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A recent English education policy has been to encourage state primary schools to become academies: state-funded, non-selective, and highly autonomous establishments. Primary schools have been able to opt-in to academy status since 2010 and academies now account for twenty-one percent of the primary sector. This paper investigates the causal effect of becoming a converter academy on primary school assessment outcomes, and on entry-year intake composition. Unlike existing evidence focused on earlier academies formed from failing secondary schools, no evidence is found of a converter academy effect on attainment for the average pupil. Although, there is evidence of a slight positive effect on age 11 attainment for pupils eligible for free school meals. There is no evidence that becoming a converter academy affects the composition of the entry-year intake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is transformative education aiming at developing participants’ understanding of sustainability issues and transforming their attitudes and behaviours regarding environment, society and economy. Sustainability consciousness, an expected outcome of ESD, is a complex of cognitive and affective learning. Development of sustainability consciousness requires transformative learning experiences. The study presented in this paper employed action research to enhance sustainability consciousness of the preservice teachers through inquiry based learning. The study was done in the Institute of Education, Lahore College for Women University, Pakistan. The study integrated sustainability education in an existing course entitled ‘Research Methods in Education’. The course is included in the final year of B.Ed. (Honours) programme. Outcome of the ESD-integration was measured in terms of change in the sustainability consciousness of the preservice teachers. The Action Research project engaged 27 preservice teachers in inquiry-based learning (empirical investigations and research based discussions) for a period of 11 weeks. The participants investigated sustainability issues collaboratively. To investigate the change in participants’ sustainability consciousness through inquiry based learning, researchers collected through pre- and post-tests, interviews and observation. Quantitative data were analyzed through paired t -test while qualitative data through thematic coding. The data indicate that empirical investigations into sustainability issues by the presevice teachers and research-based discussions enhanced preservice teachers’ sustainability consciousness. This highlights the transformative potential of inquiry based learning. Moreover, it indicates that sustainability education can be successfully integrated in the course of ‘research methods in education’. The findings suggest that teacher education programmes and other university programmes may employ inquiry based learning as a vehicle to enhance sustainability consciousness of the undergraduate students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is focused on impacts appeared as a result of e-participation tools development. The authors paid attention to education and science sphere with the purpose to analyze how education policy could be formed relying on electronic interaction forms. A crowdsourcing platform XPIR has been selected as a research object. This platform gives an opportunity for prominent scientists, business and government authorities from the Ministry of Education and Science to interact and create new policy trends and projects. A complex of document analysis, web-site analytics, in-depth interviews with the portals’ holders provided an intensive analysis stressing the developmental factors and the critical impacts. The researchers used XPIR website traffic statistics and applied DBSCAN algorithm for clustering the selected features. The achieved data and clusters allowed us to make some conclusions about possible ways of forming the policy in a branch on the base of usage website. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the impact of education on regional mobility in Europe using compulsory schooling reforms. Using data on individuals from eight European countries, I find that people who are induced by a school reform to acquire one more year of education are much more likely to relocate to another region in their country between the age of 15 and 50. I also show that education increases the probability of moving to a city for people from rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of early childhood care and education on subsequent educational attainment in Egypt. Comparisons between siblings are used to control for selection and duration analysis methods are used to account for the presence of current students in the data. These methods are compared to OLS to demonstrate the importance of accounting for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity and for students who have not yet completed their schooling. Early childhood care and education significantly reduces the probability of dropping out, specifically during basic education. The change in educational attainment from early childhood care and education is approximately one additional year of schooling. Key pathways for this effect include improved school performance, such as increases in test scores and decreases in repetition, during basic education. Results indicate expanding early childhood care and education would be an important and effective policy for improving educational outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]