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The article discusses various papers published within the issue, including one on curriculum inequalities in England by Alice Sullivan, Anna Zimdars and Anthony Heath, one on the beneficiaries of the Assisted Places Scheme by Sally Power, Andrew Curtis, Geoff Whitty and Tony Edwards and one the educational success of a group of elite girls by Alexandra Allan.

Young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) are construed by policy-makers as a pressing problem about which something should be done. Such young people’s lack of employment is thought to pose difficulties for wider society in relation to social cohesion and inclusion, and it is feared that they will become a ‘lost generation’. This paper draws upon English research, seeking to historicise the debate whilst acknowledging that these issues have a much wider purchase. The notion of NEETs rests alongside longstanding concerns of the English state and middle classes, addressing unruly male working-class youth as well as the moral turpitude of working class girls. Waged labour and domesticity are seen as a means to integrate such groups into society thereby generating social cohesion. The paper places the debate within it socio-economic context and draws on theorisations of cognitive capitalism, Italian workerism, as well as emerging theories of antiwork to analyse these. It concludes by arguing that ‘radical’ approaches to NEETs that point towards inequities embedded in the social structure and call for social democratic solutions veer towards a form of comfort radicalism. Such approaches leave in place the dominance of capitalist relations as well as productivist orientations that celebrate waged labour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper suggests that, in contrast to the great reports such as Crowther, Newsom Robbins and Plowden, recent government papers relating to educational in England pay little attention to values that should shape the standards to be achieved, the knowledge to be transmitted and the virtues to be nourished. Whilst legislation over the past 60 years has promoted a vision of 'education for all', what has predominated has been a concept of learning restricted to that which privileges the small number who can perform well within a narrowly defined understanding of academic studies. It is argued that the need to measure and standardise performance has resulted in a marginalisation of the broader vision of learning, which should be pursued in order to enable us to live fully human lives. Such an approach will require a transformation of educational ideals and refusal to accept the reductionist practices inherent in the language of performance management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the sociological issues raised by a recent study on school councils in England. This study revealed a lack of clarity among policy-makers and schools regarding the purpose of provision for pupil voice. The paper argues that this allows important questions about the functions of pupil voice to be avoided. While suggesting ways in which schools could refine their provision, the paper asks whether more effective pupil voice would make the concept less attractive to policy-makers and schools in the first place. It goes on to highlight more fundamental questions raised by critiques of notions of 'voice'. Connected to this, the paper outlines the potential for pupil voice to support neo-liberal as well as progressive ends. It concludes by arguing that teachers must grasp the opportunities provided by pupil voice to ensure that it serves 'collaborative' rather than 'managerial' professionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the longstanding question of policy for those referred to nearly half a century ago by the Crowther Report as the ‘bottom half’; those mainly working class children who, in a sense, are ‘selected for failure’. The issue of selection is a matter of concern in countries around the world and has been at the centre of renewed political debate in Britain during 2005–2006. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair has been keen to advance a policy of ‘freeing‐up’ secondary schools so as to provide ‘diversity’ and ‘more choice for parents and pupils’. Critics regard such a policy as involving ‘selection by other means’. This paper discusses questions of social class and inequality that are bound‐up with the issue of selection. The paper provides an account of ‘Blairite’ New Labour policy and discusses its closeness to new right education policy. The paper concludes with a discussion of radical proposals and observations on the prospects for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of dominant educational discourses through textual critique and argues that such an approach enables education studies to preserve an important distinction from teacher training. The texts deconstructed here are specific to English education, but the discourses at work have international relevance as the rhetorics of accountability, performance and measurement (which we call cells of discourse) have global reach. Ward described a national picture in England whereby the great majority, if not all, of education studies undergraduate courses appear to be taught alongside, or within (through shared modules) teacher training programmes. But from a sociological position, these are two increasingly conflicting arenas—the study of education and the training of teachers. In response, Ward called for the subject to radicalize teacher education. The implications of this are significant if education studies is to retain a status as agent of critique. In this paper we return to the theme of education studies as a discrete practice from teacher training and suggest that any acceptance of a proximal relation to teacher education is counter‐productive. In so doing we offer three contemporary examples of the subject at deconstructive work, scrutinizing the published standards for teacher training in England, employer discourse and the Tomlinson report (commissioned by the English government to offer proposals for the reworking of vocational education) and the new curriculum for adult literacy in England. Particular attention is given to analysing the ways in which such texts speak the currently powerful discourse of standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on data drawn from a study exploring the educational strategies of 62 Black Caribbean heritage middle-class parents. In this paper, we consider the respective roles of race and class in the shaping of parents’ educational strategies, deploying an analysis that focuses on their intersection and seeks to hold both race and class in productive tension. Drawing on empirical data, we illustrate how parents’ classed and raced identities shape their interactions with school staff. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines three recent accounts of what has allegedly gone wrong with the school curriculum in England in recent years and their prescriptions for remedying these ills – all three accounts sharing strong proposals to reinstate knowledge at the heart of the curriculum. These analyses, despite some significant similarities, come from very different political standpoints. They are: first, proposals by the current UK Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove to ‘shrink’ the National Curriculum whilst promoting a new English Baccalaureate; secondly Frank Furedi, Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes’ critiques of ‘therapeutic education’ and thirdly Michael Young and Johan Muller’s proposals, grounded in a social realist epistemology, for a ‘Future 3’ curriculum which respects the objectivity of knowledge but also recognises its fallibility and openness to change. The paper concludes by suggesting that Michael Gove’s basic objective is to shape what Basil Bernstein called a neoconservative prospective educational identity; the paper offers a critical assessment of this project and briefly considers an alternative approach, focusing on some issues relating to citizenship education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to identify common patterns in central authorities' steering of universities and the institutional power in neo-liberal higher education regimes. The paper examines the regulatory mechanisms of England and Japan through Foucault's idea of 'governmentality' and utilises the concept of autonomy to identify the state-university nexus and institutional behaviour. The paper argues that the similar application of technologies of arts in England and Japan - such as financial incentives and output quality management - has not brought about the same effect across the two countries in institutional behaviour and culture. In the case of England, the decline of traditional university autonomy - which isolated the university sector from external pressure - and increasing external influence in the value system are the case, while in Japan, the shift is rather internal within an institution, changing from department to institutional autonomy, which is compatible with the concept of accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last 20 years has witnessed the spread of corporatism in education on a global scale. In England, this trend is characterised by new structural and cultural approaches to education found in the ‘academies’ programme and the adoption of private sector management styles. The corporate re-imagining of schools has also led to the introduction into the curriculum of particular forms of character education aimed at managing the ‘emotional labour’ of children. This paper argues that character education rests on a fallacy that the development of desirable character traits in children can be engineered by mimicking certain behaviours from the adult world. The weaknesses in the corporate approach to managing ‘emotional labour’ are illustrated with empirical data from two primary schools. An alternative paradigm is presented which locates the ‘emotional labour’ of children within a ‘holding environment’ that places children’s well-being at its core. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper focuses on the auditing and accountancy paradigm that has dominated educational measurement of pupil performance for the last 20 years in England. The advocates of this minimum competency paradigm do not take account of the results of its dominance. These results include ignoring the heterogeneous complexity of groups within societies that exist now internationally and the reduction in pedagogy and curriculum experience to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of teaching concentrated on the tested subjects. This is complemented by the ‘recitation script’ style of pedagogy in schools based on coverage, delivery, completion and measurement rather than interpretation and analysis to support the complexity and diversity of individual learning needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the stratification of the curriculum according to parents' education, gender, ethnicity and school sector in England, focusing on year 10 subject choices. Using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, we analyse both year 10 subject choices and the factors that may motivate these choices, such as liked and disliked subjects, attitudes to subject choice and the extent to which choices were shaped by parents, teachers or the young people themselves. The social structure of curriculum choice is mapped using Multiple Correspondence Analysis, which reveals the hierarchy of subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Asian women's experiences of belonging to communities of practice within higher education in Britain. The research explores the ways in which women engage in friendship and support networks, how they negotiate their identities and their experiences of being marginalised and 'different'. The research argues that Asian women within the university environment are engaged in 'communities of practice', which act as mechanisms through which they are able to find support, mutual engagement and understandings of shared belongings and shared identity. The paper draws on the work of Wenger (1998) to examine the processes of identity construction as experienced by Asian women in higher education. The research is based on 20 case study interviews conducted with Asian women in a university in the South East of England. The interviews were tape-recorded and the data transcribed. The data was analysed by using methods of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published in London between 1839 and 1852 and aligned with the commercial objectives of the New Zealand Company, the New Zealand Journal included letters from emigrants. This paper studies letters written by a small cohort of rural labourers who emigrated from Ham House in Surrey to Wellington in 1841. Following Dorothy Smith, I read them as ethnographic data, interrogating them in relation to ruling-class texts including Company records, newspaper reports and correspondence between capitalists, professionals and politicians. The labourers' letters depict capital-labour (class) and colonial (race) relations in embodied form. The everyday actualities of their activities were co-ordinated by extra-local social relations of colonialism and flows of capital and labour. Their schooling in England had been designed to 'keep them in their place'. With reference to the sparse archival resources remaining from the first years of commercially-driven settlement, before there was an apparatus of state, I consider how changing material conditions in the settlement enabled and constrained learning opportunities for these labourers' children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes gender positioning within the micro-politics of the socio-educational context of teacher education in England. It examines data from the life experiences of student teachers in the context of Initial Teacher Training in Physical Education. Physical education is primarily focused on work on the body, regulated and controlled through the ritualised practices of sports and physical activities. The green paper of the New Labour government "Teachers: Meeting the Challenge of Change," reflects the government's proposals to modernize the teaching profession. There was an establishment of a performance management system by the government, which involves restructuring of the teaching profession, the introduction of annual appraisal and performance related pay. Student teachers in Initial Teacher Training Program are encouraged to develop particular pedagogical/professional approaches to teaching. They are being advised by their teachers and mentors to orient themselves toward a masculinised teaching identity. This identity concentrates on confrontational, authoritarian and didactic pedagogical approaches associated with hegemonic masculinities.

