However, when factors which account for differences in GCSE examination performance are statistically analysed, it was found that GM schools' apparently superior performance can be attributed to having lower proportions of socially disadvantaged students and to reducing this proportion over time. Being a GM school or number of years as a GM school were not statistically significant in accounting for examination performance. Given the costs of the GM schools policy, these findings suggest that its value for money was poor. The paper concludes by suggesting reasons for the absence of superior performance by GM schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the emergence of teacher employment agencies and the increased volume of employment agency business in teaching. It examines the role of agencies in quasi-educational markets, and the relationship between agency teaching and understandings about teachers' work. Drawing upon exploratory research conducted at the University of Warwick, the author analyses documents and interviews with agency representatives from a range of agencies of differing size and complexity. Agencies are seen as part of a wider agenda that includes the marketization and privatization of schooling that begins to mirror what is already occurring within the FE sector. This includes emerging local markets for agencies and supply teachers, and agencies' relations with schools and unions are considered. Paradoxically, agency teachers are shown to underpin aspects of educational policy and practice in which they, and for the most part, the agencies who supply them, have, until recently, remained either implicit or invisible. By raising basic issues about whose interests are being served by agencies, the paper takes initial steps in reducing that invisibility. [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]

The article builds on prior arguments that research on issues of social justice in education has often lacked constructive engagement with education policy-making, and that this can be partly attributed to a lack of clarity about what a socially just education system might look like. Extending this analysis, this article argues that this lack of clarity is perpetuated by a series of contradictions and dilemmas underpinning ‘progressive’ debate in education, which have not been adequately confronted. At the heart are dilemmas about what constitutes a socially just negotiation of the binarised hierarchy of knowledge that characterises education in the UK, Australia and elsewhere. Three exemplar cases presented from contemporary education curriculum policy in England and Australia are used to illustrate these dilemmas. We then extend this argument to a series of other philosophical dilemmas which haunt education and create tensions or contradictions for those concerned with social justice. It is maintained that we need to confront these dilemmas in efforts to extend conceptual clarity in what it is we are seeking to achieve, which in turn can better equip us to provide the empirical and conceptual information necessary to effectively engage policy-making to remediate inequalities in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers studying the impact of parliamentary devolution conclude that education policies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are diverging. They attribute this to five factors: the redistribution of formal powers associated with devolution; differences in values, ideologies and policy discourses across the four territories; the different composition, interests and policy styles of their policy communities; the different ‘situational logics’ of policy-making and the mutual independence of policy decisions in the different territories. This article reviews trends in higher education (HE) policy across the UK since parliamentary devolution. It focuses on policies for student fees and student support, for widening participation, for supporting research and for the HE contribution to economic development, skills and employability. On balance, it finds as much evidence of policy convergence, or at least of constraints on divergence, as of policy divergence. It argues that each of the five factors claimed to promote divergence can be associated with corresponding pressures for convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will start with a description of a small, pedagogic event: a snippet of conversation recorded in a classroom as part of a research project on working in groups with postgraduate students. I will use these few minutes of data to illustrate several of the arguments I wish to make about the policy of increased international student recruitment in English higher education. More specifically, the recorded conversation will act as a springboard into some reflections on the ways in which international students are positioned within the higher education system in England, in terms of policies, pedagogic practices and the research literature on international students. The argument will centre on the idea that English higher education institutions are on ethically dubious grounds in terms of their relations with international students, and that these flawed relations are reflected in pedagogical practices in the classroom. These reflections will draw from the writings of Levinas to explore the current failure of staff and students in sharing responsibility towards the experiences of the 'other'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reforming vocational education in the English education and training system has occupied governments for at least the last three decades, the latest development being the introduction of 14 lines of Specialised Diplomas. Using an historical analysis of qualifications reform, we suggest they are unlikely to transform 14-19 education and training. The failure to reform academic qualifications alongside their vocational equivalents is likely to result in 'academic drift', lack of status and a relatively low level of uptake for these new awards, a process compounded by low employer recognition of broad vocational qualifications. In rejecting the Tomlinson Report's central proposal for a unified diploma system covering all 14-19 education and training, we argue that the government may have condemned the Specialised Diplomas to become a middle-track qualification for a minority of 14-19-years-olds, situated between the majority academic pathway and the sparsely populated apprenticeship route. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a deconstruction of the RAE Education sub-panel's rubrics, drawing also on the broader RAE regulations, procedures, and associated documentation and research. It seeks to tease out the sorts of covert epistemologising that may (or may not) be likely to take place. The theoretical ambition is to take a Derridean approach to acts of 'translation', reworking that metaphor as a way into the acts of translation that the RAE undertakes in placing numerical values on the quality of research outputs. How do we measure our 'pounds of flesh'? As a practical 'hermeneutics of suspicion' it seeks a 'provocative validity' in that its aim is to provoke clarity and reassurance from the authors of such RAE documents. In that ambition it has had some success, as the response from Margaret Brown, Chair of the Education sub-panel, demonstrates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an account of the latest official attempt in the UK to generate both a new analysis of the underlying causes of under-investment in workforce development and a new policy to rectify the weaknesses. The account is based on the participation of the present author who was a member of the Performance and Innovation Unit's (PIU) Academic Panel on workforce development during 2001. First, the establishment and remit of the PIU are briefly introduced, and the methods and outcomes (so far) from the particular project on workforce development are then described and assessed. At the very least, this article may help to dispel the erroneous speculations about the work of this PIU team (on workforce development), which have already been published in the educational press (e.g. Beckett 2001). The separate normative worlds of policy-makers and researchers are then explored; and finally, some general conclusions are drawn from the author's experience about the competing models of Britain's future, which lie behind the policy debates and which are likely to have relevance beyond the specific field of workforce development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assessment regime for General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs) has been radical, influential and controversial. Its numerous changes, and the debates, which have accompanied them, illuminate the political and organizational struggles that characterize assessment policy in the United Kingdom. The paper draws on interviews with representatives from diverse constituencies involved in developing GNVQ assessment policy. It argues that GNVQs presented mainstream policy processes with profound epistemological and ideological challenges. A combination of unprecedented political scrutiny, ad hoc development and extreme organizational rivalry undermined these challenges. The fate of the GNVQ assessment regime has important implications for future attempts to create distinctive vocational education and assessment. [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]

The paper provides a framework from which to critique orthodox assumptions about the processes of collaboration, especially in relation to the concepts of public space and power. Key issues are the private-public distinction and the metaphor of 'public space'. The critique is rooted in alternatives to orthodox, Liberal humanist political perspectives in philosophy and draws on real examples of collaboration. Some of these are from my own experiences of a number of small-scale, policy-oriented, research projects and evaluations, both commissioned and university-originated. Suggestions are made about implications for the genesis of a politics of connection leading to collective actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary education policy is dominated by a seriously flawed intellectual framework (school effectiveness) which will inevitably fail as a means of educating persons for the 21st century or, indeed, any other. Drawing on the work of the Scottish philosopher, John Macmurray, the paper sets out not only to understand why this is so, but also to offer a positive alternative in its place, namely, transformative or person-centred education. Central to this endeavour is an emancipatory, inclusive notion of community and a complementary understanding of its relation to the necessary demands of organizational and functional life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts out from an account of deep changes in the formation of what has been called turbo-capitalism and attaches these to the emergence of wholesale auditing of all state institutions. It criticizes these hastily contrived procedures for irrelevance, narrowly financial criteria and a view of accountability indistinguishable from the politics of blame. It concludes by tracing the incommensurability of these methods with more traditional and canonical values in the polity now at risk under the impress of consumer totalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued earlier in this journal that from the formation of the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting (UKCC) in 1984, until the initiation in 1989 of NHS reform by the third Thatcher administration, nurse education policy development was dominated by a nursing establishment located largely within the UKCC. During this period, in the context of an educational reform, a non-collective professional project emerged which left around 30% of the nursing workforce marooned in an obsolescent occupational group. Drawing on documents from UKCC archives, this paper analyses that professional project in terms of professionalization theory, and argues that by following a non-collective agenda, UKCC eroded nursing's labour market position in relation to the provision of care in the National Health Service (NHS). It is further argued