Search

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

Private supplementary tutoring (PST) is a phenomenon growing throughout the world. Looking at regions such as East Asia where it is already vast and comparing with regions where it remains modest but is rising, some authors have argued that countries must act quickly to discourage negative societal implications which arise when PST grows. One underpinning suggestion here is the notion that addressing PST may be "time-critical." Drawing on insights from political science on the nature of continuity and change, in this paper I explore the possibility that societies could become substantially 'locked in' to complex patterns of dependence on PST. I report on the case of South Korea, drawing on interviews with experts in the Korean education system. I show that parents have been incentivised progressively over time to layer 'shadow education' over public schooling, particularly in times of heightened anxiety. Governments meanwhile have faced disincentives to restrict PST and public school teachers have had to adjust to becoming perceived as offering a residual service.

The notion of selecting students based on academic achievement into different schools at certain points in their educational careers is one that has long been contested in education. In this paper I consider the role selective schooling may play in driving families' demand for private tutoring -- a phenomenon currently growing in many regions of the world. The paper explores the 'extreme case' of South Korea -- a country with some of the highest spending on private tutoring globally and also a long history of selective schooling. Drawing on interviews with experts and key stakeholders in the Korean education system, the paper reports a number of findings. Interviewees for this project were in many respects critical of a 1970s 'equalisation' of Korean schooling, though they also viewed moves back towards selection as fuelling 'shadow education'. Concern about this has driven governments to curb selective schooling for a second time in Korean history.

Discussions charting the changing role of local government in education have often focused extensively on "concrete" policy changes over time, but have provided less detail on the contribution to changing power relations of less tangible shifts. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discourse and governmentality, in this paper, detailed rationalities of local third-sector and other "arm's length" actors in English education are explored, with a focus on their relationship to local authority (LA) school admissions teams. The paper aims to provide deeper understanding of tactical struggles for authority which happen within competitive local sociopolitical spaces. Data is utilised from a study of "Choice Advice" (CA) in 10 LAs, within a background context where arm's length agents deployed to deliver CA have been co-opted into central government marketisation regimes, but local state planning of schooling is arguably more equitable for vulnerable families than are logics advancing a marketisation of education. The research reveals: (1) discourses valourising "independence" and "distance" from local state "agendas"; (2) discourses separating the interests of "parents" and "schools", with LAs positioned as representing the latter; (3) dehumanising representations of LA officers as "faceless", obstructive and requiring regulation from "critical friends".

In this paper, we consider the relationship between the existence of private schools and public attitudes towards questions about educational provision. Data from the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey suggest that parents who choose to send children to private schools may become more entrenched in their support for more extensive forms of parental partiality, with potential ramifications for the future supporting of progressive education policy. We suggest that addressing questions about the existence of certain forms of education and school choice policies requires consideration of the broader ethical environment.

The proliferation of policy think tanks and more broadly the rise of "policy networks" can be viewed as indicative of important global transformations in the nature of the state. That is, the emergence of new state modalities, with a shift away from government towards forms of polycentric governance, where policy is produced through multiple agencies and multiple sites of discourse generation. This paper addresses some particular aspects of this shift by focusing on a set of relationships and sites which have had some kind of influence upon the social and educational policies of UK New Labour governments. It has two main concerns. First, focusing on the generation and circulation of some of the key policy "ideas" of New Labour, it maps out a related and overlapping set of policy networks which join-up government, think tanks and some individual interlockers, who "straddle sectors and policy fields and settings". Second, it highlights some of the main discursive elements that flow through these networks, in particular those of innovation and enterprise. They give particular emphasis on the role of "social enterprise" and social entrepreneurs in the modernisation of public service provision and in providing solutions to intractable social problems. (Contains 4 boxes, 4 notes, and 3 figures.)

This paper examines regulating discourses "spoken" within the complex multi-sector network of educational policy and provision that has grown from a recent introduction of choice advisers in England. Choice advice documentation from across the network is examined and four discursive themes are identified: equity; parental responsibility; independence/impartiality; and realism. The paper suggests that choice advice--as an English policy case illustrating broader social and political trends--superficially promotes empowerment for disadvantaged parents with a depoliticised, managerial approach while disempowering them by diverting attention away from wider stratification and shifting responsibility for educational quality away from the state. (Contains 2 notes and 1 figure.)

One of the most significant developments within English education over the last decade has been the expansion of specialist schools as a means by which to promote diversity and drive improvement. While much research has examined the impact of specialist schools on outcomes such as attainment, little attention has been paid to the schools' demographic compositions or their potential for exacerbating segregation. Gorard and Taylor (2001) reported that specialist schools admitted proportionally fewer children from deprived backgrounds over time. Building on their work, this paper uses data from the Pupil Level Annual School Census and the Index of Multiple Deprivation to examine changing intakes of specialist and non-specialist schools between 2001/2 and 2004/5. Trends in segregation were not significantly associated with the presence or otherwise of specialist status in a school. However, they were significantly associated with foundation status and the presence of strong and/or improving examination results. Such schools drew more "privileged" intakes over time. (Contains 1 figure, 7 tables and 8 notes.)

