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This paper focuses on the ‘mainstreaming’ of charities into schools. There have been growing concerns about the permeation of business and business values in education, but relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which schools are increasingly engaged in the ‘business’ of fundraising for charities. Drawing on survey data from the WISERDEducation Multi-Cohort Study (WMCS), the paper outlines young people’s relationship with charities. The data show that young people have a high degree of engagement with charities, in which schools play a significant part. There are likely to be many positive aspects to this engagement, inasmuch as it fosters and reflects young people’s sense of collective responsibility. However, there are also issues about the extent to which this high level of involvement marginalises other approaches to promote the social good and increases the permeation of business values and business into school. The paper concludes that the current mainstreaming of charities into schools is not necessarily a self-evident ‘good’ and that this under-researched phenomenon deserves greater critical attention within and outwith schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the trajectories of initially higher- and lower-achieving children from lower and higher socio-economic status families from primary school through to university in England for the first time. We also explore what explains these trajectories. This enables us to provide new insights into when and why the performance of children with similar initial achievement diverges on the basis of their socio-economic background. Our results indicate that pupils from poor backgrounds who are higher achievers in primary school fall behind their better-off but lower-achieving peers during secondary school. This suggests that secondary school may be a critical period to intervene to prevent poor children from falling behind their richer peers. Our analysis suggests that there is less divergence in performance between pupils from different socio-economic backgrounds who attend the same schools. This result is particularly strong for children with low initial achievement. While we remain cautious about the implications of these findings, they provide suggestive evidence that schools (or the sorting of pupils into schools) play an important role in explaining why the test scores of richer and poorer children diverge over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the contribution of theoretical discussions of social education in UK youth work to debates about ‘social pedagogy’, arguing that the analysis of power and difference, in particular the impact of gender difference, which has occurred in youth work is essential in discussions of ‘social pedagogy’ too. Since ‘social pedagogy’ has been discussed as a source for transformed visions of schooling, the paper extends and develops discussion of pre-figurative counter-practice and how it can be sustained through an engagement with difference, drawing especially on the work of Luce Irigaray. Ideas and practice associated with social pedagogy have been drawn on to illuminate a radical vision of the common school as a counter-practice to the neo-liberal credentialisation of schooling. Such approaches resonate strongly with so-called romantic models of youth work in the UK (Wylie, 2010) and their associated traditions of social education. The emphasis on the relational and the social in education might enable a fruitful engagement with feminist approaches especially that of the philosopher Luce Irigaray (1932–present) whose work forms the basis of the engagement with difference which is advocated here. Such an engagement with difference is essential to any democratic project which resists pressures simply to normalise, standardise and contain those involved in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between stream placement and the academic progress made by children in England in Year 2 of primary school, drawing on data from the longitudinal Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). The MCS is a sample of 19,000 children born across the UK around the turn of the century and their families. Academic progress was compared between children in England in the ‘top’, ‘middle’ or ‘bottom’ streams, and among the majority of non-streamed children. Multiple regressions took into account child, family and school characteristics and showed that stream placement significantly impacted on the academic progress made by children. Children in the ‘top’ stream achieved more and made significantly more academic progress than children attending schools that did not stream, while children in the ‘middle’ or ‘bottom’ streams achieved less and made significantly less academic progress. The reasons for this and the educational implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Educational and occupational aspirations have become an important reference point in policy debates about educational inequality. Low aspirations are presented as a major barrier to closing educational attainment gaps and increasing levels of social mobility. Our paper contributes to this on-going debate by presenting data on the educational aspirations of students from the Effective Provision of Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education Project in England. We analyse factors that help predict students holding high aspirations. Our findings reveal generally high aspirations across all students but also differences by income group and other background factors. We evaluate the significance of these findings for the existing literature and public policy discussions about the importance of raising educational aspirations. In particular, we question the way in which low aspirations are framed by policy-makers as a major problem in debates around educational inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are long-standing achievement gaps in England associated with socio-economic status (SES), ethnicity and gender, but relatively little research has evaluated interactions between these variables or explored school effects on such gaps. This paper analyses the national test results at age 7 and age 11 of 2,836 pupils attending 68 mainstream primary schools in an ethnically diverse inner London borough. The groups with the lowest educational achievement and poorest progress were both Black Caribbean and White British low SES pupils. White British middle and high SES pupils made substantially more progress than White British low SES pupils, significantly increasing the SES gap over time. However low and high SES Black pupils made equally poor progress age 7–11. School effects on pupil progress were large, but there was no evidence of differential school effectiveness in relation to SES, ethnicity or gender. Low SES pupils in the more effective schools performed significantly better than high SES pupils in the less effective schools, but all pupils (both low and high SES) benefit from attending the more effective schools and so these schools do not eliminate the SES gap. The limits to change that may be achieved by schools alone are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implementation refers to the process by which an intervention is put into practice. Research studies across multiple disciplines, including education, have consistently demonstrated that interventions are rarely implemented as designed and, crucially, that variability in