that this eroded labour market position has subsequently been exacerbated by government-led policy developments concerning vocational education and NHS reform, with a consequent weakening of nursing's influence on important aspects of caring work in the health service. Explanations for these aspects of the professional project are proposed relating to the fact that although wide-ranging in terms of the nature and practice of nursing, Project 2000 was positioned and conducted as an educational reform. While education provided the ‘political space' (i.e. free from the immediate priorities and direct involvement of the NHS) for UKCC to assemble and promote its radical professional project, that project as a consequence was uninformed by cost and workforce planning issues. Late stage engagement between professional aspirations and service needs demonstrated the likelihood of an eroded labour market position for nurses, and high levels of risk for the NHS in terms of the supply of nurses, but by that point UKCC was already committed to the key elements of its original proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces how the meaning of ‘skill' has broadened considerably since the 1950s through an examination of the relevant policy literature. It stresses the central role of both the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) and Further Education Unit (FEU) in re-defining ‘skill' in the late 1970s and 1980s. Core (or key) skills, which have come to dominate contemporary education and training debates, are seen as an extension of this agenda. Recent usage of the term, skill, is found to be more applicable to a vision of a low skill economy than that of a high skill one, presenting policy makers with range of difficult problems with regard to vocational education and training (VET) policy. I'm not against skills as such . . . so long as it really is skills we're talking about. (Hart 1978: 205) . . . nothing is more false than the claim that, for a given assertion, its use is its meaning . On the contrary, its use may depend upon its lack of meaning, its possession of wholly different and incompatible meanings in different contexts, and the fact that, at the same time, it as it were emits the impression of possessing a consistent meaning. (Gellner 1973: 42) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the UK Secretary of State for Education's proposed revisions to the national curriculum at the turn of the century. The author argues that the proposed changes towards a more flexible and less prescriptive curriculum framework are a direct attempt to address the significant problem of student disaffection, which is currently haunting educational policy-interventions aimed at 'driving up standards'. He hypothesizes that the scale of the problem is much greater than the traditional indicators suggest and, whilst approving of the general direction in which the proposed changes are moving, questions whether they are radical enough to meet the challenges which social change is presenting to schools at the turn of the century. The author argues for a curriculum design which is more explicitly driven by pedagogical values and principles, and finds that the outcomes-based framework for citizenship education is a missed opportunity in this respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of British Labour Party policy on educational selection between 1996 and 1998. The exercise is conceived as one of policy scholarship and the benefits of a sociological imagination are advocated. This imagination is rooted in a relational insight and particular emphasis is placed upon distributional relations. This conceptual framework is then used to examine key documents from before and after the 1997 General Election. It is argued that, in such themes as 'standards not structures' and 'intervention in inverse proportion to success', policy largely underpins existing structural relationships which maintain the significant educational inequalities which are the supposed targets of policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an ongoing research project exploring the perceptions of finance held by undergraduate students and how these perceptions modify over time. It examines changing government policy on student finance in an historical context before moving on to provide a critique of contributions made to the sociology of the student experience thus far. The rationale underpinning the case for a new economic sociology of the undergraduate financial experience of higher education is presented and then augmented by way of empirical data. The final section then examines some of the implications of the research findings for the new and arguably still evolving government policy on student finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education systems can be characterized on the basis of whether the academic and occupational/vocational education and training they provide is compartmentalized (tracked systems), systematically connected (linked systems) or fully integrated (unified systems). This paper describes how such a typology might be used to model strategic change at the higher levels of the UK system for education and training. Successive governments have pursued a number of separate agendas (e.g. massification of HE, public accountability, standards in HE, key/employability skills, lifelong learning. . .) the net result of which is leading to a more unified system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores subjective aspects of human capital investment decisions in education. It gives an insight into ways in which students in Year 11 and Year 13 perceive the connection between their education and the labour market and the mechanisms by which qualifications translate into life chances. An instrument is described which was used to assess perceptions in terms of 'productivity', 'screening' and 'credentialism' . Our findings suggest that most students believe education to play a market signalling role and that its role in raising productivity is subordinate. The influences of age, gender, educational intentions and school type