The article presents information on the impact of the educational policy from 1997 to 2000 on class structures in England. The New Labor government, elected to office in May 1997, adhered to the Conservative faith in choice and competition, and education as a market driven by consumer demands fueled by league tables of exam results, specialist schools and failing schools. The period saw an enhanced commitment to the view that all educational institutions should be managed along the lines of private business, while at the same time there was increased emphasis on state regulation and control of the curriculum, assessment, inspection, teachers and local education authorities. The emphasis of the educational policy was on "learning to compete" in a global economy. Studies on social mobility studies have indicated that the pattern of unequal social mobility chances has remained basically the same throughout most of the twentieth century, despite the advent of welfare states, universal free education and redistributive tax regimes.

This article focuses on the guidance system in England and Wales which has involved schools and Careers Services. During the 1990s the terms partnership approach and guidance community have been used to refer to the guidance system. Descriptors confirm what is taken to be a strength of the system. This in many respects is ironic given that the dual system underlying this provision is a historical legacy and belies the struggle for control between two sectors, education and employment, over which was most suitable to offer guidance and advice to youngsters about to leave school. There are two dimensions to guidance provision, careers education and careers guidance. Often there is a tendency to conflate the two and simply talk of careers education and guidance or CEG. Careers education is school-based curricular provision (usually structured around four key elements: decision making; opportunity awareness; transition skills and self-awareness) and includes work experience programmes for students, usually in year 10 (age 14-15 years).