implementation is related to variability in the achievement of expected outcomes. Put simply, implementation matters (Durlak & DuPre, 2008). This paper reviews several key issues in the study of implementation and calls for an increasing emphasis on this often neglected aspect of evaluation research in UK journals. These issues include programme-specific reasons for studying implementation as an intervention passes through the various stages of development, advancing knowledge and understanding about the processes of implementation (including the balance required between fidelity and adaptation, and the range of factors that may facilitate or impede implementation), and improving measurement and assessment of implementation. Through discussion of these issues the case is made for more research that focuses specifically on the examination of implementation in school settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of pupils amongst schools is fundamental to concerns about equality of educational opportunity and it is for this reason that the process by which pupils are admitted to schools is of significance. This paper focuses on admissions criteria and practices used by English secondary schools in 2001 and 2008 in light of changes to legislation and the regulatory context. In 2008, unlike 2001, virtually all schools gave priority to children in care and very few used interviews. In a minority of schools, predominantly those responsible for their own admissions, criteria designed to 'select in' certain pupils were used, with partial selection by aptitude/ability increasing over time. An analysis of 'supplementary information forms' revealed that a minority of schools requested information that was prohibited and unrelated to admissions criteria. Notwithstanding some positive impacts, further changes could make the admissions process easier for parents/carers and enhance equality of educational opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been a re-appraisal within political science of the characteristics of various kinds of public policy failure. At the same time, the political significance of education has grown in most liberal democracies. The present paper examines public policy in British education since the mid-1970s and asks: What goes wrong in policy-making and when does manageable failure slide into full-scale crisis? Various episodes of policy are explored and set against the theoretical framework developed by Mark Bovens and Paul t'Hart in an attempt to distinguish those policies in recent British education that have been controversial, those that have been manageable failures and those that turned into disabling fiascos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1993 the UK Economic and Social Research Council funded the Parental and School Choice Interaction (PACSI) Study into the marketisation of education, conducted by the author along with Philip Woods and Ron Glatter of the Open University. The findings from the PACSI study highlighted the localised and complex nature of markets in education and reported the ways in which senior school managers adopted a variety of strategies to respond to the local competitive arena in which they found themselves. In more than ten years since this study the UK Government has changed from Conservative to Labour and policy discourses on choice and competition have been situated alongside those of collaboration and partnership. In this shifting policy landscape the paper utilises analytical tools and findings from the original study to revisit one of the case study areas and examines the market environment in which senior school managers find themselves today. The findings reveal a stronger ‘parent as consumer’ marketing orientation and responsiveness on behalf of schools and an environment in which competition and rivalry has intensified and continues to discursively predominate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores and attempts to rectify current conceptual confusion found in secondary art education in the UK between procedural knowledge or ‘knowing how’ and declarative knowledge or ‘knowing that’. The paper argues that current practice confuses procedural knowledge with declarative knowledge. A corollary is that assessment evidence for ‘knowing how’, which is shown or demonstrated, is confused with assessment evidence for ‘knowing that’, which requires spoken or written forms of reporting. The confusion is replicated in the national examination, the General Certificate of Secondary Education, taken by students at the age of 16. The article traces this confusion to three dualisms: the Cartesian dualisms of mind and body, an individual mind and the distributed mind of culture, and the more recent mind‐in‐brain hemisphere dualism. The article advocates a Wittgensteinian embodied, socio‐cultural view of mind as a way of solving the current conceptual confusion that prevails in art education in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School diversity in the UK is not a new phenomenon. However, recent reforms to 'modernise' the secondary school system towards greater diversity of provision, primarily in England, needs to be explored in more detail. The article begins by proposing three phases in the development of state-funded school diversity and provision between 1944 and 1997. It then goes on to consider such reforms with the introduction of a Labour government in 1997. We argue that school diversity under New Labour represents a distinct fourth phase within this broad policy agenda. While there is some continuity in the expansion of school diversity this most recent phase is characterised by greater governmental intervention and a stronger commitment to provide greater resources for schools in disadvantaged communities. However, the paper then critically analyses the relationship between recent programmes of education diversity and equity. In particular, we go on to discuss the extent to which critics' fears about the emergence of a two-tier system are justified. We conclude that while the fourth phase in the UK school diversity agenda may aim to be more equitable, complementary and collaborative it perhaps fails to recognise that the education system today is more competitive and consumer-led. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper, first, outlines the official policy regarding education and training 14-19, second, picks out five areas within which that policy might be assessed, and, finally, raises questions about the educational thinking which underlies the policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practices of students, teachers, educational policymakers and managers are laden with assumptions of fact and value. Clearly, assumptions of value influence the way in which individuals and groups construe the nature and purpose of education, but this should not blind us to the existence of assumptions of fact about how to promote learning and improve the conduct and organisation of teaching. Many of these assumptions of fact may be false or inadequate, and as such they may limit the success of our educational endeavours. Using the UK's national literacy strategy as its principal illustration, this paper shows how a Popperian approach to science can advance our knowledge of what is the case about learning, teaching, and the organisation and conduct of formal education, and how such a non-positivist science can contribute to the improvement of educational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]