Search

Over the last 30 years higher education has seen a rise in new managerialism across all its activity, driven by neoliberal economic policy. Professional doctorates (PDs) have been part of this rise, increasing in number considerably and spawning a related interest in researching doctoral work. However, there have been few studies focused on how students develop an understanding of theory/theorisation and how supervision supports it. This paper reports on a research project involving interviews with supervisors from professional doctorate in education programmes in the UK, as a particular example of PDs in general, to explore the process of theorisation. Drawing on Bernstein, it shows how supervision, and wider programme design, are mediated by the increasingly managerial context of doctoral study. The study raises questions about the ways in which students and supervisors engage with both methodology and theory/theorisation in working together and subsequent implications for the quality of doctoral work.

The author reflects on continuities and changes in the subdiscipline, using Mary Douglas and Basil Bernstein. In 2000 the millennial issue of "Sociology," the generic journal of the British Sociological Association, included a paper about the sociology of education called 'The anomalous beasts: Hooligans and the sociology of education'. It focused on hooligans as anomalous beasts in the sociology of education, and the sub-discipline as an anomalous beast within the discipline of sociology itself. It concluded with, very poor, predictions about the likely state of sociology of education and UK sociology in 2025. The fortieth anniversary of "BJSE" is a good time to revisit that millennial evaluation in order to offer a new sociologically informed re-evaluation of the field in 2020, set an agenda to highlight some of the current weaknesses in the sub-discipline and update the analysis of the uneasy relationship with the wider discipline of Sociology itself.

High-stakes, standardized testing has become the central tool for educational reform and regulation in many industrialized nations in the world, and it has been implemented with particular intensity in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on research on high-stakes testing and its effect on classroom practice and pedagogic discourse in the United States, the present paper applies Bernstein's concept of the pedagogic device to explain how high-stakes tests operate as a relay in the reproduction of dominant social relations in education. This analysis finds that high-stakes tests, through the structuring of knowledge, actively select and regulate student identities, and thus contribute to the selection and regulation of students' educational success.

Since the neoliberal reforms to British education in the 1980s, education debates have been saturated with claims to the efficacy of the market as a mechanism for improving the content and delivery of state education. In recent decades with the expansion and "massification" of higher education, widening participation (WP) has acquired an increasingly important role in redressing the under-representation of certain social groups in universities. Taken together, these trends neatly capture the twin goals of New Labour's programme for education reform: economic competitiveness and social justice. But how do WP professionals negotiate competing demands of social equity and economic incentive? In this paper we explore how the hegemony of neoliberal discourse--of which the student as consumer is possibly the most pervasive--can be usefully disentangled from socially progressive, professional discourses exemplified through the speech and actions of WP practitioners and managers working in British higher education institutions.

This is an attempt to review what I am now. To give some coherence to an incoherent academic life, written against the background of profound changes is what it means to be an academic. The paper begins in a welfare state primary school and ends in a global neoliberal university.

This paper focuses on the role of curricular content on social mobility, an issue largely neglected by social mobility studies. Using data from the National Child Development Study we investigate the extent to which secondary school curricula account for social class differences in the chances of entering into the service class and avoiding a low-skilled occupation. The results show that curriculum matters in the acquisition of different social classes of destination but it matters more for children from advantaged social backgrounds than for children from lower classes of origin. This is because of their higher propensity to choose subjects such as languages, English, mathematics and science, which were found to be highly valued in the labour market. Moreover, net of the effect of origin class and individual ability, all or most of the advantage associated with attendance at selective schools is accounted for by the curriculum studied there.

This article considers some of the ways in which the transformative power of Web 2.0 digital technology is reconfiguring learning, knowledge and academic identities in the contemporary university. Through a focus on five specific examples, we consider the impact of virtualization processes on spatiality, materiality and embodiment, and pedagogic relations. We argue for the benefits of taking a microsociological approach in order to reflect on the potential of virtualization to bring about new geographies of knowledge production and as a means to identify the ways in which potential transformations are uneven, problematic and contested. (Contains 2 notes.)

