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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.)