are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most notable developments in post-compulsory educationand training in recent years has been the establishment of GNVQ (General National Vocational Qualification) policy in England and Wales. Although the new qualifications have attracted a considerable amount of popularity in the few years since their launch, they have nonetheless been the subject of much critical comment. Drawing principally on in-depth interviews with key informants in the policy process, an account of how GNVQ policy originated is provided in this paper. It is argued that the presence of four interrelated 'policy tensions' during the development phase- the tendency for 'academic' education to be privileged over 'vocational' education and training, the potential for conflict in government between longterm strategic imperatives and short-term political objectives, the differing aims of the education and employment departments and the contours of the relationship which a quango like the NCVQ has with its sponsoring department(s)- shaped the way in which GNVQs progressed and thus contributed to their subsequent weaknesses on implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educationalists have been concerned with the labelling and treatment of children with mental health difficulties in the education system in England for some time. These concerns have centred on the role of policy in 'othering' such students as deviant learners. The unprecedented number of children suffering from mental illnesses, has forced policymakers to address children's mental health difficulties. This has involved the identification of a sub-set of the school population experiencing 'less-severe' mental health issues, to be addressed through a suite of policy interventions delivered by whole-school approaches, but targeted towards children situated as mentally 'weak'. Drawing upon a Foucauldian theory of governmentality that addresses children's behavioural motivations, an in-depth analysis of a number of educational policy initiatives related to mental health is conducted, that it is argued are fundamentally flawed. This analysis is followed by a discussion of the performative culture of High Stakes Testing in contributing to children's mental health difficulties. Here it is argued that a narrative of mental weakness serves to justify a neoliberal rationality towards the treatment of children for whom the performative logic assumed to motivate all learners, fails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The language of austerity has been widely used to characterize policy-making in post-industrial nations since the financial crisis. Youth services in England are a noted example of the effects of austerity, having suffered rapid and severe cuts following a period of record investment prior to 2008. In this article, I argue that ‘austerity’ is an inadequate conceptual basis for critical analysis of policy-making since 2008, and that youth services are better understood as an exemplar case of the reforming effects of a ‘late neoliberal regime’. The late neoliberal regime describes a regulation of production through a finance capital imaginary, as distinct from the productive capital imaginary of the quasi-marketising neoliberal regime. I argue that late neoliberalism has effected the disassembly of quasi-marketised youth services and simultaneously the emergence of a new youth sector founded on norms of investment and return. I trace the reforming force of this regime through the productive relations of capital distributions, policy discourse, and organizational forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the challenges and possibilities for UK policy learning in relation to upper secondary education (USE) across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (NI) within current national and global policy contexts. Drawing on a range of international literature, the article explores the concepts of ‘restrictive’ and ‘expansive’ policy learning and develops a framework of dimensions for examining what is taking place across the UK at a time of change for all four national USE systems. From an examination of recent national policy literatures and interviews with key policy actors within the ‘UK laboratory’, we found that the conditions for expansive policy learning had markedly deteriorated due to ‘accelerating divergence’ between the three smaller countries and a dominant England that has been pursuing an ‘extreme Anglo Saxon education model’. The article also notes that some aspects of policy learning continue to take place ‘beneath the radar’ between UK and wide civil society organisations. This activity is more prevalent across the three smaller countries although each, to differing degrees, is still constrained by its position in relation to the UK as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Educational institutions and governing practices are increasingly augmented with digital database technologies that function as new kinds of policy instruments. This article surveys and maps the landscape of digital policy instrumentation in education and provides two detailed case studies of new digital data systems. The Learning Curve is a massive online data bank, produced by Pearson Education, which deploys highly sophisticated digital interactive data visualizations to construct knowledge about education systems. The second case considers ‘learning analytics’ platforms that enable the tracking and predicting of students’ performances through their digital data traces. These digital policy instruments are evidence of how digital database instruments and infrastructures are now at the centre of efforts to know, govern and manage education both nationally and globally. The governing of education, augmented by techniques ofdigital education governance, is being distributed and displaced to new digitized ‘centres of calculation’, such as Pearson and Knewton, with the technical expertise to calculate and visualize the data, plus the predictive analytics capacities to anticipate and pre-empt educational futures. As part of a data-driven style of governing, these