Claims are often made in British education about the extent to which policy reforms have been "borrowed" from overseas. Based on interviews with senior civil servants and HMI, this paper addresses the extent to which such claims apply to central government educational policy-making at school level in England between 1985 and 1995. This was a period which saw the collapse of traditional "partnership" modes of educational reform (central and local government, schools, teachers, educationists), which was replaced by major centrally directed legislation from Kenneth Baker's 1988 Education Reform Act onwards. It was also a period in which the OECD promoted the use of educational "performance indicators" to facilitate cross-national comparisons of educational quality. The paper finds that, while overseas developments were frequently cited during this period of radical legislative change, these were largely convenient examples from countries with particular ideological closeness to the English climate, promoted by "New Right" think tanks, to lend legitimacy to what were primarily "home grown" policy solutions. Overall, their effect was marginal. Reforms in England took place both prior to and in parallel with similar reforms elsewhere; hence examples from overseas were more often used to confirm developments in England rather than to initiate them. (Contains 37 notes.)

Private supplementary tutoring (PST) is a phenomenon growing throughout the world. Looking at regions such as East Asia where it is already vast and comparing with regions where it remains modest but is rising, some authors have argued that countries must act quickly to discourage negative societal implications which arise when PST grows. One underpinning suggestion here is the notion that addressing PST may be time-critical. Drawing on insights from political science on the nature of continuity and change, in this paper I explore the possibility that societies could become substantially 'locked in' to complex patterns of dependence on PST. I report on the case of South Korea, drawing on interviews with experts in the Korean education system. I show that parents have been incentivised progressively over time to layer 'shadow education' over public schooling, particularly in times of heightened anxiety. Governments meanwhile have faced disincentives to restrict PST and public school teachers have had to adjust to becoming perceived as offering a residual service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores UK attempts to boost ordinary citizens' participation in government policy formulation through 'open policy making'. Drawing primarily on an analysis of government documents dating from 2012–2018 and focusing on the case of the Department for Education in England, the article highlights elite network control of policy making which works to depress ordinary citizens' democratic input. Groups who do not fit with depoliticised, 'top down' understandings of what counts as valid citizen participation become delegitimised and excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores recent UK government aspirations towards 'open policy making' (OPM). Against a backdrop of scholarly literatures on power inequalities in policy making, I consider to whom processes of policy formulation under a banner of OPM are expected to be 'opening up'. The article draws on an analysis of government documents from 2012–2018 plus some supplementary data from expert interviews. It notes aspirations towards 'opening up' policy formulation to new experts and a particular preoccupation with encouraging private sector involvement. Ideas which may boost ordinary citizens' input are also part of what 'makes up' UK Government OPM, though citizen involvement appears restricted, sitting uneasily alongside commitments to austerity influencing how 'openness' is understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of selecting students based on academic achievement into different schools at certain points in their educational careers is one that has long been contested in education. In this paper I consider the role selective schooling may play in driving families' demand for private tutoring – a phenomenon currently growing in many regions of the world. The paper explores the 'extreme case' of South Korea – a country with some of the highest spending on private tutoring globally and also a long history of selective schooling. Drawing on interviews with experts and key stakeholders in the Korean education system, the paper reports a number of findings. Interviewees for this project were in many respects critical of a 1970s 'equalisation' of Korean schooling, though they also viewed moves back towards selection as fuelling 'shadow education'. Concern about this has driven governments to curb selective schooling for a second time in Korean history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits traditions of observational fieldwork inside welfare institutions which formed a core part of past social administration teaching and research in the United Kingdom. Drawing on archive materials, a historical exploration of journal contents and some supplementary interview data, it is argued that such approaches—though carried out in a less theoretically pluralist, more vocationally‐oriented time for the subject of social policy and administration—were at the same time valuable in facilitating critical perspectives on how welfare bureaucracies work. Their popularity is potentially rising once again in social policy teaching. Where cultivated alongside an appreciation of theory and where carefully integrated into university social policy departments' wider pedagogical and curricular strategies, they may be of benefit today to students and more senior scholars alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of inconclusive evidence on the extrinsic successes of quasi-markets, policy defences of school choice and competition in education have often discussed the intrinsic, empowering value of choice for consumers, arguing that school choice for parents is 'what people want'. Discourses often imply that choice is desired for its own sake rather than merely as a means by which families can escape what are deemed to be poor quality schools. Support for an idealistic, abstract notion of 'choice' is also taken to imply support for quasi-markets overall and is not considered alongside possible competing values that people may hold at the same time as they value choice. Additionally, views of parents are often examined without considering possible differences in views between parents and non-parents. Contributing to debates about how far a public desire exists for quasi-markets in education, this article draws on data from newly designed questions fielded as part of the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey. The article finds that while choice 'in the abstract' is supported widely by both parents and non-parents (albeit slightly more so by parents), a valuing of choice among the British public appears to be more instrumental than intrinsic - potentially problematic given evidence on the extrinsic benefits of quasi-markets is mixed. Support for choice is tempered among parents and non-parents by clear opposition to vouchers, school diversity, government spending on transport costs to facilitate choice and by strong support for the idea of sending children to the 'nearest state school'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]