Inequality in students' degree outcomes has been a concern for the higher education sector and the UK government for more than a decade. Since its inception in 2018, the Office for Students in England has prioritised the need for evidence of causality through requiring institutions to evaluate the effectiveness of their initiatives as set out in Access and Participation Plans. This policy development responds to several reports which identify a dearth of evidence-based interventions and scant knowledge of 'what works'. This paper traces the interplay between policy and research, focusing on the assumptions they make about causality. It concludes that unwarranted positions are taken in both spheres of practice, making progress unlikely. A conception of causality situated in extant formal theory on evidential pluralism and that draws on current practices would help us address inequality more effectively. Alternative framings of the problem of inequality in students' degree outcomes is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines New Right argument on educational provision, including the establishing of a voucher scheme and the introduction of elements of a 'free market' into public sector education. The paper examines the right-wing allegation that educationalists have 'captured' the school curriculum and the argument on the need for 'consumer capture' of education. It discusses the New right tactic of privatization by stealth, and the argument that gradualism provides the most effective means of securing educational reform. The paper discusses arguments put forward by the right on the idea of a General Teaching Council (GTC) and argument on the need for the development of a teacher labour market freed from national salary scales. It goes on to examine Mary Warnock's proposals for a GTC and her views of teacher education. The paper examines the likely effects of the implementation of right-wings education policy, concluding that the 1988 Education Reform Act will prepare the ground for the privatization of education and the development of a teacher labour market of the kind proposed by the New Right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines recent empirical work on the lived experience of learners in post‐compulsory education. The starting point is a brief examination of the socio‐economic context of the sector. Despite the sophistication of analyses of learning cultures, a more radical approach is needed. Failure to do so renders these analyses amenable to appropriation by ‘new labour’ modernisers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With reference to the 'meritocratic' and 'equal opportunities' (EO) paradigms, the paper discusses the problem of explaining the relationship between changing differentials in educational attainment and changes in social opportunities more generally It is argued that, for the farmer, progressive changes expected to follow from social democratic educational reforms failed to occur and, for the latter, unanticipated improvements in the relative attainments of girls and blacks have occurred In both cases, the paradigms fail to provide systematically-convincing explanations of these events Essentially, there is a conflict between accounts of the ideological positioning of categories of pupils within education and their positions within the system of relative attainment It is argued that this situation relates to the manner in which the sociology of education in Britain has been, to a significant degree, relocated within the educational field through its association with teacher training and functions more as a sociology for education than as a sociology of education [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservative critiques of education and proposals for reform show striking similarities in Canada, Britain and the US. All seem to reflect what Haberrnas referred to as "the affirmative stance towards social modernity and the denigration of cultural modernity". The paper uses this distinction to describe and analyse New Right criticisms of educational progressivism and conservative efforts to promote a new sympathy for business values, market discipline and market relations in schools and colleges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when almost every area of social policy in the UK is undergoing a period of radical 'top-down' reform, several writers have identified a key role for ethnographic research, which examines the social processes through which macro changes in structure and funding are experienced and reconstructed at the micro level. This paper presents one such study. Empirical data are used to chart the complex, interconnected processes through which national reforms helped destroy the previous balance of micro-political power in a school, ultimately leading to fundamental changes in policy and practice in a previously 'progressive' comprehensive. The school's fate highlights the importance of micro-political power, but also compels us to consider the wider forces at work on the school. The teachers" micro-political struggles make sense only when viewed against the backdrop of sweeping conservative reform at the macro level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I take issue with the claim of Ozga (1992) that because of the poor quality of many recent texts on education management, and their lack of a sociological perspective, they are not proper material for analysis in the British Journal of Sociology of Education. I argue that sociological analysis of such texts is an urgent priority because they have gained credibility among education practitioners and provide a spurious legitimacy to new right policy directions. This general argument is illustrated by focussing on four specific limitations of one of the most popular current texts on education management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a number of comparative observations on economic restructuring and education reform in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). It will be argued that there are powerful social and political forces which are making free market' educational reforms, such as those being pursued in Britain, an increasingly attractive model of educational development in the as and Eastern Europe. It will be suggested that such a basis for reform not only leaves the tension between political and economic change unresolved, but threatens to undermine the process of frost-communist reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses speeches made by UK higher education ministers, from the election of the Conservative government in May 2015 through to September 2020. The article uses disruptive innovation as a theoretical framework through which to analyse ministers' perspectives on innovation. The methodology is content analysis with a directed approach. Fourteen speeches are analysed. Innovation is shown to serve an economic agenda, enabling students to transact their higher education quickly and subsequently function without state support. Innovation is also a flexible term offering numerous solutions, from providing economic growth; to militating against the isolationism of Brexit; to providing a route out of the pandemic. Innovation is intended to enhance economic performance and to deliver efficiency, but not to fundamentally disrupt the existing organisation of the UK's higher education sector. Innovation, as articulated by Ministers for Higher Education, comprises sustaining innovation and efficiency innovation, but not disruptive innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of quality assurance and enhancement initiatives on teacher identities in higher education. Data from an interview-based study of a research-led institution in the United Kingdom are drawn upon to consider the implications of quality – for example, whether it has captured the inner assumptive worlds of higher educators (and supplanted their own understandings of quality) or whether it has opened up new subject positions and possibilities for change. I focus on a particular group of people within the article – those who have demonstrated an interest in higher education teaching by participating in professional development programmes. Such programmes have proliferated in the light of the quality movement whilst offering exposure to ‘educationalist’ discourses. Contextualising the work through previous critical higher education research, I consider the group’s perceptions of quality initiatives and the construction of their teaching identities within a research-led institution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent curriculum reforms have led to a wider variety of methods of assessment in formal 'high stakes' assessment regimes in many countries. Morgan's study of mathematics coursework assessment in UK schools identified a number of positions adopted by teachers as they assessed student texts. Using Bernstein's theoretical framework, we revisit Morgan's study in order to construct a model for understanding teachers' assessment practices and positionings. The model consists of opposing forms, generated by modelling agencies, agents, practices and specialised forms of communication, to identify their principles of construction, displayed as changes in the strength of boundary. This helps to distinguish practices of assessment as different modalities of regulation, and to understand the tensions within and between discourses and practices. Thus, for example, by interpreting tensions between discourses of 'mathematical investigation' and of 'assessment' in terms of the contradictory demands made by different modes of pedagogic practice, we can reveal the social assumptions of the pedagogic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the theory of instruction legitimized by the Ministry of Education in the present reform (1991) by comparison with the previous reform (1975), in order to find out possible changes in the teacher-student relation. The study is focused on the syllabuses of the discipline of Natural Sciences of Years 5/6 and 7, and is theoretically based on Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse. The results showed that there are differences between the 1975 and the 1991 reforms, which reveal a change from a more self-regulative theory of instruction to a mixed theory of instruction. This is particularly evident for Years 5/6 of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]