emerging digital policy instruments prefigure the emergence of ‘real-time’ and ‘future-tense’ techniques of digital education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Early years education has received considerable attention in recent years, particularly as a result of longitudinal studies that demonstrate the importance of the first few years in a child’s development and educational experience. In 2004, a new approach to early years education, the Foundation Phase, was introduced in Wales. This is a major flagship policy of the recently devolved Welsh Government, and marks a radical departure from the more assessment-driven competency-based approaches to early childhood education that existed prior to the Foundation Phase. Studying approximately 2000 children in Wales who are part of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), all born in 2000–2001 we investigate the potential impact of the Foundation Phase pilot on a range of key academic and well-being outcome measures. Compared with other children, those attending a Foundation Phase pilot school tended to have lower scores in a number of academic assessments at age seven and lower subjective well-being, in terms of their attitudes to learning and well-being at school. We consider these surprising, yet concerning, results in the context of the methodological limitations to this analysis and propose how the MCS can be further used to substantiate these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Parenting has come to play a pivotal role in breaking intergenerational disadvantage and increasing children's life chances and social mobility through practices such as parental support with their learning and education. Using a UK representative sample from the Millennium Cohort Study, the present study examined the unique and cumulative contribution of children's characteristics, parenting practices and family's socio-economic background to children's educational outcomes at the end of Key Stage 1 (age 7). Consistently with previous studies, the findings showed that family's socio-economic background made a substantive contribution to teacher-rated reading, maths and sciences. Despite much emphasis within family policy on parents as being central in tackling educational inequality, certain aspects of parenting such as involvement with home learning, parental warmth and discipline did not explain a significant amount of variance in teacher- rated reading, maths and sciences. These findings are likely to contribute to debates regarding the role of parents in reducing the achievement gap and the enduring influence of social class on young people's school outcomes, drawing important implications for family policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines ways in which economic and sociological explanations of higher education (HE) choices may intersect through student's use of information. We find substantial positive associations between intention to go to university in England and each of: (i) parents' education; (ii) cultural capital; and (iii) expectations of the size of the graduate premium. We also find an association between beliefs about the size of the graduate premium and cultural capital. These results support an integrated model of participation in HE in which social and economic factors are treated as complementary rather than competing explanations. The results run counter to previous research which has found that associations between participation in HE and socio-economic status (SES) largely disappear once students' attainment is taken into account. One policy implication of this research is that some indicators of SES (notably household income, eligibility for free school meals or parental occupation) are sub-optimal for interventions to widen participation in HE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent emergence of new venture philanthropists, social entrepreneurs and neoliberal policy advocates and the new ways in which they configure and perform their political agendas have brought important changes in the way in which education policy is enacted. This study takes some of the ideas sketched in previous work further and develops what was termed there as 'philanthropic governance'. The first section analyses the transition to a new political framework characterised by new forms of coordination or 'heterarchies'. These transformations represent new forms of governmentality and power regimes and are deeply rooted within the political economy and political philosophy of neoliberalism. The second section of the study focuses on a set of new policy actors, the 'new' philanthropists and explores the organisational model of a group of these philanthropic individuals and enterprises, their discourses, connections, ideological influences and agendas on the ground. Finally, the study reflects on the new ways through which philanthropic activity has gained an increasingly important political dimension, becoming a central explanatory variable to understand the recent changes and directions of national and international political agendas in different parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free school policy claims to partly decentralise to local proposers decisions over who provides a free school, where and for what reasons, within the constraints of a government approval process. This article analyses empirically the people and organisations doing the proposing and their interactions with the approval process. The article begins by locating free schools within Big Society and quasi-market policies. The emerging free school landscape is then mapped and the motivations, aims and demography of a sample of 50 proposers are explored. A key distinction emerges between two analytical clusters. First, proposers able to negotiate the approval process are shown to draw on a range of professional networks, to have strongly academic educational aims and to on average not seek to specifically serve disadvantaged communities. Second, and conversely, the majority of proposers located in highly disadvantaged areas have aims and expertise that do not fit well with