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The authors discusses the education in Great Britain. It raised on the public opinion if education in Scotland can survive alone or Great Britain can survive without Scotland during the Scottish independence referendum debate on September 2014. The authors explores the distinctive history, principle, and current policies of each country based on the papers they are written.

The documented social-subjects curricula for Scottish 5-16 year olds are analysed for representations of 'self-in-society'. Such representations are important in Scotland because it is expected that the new Education-for-Citizenship framework will in part be delivered through the social subjects. However, citizenship education is also relevant throughout the UK and beyond and our analysis of the social subjects has wider relevance. An ideal-type analysis was used on documents including national guidelines, examination syllabuses, examination papers, and assessor instructions. Our analysis suggests that in these documents: the self is seen as an abstract; people are understood by category; society is the sum of discrete institutions; self-in-society is fully defined; and this representation of society is not contested. This representation becomes increasingly exclusive with age/ability and may be linked to assumed modes of curricular division, teaching and assessment. We discuss how this overall picture might affect students' sense of 'agency' in the light of citizenship education. We conclude that the social-subjects' curricular representation of self-in-society may not fully support the Scottish Education-for-Citizenship framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates and compares the utilization of online resources to support teaching and learning in two different educational sectors with overlapping student groups in Scotland: secondary schools and further education (FE) colleges. The online ‘Core Skills’ materials included Numeracy, Communication, Information Technology (IT), Problem Solving and Working With Others. The research involved two large-scale national surveys with representative samples of staff drawn from secondary schools and FE colleges, and four qualitative case studies purposively selected to represent a range of geographic locations. The most popular resources were for Numeracy. In the majority of colleges, respondents' attitudes to the materials were positive and the e-resources were used in conjunction with other teaching approaches. The evidence suggested that less motivated learners benefited from the materials when they were contextualized. Among secondary teacher respondents, however, the resources were virtually unknown. The majority of secondary teachers reported that they needed time to evaluate the materials and that they would benefit from specific training related to curriculum-linked e-resources. In conclusion, as the Numeracy materials have been found useful, e-learning in mathematics warrants further investigation among less motivated students who are currently not achieving their potential in secondary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The restructuring of teachers' work in Scotland, under the reforms of both the New Right and the New Left, has not exhibited the starkness and radical edge evident in the history of reform in England. This paper argues that the professional context of Scotland's teachers has changed, if perhaps in a Caledonian form, under the action of the same forces that have been altering the educational landscape south of the border and internationally. While comparisons with England tend to place Scotland in a more favourable light in relation to the recasting of the professional context of teachers, there is a danger of overstating the social democratic virtues of policy-making and educational reform under New Labour. Three examples are discussed by way of illustrating the performativity climate within which Scotland's teachers now work: the use of development planning, quality indicators and statistical monitoring; the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc. Act 2000; and the agreement on pay and conditions of employment for teachers following from the McCrone report (McCrone, G. A Teaching Profession for the Twenty First Century (Edinburgh, SEED, 2000)). We conceive the role of the teacher as being essentially malleable: what is expected and desired of teachers is susceptible and sensitive to the historically and politically contingent. The paper argues that the professional context of Scotland's teachers has been restructured by the same reform imperatives manifest internationally across education systems. However, the form and constitution of restructuring in Scotland can only be illuminated in relation to the interaction and compromises of such reform imperatives within the national political climate and policy-making process. The paper concludes that this vernacularization of international trends goes some way towards accounting for a distinctive Caledonian form of 'modernization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2012, Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond announced a radical measure that would see every Scottish school student study a Scottish text from a prescribed list. In 2010, Michael Gove announced that ‘Our literature is the best in the world’ and that every pupil should study particular authors. The ‘cultural heritage’ model of English is increasingly dismissed by teachers and students However, it is this ‘cultural heritage’ model which is preserved in the discourse of politicians. This paper explores the role that literary heritage texts play in the discourse of education policy in the context of devolution in twenty-first century Britain and considers the drivers and differences which can be seen in England and Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using data on the patent portfolios of UK universities, the paper compares the levels of patenting activity (filings), success (grants) and quality (patents with commercial co-assignees and patent citations) at Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish institutions. Patent activity, per researcher, in Wales is on a par with that in Scotland and about twice the rate in Northern Ireland, but the numbers of researchers relative to population in Wales and Northern Ireland are around half of the number in Scotland. Patent quality indicators are less favourable to Wales, while both activity levels and conversion of applications into grants are poor in Northern Ireland. It is suggested that greater cross-university collaboration in Wales and Northern Ireland would help improve performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, education in Scotland has been viewed as a national service that is locally administered. This research casts new light on that relationship between the Scottish Executive and local authorities by drawing on evidence from an evaluation of the implementation of the additional support staff element of the Teachers' Agreement which determined not only teachers' pay structure but also established the professional conditions under which they would work. The paper identifies how local authorities and schools spent the grant aid on staff and equipment, how many additional support staff were appointed, and what impact they were reported to be having on teaching and learning. Information was gathered from a postal survey of all 32 Scottish local authorities and a random sample of 267 schools, and also from interviews held in six case study schools. The findings show that: all the grant aid could not be accounted for, the target number of support staff was not achieved, and their deployment and impact varied across local authorities and schools. By way of conclusion it poses the question: 'Was the money well spent?' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on findings from the first cross‐national study of school exclusion in the four jurisdictions of the UK. It casts new light on the crucial aspects of children's education that lead to school exclusion. It investigates the reasons for the UK disparities, as well as the policy and practice in place. The focus of this article is on a detailed analysis of the policy context in Scotland, where official permanent exclusion reduced to an all‐time low of just five cases in 2014/15. This is much lower than in Northern Ireland and Wales and in stark contrast to England, where exclusions have increased substantially since 2012. Our analysis seeks to understand Scotland's success in reducing exclusion and offers new insight into the ways in which national policies and local factors more generally shape schools and their practices and the consequent impacts for children and young people more broadly in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognition that the United Kingdom has increasingly become a multi-cultural and multi-faith society has raised questions about the place of church schools or schools with a religious character within the state-maintained sector. The issue was given particular focus by the Runnymede Trusts report Right to divide? Faith schools and community cohesion published in 2008. In response to this challenge, the present study examines attitudes toward religious diversity among 1,012 students attending Catholic schools and 1,518 students attending schools without a religious foundation in Scotland (13- to 15-years of age). Employing a multilevel linear model to allow for the fact that students were nested within schools and after controlling for individual differences in personality and religiosity, the data demonstrated that students attending Catholic schools held a more positive attitude toward religious diversity, compared with students attending schools without a religious foundation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on political issues surrounding special education in Great Britain as of June 1, 2014. Topics discussed include the use of shared education in Northern Ireland, individual development plans (IDPs) in Wales, and the passage of the Children and Young People Act in Scotland.

