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The process of privatising services historically provided by the state has blurred the boundaries between what is considered to be 'private' and 'public'. However, few efforts have been made in the educational arena to develop tools to measure this process. Most of the previous research has relied on narrow definitions about what is private and what is public. This work proposes a tool to measure the degree of publicness-privateness of school systems, avoiding binary separation of the concepts. We develop an index and test this tool in two different landscapes: London and Santiago. In these cases, it serves to illustrate major changes in the levels of public-private participation in both school systems, reflecting differences between the systems and over time. We conclude that the index has potential for development and use in the analysis of public and private dimensions in education in broader international contexts.

This paper draws on material generated from a qualitative study of educational impacts of a British welfare reform affecting housing rent subsidy, size and location commonly known as "the bedroom tax" (Bragg et al., 2015), which was partly taken as a topic for study specifically because of its iconic status as a controversial and unpopular welfare "reform" (or cut). The analysis draws on Foucauldian understandings of subjectification or subject-formation--as elaborated both from within and in relation to the social (Foucault, 1970; 1983; Ball, 1990; Olssen, 2006; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998), read through new and newly available perspectives (Allen, 2015; Pêcheux, 2014). This approach is applied to discuss how those addressed by educational policy, and also as research participants, are both subject to prevailing political and practice-oriented discourses (of educational "problems", and of the neoliberal frameworks by which poverty and welfare cuts are discussed), but also--at times--how they can become the subject of--in the sense of reformulating--these discourses in their accounts of everyday activities. After outlining our approach and the context for the study, we focus on four examples drawn from the narratives of the various stakeholders in the study--parents/carers, school staff and other community-based organisations as illustrations of how this discursive approach can provide rich readings of relevance to educational policy debates. From these we not only take further discussions of the production and regulation of subjectivities via social and educational policy practices, but also offer indicative glimpses of resistance to this as expressed by those who are its primary subjects, and where in one case such resistance brings our own research commitments under critical scrutiny. As such, the contribution of this article is both topic-related (concerning the educational impacts of policy) but, crucially, also conceptual and methodological, in motivating for a Foucauldian-influenced discursive approach that is sensitive to struggle and resistance.

This paper presents a novel conceptualisation of the school context by examining the 'personal' (emotional wellbeing), the 'political' (everyday political actions and power relations) and the 'Political' (the Political system, including electoral politics and governmental policy) and how these interrelate. Informed by literatures from a range of disciplines, the authors use this conceptual lens to consider data from two projects which explored the impact of austerity on schools. In their qualitative analysis of data from interviews with 82 participants they illustrate connections between the personal, the political and the Political. They conceptualise the work schools are doing in response to the impacts of the Political as quiet political activism, which appears to have knock-on effects for staff wellbeing. They consider the implications of this, concluding that the 'quiet politics' occurring in schools may bring a sense of control and create opportunities for community activism, but also has potentially worrying consequences.

The reduction of socio-economic inequalities in school outcomes was a major priority of the Coalition Government in England from 2010-15. In this paper we examine the Coalition's policies and spending, including an analysis of the distributional effect of its pupil premium policy. We also look at trends in outcomes up to 2014. We find that although the pupil premium had a modest overall effect of distributing more money to schools with poorer intakes, this was nested within a wider set of policies which have disadvantaged low income families and children, and that there is evidence of socio-economic gaps widening on some indicators.

This paper is motivated by a shared concern over the apparent lack of inclusion of socially critical research in educational policy intended to address inequitable outcomes from schooling. We recognise that while this is partly (perhaps mainly) a political problem, an effective response by socially critical scholars must also take into account the mechanics of research/policy relationships. We need to understand who else is operating in the contest for ideas, how and why they use research, and how their practices promote and reinforce some types of knowledge and some messages while others are excluded. One example is the work of think tanks. To gain insight into these issues, we construct and consider "activity profiles" of two think tanks operating to influence policy around socio-economic inequalities and education. These suggest some points of interest for researchers working in that same area: points about the differences between different think tanks and about their strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis the policy process, compared with those of academics. In response, we argue that researchers need to develop a pedagogical not just a critical disposition, and propose a number of potential strategies they could adopt. In order to have an impact, academics must find ways of communicating beyond their scholar peers, in forms that are accessible and digestible, while maintaining the hall marks of robust, peer-reviewed and deeply evidence-based knowledge.

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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.