what the government is willing to accept. This is not conceived as a simple dualism but highlights the significance of both a lack of critical engagement with inclusion among accepted proposers and the effects of an approval process that has prioritised an unequal distribution of particular forms of professional expertise and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking recent policy on education and social mobility as a working example, this article examines developments in the mechanisms for realising policy over the past ten years, as indicative of changes in the neoliberal state. This initial analysis suggests that, despite similarities in the process of policy formation before and after the General Election of 2010, the changing nature of the policy levers chosen by the Coalition Government represents a move from a rationalist, directing state towards a more hybrid bul nevertheless neoliberal model. The Government still intends to 'steer' the education system through data, however, but in a more developed market system with little supervision, its effects will be less predictable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the increasing internationalisation of higher education, there is a pressing need to think through how demands for educational equality and justice, that currently tend to be framed at the national and sub-national level, should be conceptualised at a global level. This article compares two recent media and policy debates in the UK, over admitting wealthy students off-quota to university and restricting international student visas, in order to demonstrate the contradictions that are created when demands for educational equality stop at the national border. Based on a discussion of these debates, the article calls for the principle of educational equality to be extended outwards, beyond the national border, to apply to domestic and international students alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from three school admissions surveys and the National Pupil Database are combined to investigate whether changes to the School Admissions Code appear to have altered the published admissions policies and the social composition of particular schools. We show that the 2003 and 2007 School Admissions Codes appear to have been at least in part responsible for changes in the social composition of pupils at schools with criteria and arrangements that were subsequently deemed inadmissible. Although the average impact is relatively small, the direction of the impact is consistent with the observation that school segregation across England has declined a little at the same time that regulations were tightening. Our regression analysis of changes in individual school compositions is able to show this relationship holds even when changes in neighbourhood composition are accounted for. These measured associations that we identify suggest that, if the differentiation of school intakes is a concern, then regulating admission arrangements does appear to have an impact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reviewing the 22 years that have elapsed since Gifford’s 1989 report labelled Liverpool as racist, the authors focus on the fact that in a city which has had a British African Caribbean (BAC) community for over 400 years, there is minimum representation of that community in the city’s workforce. The authors investigate two major forms of employment in the city, i.e. the teaching workforce and the city’s Council workforce and one major route to employability, i.e. Higher Education Institutions in the city. They set out an evidenced argument which demonstrates the under-representation of the BAC community in two of the city’s major areas of employment. The authors hypothesise that this under-representation is grounded in institutional and structural racism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As part of the international debate about new forms of governance and moves towards decentralization and devolution, this article discusses the increasing interest in the concept of ‘localism’ in the UK, marked recently by the publication of the UK Coalition Government’s ‘Localism Bill’. A distinction is made between three versions – ‘centrally managed’, ‘laissez-faire’ and ‘democratic’ localism. The article draws on two research projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and one by the Nuffield Foundation, as well as sources by specialists in local government, political analysts and educationalists. It explores the broad features of the three versions of localism and their implications for upper secondary education and lifelong learning. The article concludes by examining the strengths and limitations of the first two models and suggests that the third has the potential to offer a more equitable way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A focus of Government policy has been the need to ensure that those at the lower end of the labour market invest in their human capital through re-engaging with learning, which has been assumed to enable progress into better-paid employment. This article explores the problems created by ‘bad jobs’ and the evidence for the existence of a set of mutually reinforcing factors that reduces the incentives acting on individuals in such work, and in many cases their employers, to participate and invest in education and training. Each of these factors, on their own, would be sufficient to cause problems at the lower end of the labour market. Acting in concert, as a mutually reinforcing matrix, they produce powerful reasons why many individuals perceive that the incentives to engage in work-related learning are weak. More broadly, our argument suggests that the fundamental causes of low pay and low-quality employment have been misdiagnosed and the subsequent public policy solution of up-skilling interventions is relatively ill-fitted to achieving the desired policy goals. Imaginative re-thinking on how policy might help those in low-wage, dead-end jobs is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Labour Government launched the 'Building Schools for the Future' programme (BSF) in February 2003 with the aim of refurbishing or rebuilding all secondary schools in England over a 15-year period, with an anticipated budget of £45 billion. In this article, we locate BSF in a wider public policy context which has already had important implications in other sectors of public provision. The local improvement finance trusts (LIFTs) initiative within the National Health Service (NHS) is of particular relevance to this discussion both because it reflects contemporary developments within New Public Management and because it also reveals new ways of extending and developing the private finance initiative (PFI) approach to public provision. We shall also consider the purposes and 'delivery' mechanisms of BSF and identify some of the key commentaries which have been provided by parliamentary reports and other evaluations. Although still in the early stages of its implementation, the BSF is of such significance for the future shape and form of educational provision that it is important to begin the process of considering possible directions and dimensions for a research agenda which will provide a secure empirical and analytical foundation on which to base discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the individual academic is all but absent from the assumptive worlds of policymakers in UK higher education. It is taken for granted in research on academic identity that those who work in higher education as teachers and researchers refer to themselves as, and indeed are referred to by others as, 'academics'. Evidence is drawn from a study of policymakers in the UK to demonstrate that the word 'academic' is not a part of the lexicon of higher education policymaking. Moreover, the concept of the academic is cast into shade by an overwhelming emphasis on 'the student experience', and, from another direction, by a location of professional academic accountability at the level of the higher education institution rather than the individual. The article concludes with an exploration of what work this absence of the academic in policy does in disrupting the possibilities for engagement between the worlds of academia and policymaking and in perpetuating the discourses of marketisation and new management in higher education. It also suggests understanding the assumptive worlds of policymakers is a crucial counterbalance to a growing body of literature on academic responses to change, some of which has tended towards the self-referential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For several years now a number of countries have been attempting to increase their numbers of male primary teachers, yet have met with little success. Feminists/pro-feminists have challenged the intentions of these male teacher recruitment drives but failed to offer any interventions that might contribute to a broadening of the primary teacher population. This article seeks to redress this by identifying specific reasons why policy initiatives have failed. Through a review of the literature on teacher identities and analysis of the responses of 20 primary teachers, from a range of backgrounds, to the question 'Has your gender had any impact on your experiences and/or career as a teacher?', it emerged that teacher recruitment campaigns that focus on aspects of personal identity fail to resonate with the motivations of those who are attracted to teaching. Gender is not regarded by primary teachers as of having any particular significance to their careers, whilst minority ethnic and sexuality status are both regarded as having an impact. The conclusions drawn are that policies on teacher recruitment drives need to focus less evidently on gender and more on broader constructions and understandings of what it means to be a 'primary teacher'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Civil defence pedagogies' normalise continuous emergency through educational channels such as school, community and adult education. Using critical whiteness studies, and critiques of white supremacy from critical race theory, as a conceptual base, the protection of whiteness, and particularly the white middle-class family, is considered to be centrally important to civil defence in education. Civil defence is not only classed and state-centred, but a racialised and eugenic discourse where the state considers not necessarily the survival of the majority of white people, but the continuity of whiteness to be prioritised above the survival of people of colour. Within these policies, the enterprising white, middle-class, suburban family has provided a key role as main reference, beneficiary, activist and supporter of civil defence pedagogies. Through the use of policy analysis and documentation from the USA in the 1950s and the UK in the 1980s, I discuss representations of the family, race and class in civil defence pedagogies. Although whiteness is contextualised by geography and history, there is congruence in terms of the eugenic tendencies of these seemingly innocuous pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines education policy and the policy process in the light of two key concepts. The first is the concept of 'governmentality' from the work of Michel Foucault (1991). The second is the concept of 'political spectacle' from the work of Murray Edelman (1985, 1988). Taking note, further, of recent work by Fairclough (2000) on political 'spin' and rhetoric, the article suggests that education policy needs to be seen in the light of a more modern stress in governance which recognises that 'the conduct of the conduct of conduct' (the management and presentation of policy - the conduct3 of the title) is not only of electoral relevance but has considerable implications for education and policy. The article probes the ways in which current education policy in the UK is affected by conduct3 and attempts to place it within the Foucauldian governmentality framework. It suggests that while conduct3 can be understood as a modern variant of the Machiavellian concern with sovereignty, it is also associated with the neoliberal marketisation of democracy. On this reading, it can be considered