This article examines the concept of ‘White racism’ in relation to the experiences of Gypsy and Traveller groups in England. It is based on ethnographic research conducted in two secondary schools during the years 2006–2009. Interviews were carried out with pupils attending the secondary schools, their mothers and members of the Traveller Education Service. The research reveals that racism experienced by White Gypsy and Traveller groups is understood differently to that experienced by non-White minority ethnic groups. This is further related to how Gypsy and Traveller groups are perceived inside and outside schools, as ‘others’ and ‘outsiders’. The article considers discourses around racism and discrimination and how they might work to disadvantage Gypsy and Traveller groups in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers multicultural education policies in relation to recent political and social events in England, France and Canada. The authors start from the assumption that the promotion of multiculturalism is thought to be a beneficial aim in schools. In light of this, they contrast this aim with the large civil unrest witnessed in 2005 in England and France, along with a recent 2006 court decision in Canada regarding minority rights in schools. They contend that effective multicultural policies must be developed at both the state and local levels, otherwise multicultural education policies will remain superficial at best. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fifty‐year retrospective has led to recent media interest in the comprehensive school. Bristol, located in the south‐west of England, is frequently portrayed as an early provider. This article draws on documentary evidence and life‐history interviews with ex‐pupils to explore this claim. It finds that they were not comprehensive schools, but selective bilaterals that, despite including grammar and secondary modern streams within the same physical site, constructed, through their curricular and non‐curricular practices, a rigid divide between the two. The selective schooling of the bilateral consolidated the classificatory practices that began in primary school. Framed by Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, disposition and classificatory practices, it is a study of explicit selective schooling that was reliant not only on key moments of selection, and differentiated curricula, but on everyday practices and signifiers of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the increase of cultural pragmatism in English schools. The culture of pragmatism is partly understood as a response to extensive educational reform, and partly as the internalization of a wider discourse of pragmatism. The role of pragmatism in itself is made up of virtue and it in turn takes on ideological significance. In this context the concept of contingent pragmatism is observed. It specifically refers to those situations wherein teachers adapt to various teaching approaches and philosophies in accordance with specific circumstances that may change with time or location. In principled pragmatism specifically those cases are referred wherein teachers adopt changes that are already introduced into their existing practice more deliberately and proactively than is the case with contingent pragmatism. According to suggestions drawn from research evidences, principled pragmatism is more comfortably accomplished than contingent pragmatism, and has the potential to be more enduring.

In the light of the authors' ongoing evaluation of a single Education Action Zones (EAZ), the article examines the extent to which the ambitious claims made by the government have been realised. It assesses the extent to which EAZ can be viewed as part of the British 20th century theme in education of tackling inequality. It demonstrates that EAZ policy was riddled with tensions and paradoxes arising out of the eccentric mix of neo-liberal, social democratic and Third Way approaches to addressing educational inequality. The article concludes that EAZ suffered from three types of errors—concept, process and outcomes, and hence was a mission impossible. The authors argue that EAZ may, hopefully, be a lesson in making the vision of resolving education inequality possible. Despite the history of education in England, this article does not view the pursuit of equality of education and educational opportunity as a mission impossible, though it sees this as calling for the redistribution of societal wealth in all its forms. However, that has never been a clear political venture. It is within this context that the conclusions concerning EAZ are made.

The article presents a socio-historical overview of teacher education in England. In the Middle Ages teaching was provided through the church, by clerics or by those who had been educated by clerics. During those days entry to the ancient universities was only available to those men who took the cloth. This virtual ecclesiastical control of education continued until such time as the nature and extent of the demand and need for education and schooling surpassed the capacity of the churches and shifts of institutional power within society. The enactment of the Royal Commission on the working of the Elementary Education Acts in 1988, marked the establishment of training departments in universities and ended the monopoly of the churches. Another major landmark was the Education Code of 1890 establishing local committees which were to make arrangements for lecturers to give instructions on the theory and history of education to teachers in training. It indicates that during the 1980s the teacher education moved from the assumed condition for which it was castigated by often ill-informed right-wing critics.

This article focuses on the role of the School Organisation Committee (SOC) in England and Wales. In 1994, the Education Act delegated the responsibility for education to the local education authorities (LEAs). However, the debate on the reassertion of central control over education policy-making is still going on. In the Education Act (1998), provisions were included for setting up a SOC in every LEA in England. According to this legislation, an Adjudicator should also be appointed who would take the decisions in those cases where the local SOC could not agree. The Education Act (1998) was a part of the Labour Government's program of modernization. The SOC exists as a separate statutory body and the LEA is only responsible for setting up and financing the SOC. The primary purpose of the SOC is the consideration of the LEA's School Organisation Plan. Other responsibilities of the SOC include changes to a school's admission limits and proposals to close a school or open a new one. The central government regards the SOCs as a way of increasing local accountability. However, some local councilors see them as further evidence of an assault on local government.