The article focuses on the late 19th and early 20th Scottish private school administrator John Guthrie Kerr, who was headmaster of Allan's Glen private school in Glasgow, Scotland. Kerr's tenure there is examined in terms of his role in advancing the philosophy of education associated with private schools in England and its elite universities, Oxford and Cambridge. His introduction of organized sports as part of the school's activities and stress on the merits of physical education is considered. The benefits of sports and exercise were important tenets of the philosophy and organization of private schools and universities in England. Kerr's success in popularizing these ideas within Scotland's system of education is discussed.

The article focuses on the 19th century Scottish educator Hely Hutchinson Almond, who was headmaster of Loretto, a small private school outside Edinburgh, Scotland from 1862-1903. Almond was considered a radical by his contemporaries, as he saw Scottish society as not having adapted to the ideals of what he viewed as progress, particularly the importance of health and exercise. This was translated in his educational philosophy into a concern for the role of physical education and sports in secondary education. It is argued that Almond's vigorous criticism of established Scottish society masked the fact that his ideas on physical education and sports were very much in the mainstream of educational philosophy in Great Britain's private schools in the late 19th century.

The Learning with Care report (HMI and SWSI, 2001) made seven criticisms in relation to the provision of education for looked after children in Scotland. The most recent report, Looked After Children and Young People: We can and must do better (Scottish Executive, 2007), contains 19 actions for improvement. Graham Connelly and Mono Chakrabarti examine whether the distinctiveness of the Scottish political landscape has the potential to lead to improvements in tackling the deficits in the educational experience and attainment of looked after children and young people clearly acknowledged by the authors of both reports. Their article considers the recent history of political concern and asks whether things are getting better, concluding that while there is only limited improvement, the climate is more supportive and more emphatic in its expectations of the young people and the professionals who support them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an apparent contradiction between the widespread moves towards a uniform and instrumentalist standards-based approach to teaching on the one hand and recent research-based insights into the complexity of effective pedagogies. The former tendency reflects a politically driven agenda, the latter is more professionally driven. Tensions reflecting such a contradiction are evident in the debates over initial teacher education (ITE) policy and practice in many parts of the world. This article examines aspects of ITE policy in two contiguous parts of the United Kingdom, England and Scotland. The authors draw on a comparative study carried out during 2002–2004, particularly on an analysis of key contemporary policy documents, in order to consider some of the similarities and differences that are apparent in these two countries. It is argued that while features of national culture, tradition and institutional politics have a significant role to play in the detail of the approaches taken, there is nevertheless evidence of significant convergence between both countries in one aspect of the determination of initial teacher education, the definition of teaching through the prescription of standards, which set official parameters on professional knowledge required for entry into the profession. This, it is suggested, reflects trends associated with neoliberal ‘globalisation’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the General Teaching Council for England (GTC(E)). Impact of the council on education in England; Support of the council by England's educators; The GTC(E) legislation; Comparison with the General Teaching Council for Scotland.

Reports on a study of education for sustainability in Scottish secondary schools. Coverage of a secondary concern relevant work in the other national regions of Great Britain; Analysis of the central problem faced by schools involved in cross-curriculum developments of this kind; Outline of changing practices within these schools.