as a mutation of liberal governmentality, serving to undermine some of its key principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate in the UK about gender equity and equal opportunities for girls and boys has been 'captured', in the last two decades, by an overriding concern with the issue of boys' apparent under-achievement. More recently, however, there has been a reaction to essentialist approaches related to 'boy-friendly' pedagogies and strategies, and attempts to return the debate to consider gender relational and gender-inclusive approaches. This article focuses upon these issues within the context of the initial training and education of primary school teachers in the UK, exploring the gender awareness and perceptions of one cohort of trainee teachers, to establish their emerging beliefs about pedagogy, curriculum and whole school strategies. On the basis of our findings, we argue that there is a need to re-activate debates about gender identity and inclusivity within initial teacher education and training in the UK, and to reconnect research within the academic community and teaching on such courses, if the seductive discourse about the need to defeminise primary schooling is to be effectively challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Term-time employment among Britain's undergraduates is a growing phenomenon but it has received scant attention from government and policy makers. Although there are numerous studies on the subject, few have explored the impact of term-time employment on students' actual attainment and those that have are limited. This article attempts to fill that gap. Using data derived from 1000 students in six UK universities, it quantifies the impact of students' paid work on their actual marks and degree results, while controlling for their academic attainment on entry to higher education and other factors including their hours of work. It shows that irrespective of the university students attended, term-time working had a detrimental effect on both their final year marks and their degree results. The more hours students worked, the greater the negative effect. Consequently, students working the average number of hours a week were a third less likely to get a good degree than an identical non-working student. Some of the least qualified and poorest students are most adversely affected perpetuating existing inequalities in HE. The 2006/07 changes to student finances may help some of them, but term-time employment is likely to remain part of the HE landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines data from two different studies concerning issues of social justice, gender and schooling and specifically the practices of secondary teachers, 'Mr B', a teacher from a school in Tasmania, Australia, and 'Mr C', a teacher from a school in Bedfordshire in the United Kingdom. Both teachers' practices and relationships with students are analysed within a feminist interpretation of the Productive Pedagogies model of quality teaching and learning. The two different stories are presented as juxtapositions that serve to illuminate the capacities of pedagogy to, on the one hand, work in ways likely to re-inscribe the discourses of entitlement and privilege that perpetuate cultural gender injustice, and on the other, transform these discourses towards more equitable and just networks of multiple and intersecting differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the views of staff employed in UK higher education institutions (HEIs) about how those institutions are dealing with the impact of recent UK equality legislation and related European employment directives. Assumptions underlying current approaches to equality in UK HEIs are examined, particularly the notion of meritocracy, which advocates job selection and promotion based on normatively and culturally neutral measures of merit. The article is based on a project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, using qualitative case studies of six English, Welsh and Scottish HEIs. The project data suggest that equality policies for staff and students are in tension with each other, that staff policies may clash with other institutional policies, for example on research excellence or enhancing the student experience, and that the rhetoric of equality policies is not always matched by the day-to-day experience of staff. The article suggests that the case study UK HEIs, with their continued focus on meritocracy and excellence, have not yet adapted to the new climate of employee equality legislation and perhaps need to consider a different approach than the meritocratic one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the concept of emotional labour to understand some of the changes that are ongoing in the teaching profession. While research has explored the impact of the new performance culture upon teachers' work and identified a marginalisation of the caring and emotional aspects of teaching, the concept of emotional labour allows us to extend this argument. Using interviews with teachers who have had their capability questioned, in the majority of cases through the threat or implementation of capability procedures, this article draws upon newer conceptualisations of emotional labour to analyse some of the changes teachers are experiencing with the introduction of new accountability and performance systems. Utilising Bolton's typology of different forms of emotion management in the workplace, we argue it is possible to recognise the distinctiveness of the emotion work carried out by teachers and identify why teachers' emotion work is particularly vulnerable to the educational reforms associated with the standards agenda. We suggest that not only is there a shift away from the caring aspects of teaching, but also the emotional work teachers are expected to perform is becoming increasingly prescribed in ways that mirror the management of emotional labour carried out in the service sector. This is particularly the case in the primary sector where the majority of teachers in the study were working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]