This article focuses on different issues related to the initial teacher education in England and Wales. A new model of teacher education, based on standards, has been introduced in these countries. In the past few years, the teacher education has been changed into teacher training which involves a technical rational ideology. The new ideology has also introduced a standards model which represents a new form of regulation of professional expertise in society allowing the state to control teacher education. This model also specifies a particular brand of outcome. Some scholars argue that the new teacher training standards have made it difficult for teacher educators to help student teachers to become critically reflective teachers. Technical rationalists say that the aim of education is to meet the demands of society such as the labor market or the national targets for numeracy and literacy. However, this thinking has some serious drawbacks. By fragmenting a professional activity like teaching into lists of practical elements, the task of the teaching becomes disaggregated and atomized. This view of teaching is disembedded. Another important fact is that standards based on practical skills and techniques do not address value issues or engage in the theories underpinning teaching activities.

This article focuses on the influence of economic, cultural and intellectual changes on teacher education. Different social groups have their different agendas for teacher education. In some countries, the governments try to reduce the expenditure on teacher education whilst retaining control over it. However, the governments must ensure that its interventions are both necessary and appropriate for teacher educators. Therefore, teacher educators try to protect their interests against what they see as heavy-handed interventions by the state, especially, in England, by the Teacher Training Agency. In England, the very term used to describe the teacher educator is the provider. And it suggests that if government-defined national criteria can be met, then it is open to any provider to come up with the goods. In other countries such as the United States and Australia, professional bodies have constructed their own national standards. In the postmodernist culture, teachers educators are caught between governments which seek cheap certainties and also try to curb public expenditure. However, they must also consider the effects of deeply-rooted structural changes which are at once economic, cultural and intellectual.

The article presents information on the under-representation of minority ethic group in teaching in England and Wales and their relative lack of opportunities for career progression. In mid-1980s, the Commission for Racial Equality applied for policy interventions to address the issue and afterwards carried out a survey of staffing in eight local authorities that had higher than average minority populations. Survey findings revealed that less than 3% of teachers came from minority ethnic backgrounds and were also disproportionately concentrated on lower pay scales. Consequently, the Higher Education Funding Council for England funded 17 projects to extend ethnic minority participation in initial teacher training. Subsequently, teacher training institutions employed a number of strategies to attract minority ethnic trainees both on campus and during school placement. Another matter for concern was of the financial support for mature entrants to the Postgraduate Certificate in Education.

The article presents a case study exploring the parental role in education and the response of parents and teachers towards it in England and Wales. Data is collected in two first phase schools in England. The authors argue that government policy depoliticises both educational outcomes and parent-teacher relations with acknowledgement of appropriate education policy and critical educational research. All agree on an atmosphere of open communication, informality and routine. The idea of the "open" school dominates the data as it is pivotal in the way in which parents and teachers use it to explain and sustain parent-teacher relations of a mutually acceptable kind. However, it seems that parent-teacher relations are heavily based on the teachers' side while parental empowerment is something of a myth. The data clearly show that what drives parental involvement in these schools is teacher priorities coupled with some parental compliance, under the cover of the "open' school," and not government policy imperatives.

The article discusses the relevance of the notion of parental involvement in secondary education. The author in this article believes that it tends to be regarded as a unified concept and accepted unproblematically as desirable by all concerned. The article considers the question of "who wants parental involvement?" by considering the different viewpoints and experiences of the main protagonists: the teachers, the parents and the school students. Earlier, parental involvement has been, more or less, voluntary in England and Wales. The question is placed within the current context whereby school governing bodies will be required by September 1999 to instigate Home-School Agreements, to be signed by all parents. The relevance of this document is looked in the light of the diversity of needs and/or expectations manifested by the main protagonists and the tensions produced by these struggling relationships. Data has been drawn from a 3-year research project, which looked at parents' relationship with their children's secondary school.

This article focuses on the multiplicity of ways in which lesbian physical education students and teachers construct and manage their respective identities within higher education and the schooling system in England. It is argued that these identity management strategies must be understood within their specific corporeal, social, cultural and political contexts. Attention will be directed towards the politics of New Right discourses on sexuality and in particular to the prohibition of homosexuality and the passing of Section 28 of the Local Government Act in England and Wales in 1988 which created a climate of fear of loss of employment for many lesbian and gay teachers. In order to understand why lesbian students and teachers feel the need to conceal and protect their lesbian identities it is necessary to understand something of the social and political climate which forces them to render their real identity invisible. It is a climate, undoubtedly within education, that it is not generally conducive to the open display of a lesbian identity.