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This essay offers a broken narrative concerning the early history of anti-oppressive practice as an approach in the U.K. to youth and community work and the struggles over this in the context of UK higher education between the 1960's and the early 2000's. Educating informal educators as youth and community workers in the UK has been a site of contestation. Aspects of a genealogy of that struggle are presented in ways which link publicly available histories with personal memories and narratives, through the use of a personal archive developed through collective memory work. These are chosen to illuminate the links between theory and practice: on the one hand, the conceptual field which has framed the education of youth and community workers, whose sources lie in the academic disciplines of education and sociology, and, on the other hand, the social movements which have formed the practice of informal educators. Six have been chosen: (1) The long 1968: challenging approaches to authority; (2) the group as a source of learning; (3) The personal and political: experiential learning from discontent; (4) Paolo Freire and Critical Praxis; (5) A critical break in social education and the reality of youth work spaces as defensive spaces; (6) New managerialism: ethics vs. paper trails. The approach taken, of linking memory work with present struggles, is argued to be a generative form for current critical and enlivening practice.

Opportunities for children to be involved in the decisions made about them is a part of current statutory educational legislation. Person‐centred planning (PCP) has been proposed as an appropriate method of meeting statutory requirements. However, there is a dearth of research into its application within education. The paper describes a systematic literature review of current research into PCP within education for pupils with SEMH and the associated outcomes. PCP appears to be an effective way of engaging children, young people and their families but research within education is currently limited and methodologically weak. More rigorous research is needed into PCP and its effectiveness and should include the use of standardised and/or observable measures, more varied ranges of contexts and participants, and longitudinal and child‐led designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This study estimates the effect of education on trust with a RD design. • Education and trust are positively and significantly correlated. • The OLS estimates may suffer from omitted variable bias. • RD estimates imply the effects of education on trust may be small. • We need to interpret the relationship between education and trust with caution. Although many studies document that education and trust are positively correlated, few studies examine whether this correlation represents a causal effect. This paper fills in the gap with data from the British Social Attitudes Survey. Firstly, using the OLS method, this paper finds that education and the three measures of trust—trust in people, trust in politicians, and trust in government—are all positively and significantly correlated. Secondly, to examine whether this correlation represents a causal effect, this paper exploits exogenous variation in educational attainment induced by the compulsory schooling reform in 1972. The regression discontinuity estimates suggest that the effects of education on the three measures of trust are all small and statistically insignificant. The findings imply that the OLS estimates may suffer from omitted variable bias and the effects of education on trust may be small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vocational qualifications in England are undergoing another round of reform. This paper starts by reviewing the alleged weaknesses of English vocational qualifications, but argues that these do not necessarily establish a case for radical reform. The issue is not so much whether the system needs to be changed as the nature of the change that is needed. The paper argues for a more deliberative and incremental approach and proposes five principles upon which this should be based. These are the following: that the process of change is as important as the content of change; that institutions matter; that the purposes of reform need to be clear, consistent and realistic; that reforms should help to create a more unified qualifications system; and that the interests of the UK’s other home countries should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers how knowledge, education and research interact as the institutional structures that support them change. Many efforts at large-scale education reform depend upon the proposition that what counts as useful knowledge can be easily defined, without reference to the specific contexts in which that knowledge will be set to work. Yet ?useful knowledge' as it appears to policymakers does not always translate into ?useful knowledge' from the perspective of practitioners. Distance and context matter. Based on studies of the development of literacy policy in England under successive governments, the paper assesses the dislocations and divisions of labour that characterise the contemporary knowledge landscape and asks how the research community can continue to act for the common good in an increasingly crowded and contested education field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 40 years, teacher education in England has been the focus of a stream of ‘reforms’ with the ultimate aim of placing provision into schools, the justification for such a radical policy being that higher education is alleged to be failing to provide good quality teachers thereby compromising the social and economic development of the country. The process whereby these reforms have been introduced is described and then used as a way of comparing and contrasting the way in which similar reforms can be identified in the international teacher education communities represented in this special issue of theJournal of Education for Teaching(JET). The paper closes by identifying lessons that can be learned from international comparators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the key periods, players and events which have contributed to the shaping of the current landscape of teacher education in Scotland. Starting with the Wheatley Report and the formation of the General Teaching Council (Scotland) in the 1960s through to the most recent Donaldson Review of Teacher Education, we examine ebb and flow amongst GTCS, government, colleges of education and universities. Following its own trajectory, Scottish Education resisted and rejected policies emanating from an ‘English’ ideology, capitalised on respect for and influence of the GTCS, and successfully moved teacher education’s base from autonomous colleges to high-status universities. At the core of teacher education in Scotland is the continuing desire for partnership-working amongst key stakeholders: local and national government, GTCS, schools, teacher education institutions, teaching unions, parents and pupils. A teaching profession of trained graduates, underpinned by university-led subject study, is now moving steadily towards Masters-level professional learning for all. Although having faced some troubled episodes, this period has also been characterised by remarkable stability and consensus and, although still tackling the improvement agenda suggested by the recent Donaldson review, teacher education in Scotland has retained a high degree of public and political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Rwandan genocide was perhaps the most paradigmatic human rights catastrophe in the post-Holocaust era, which challenged the mantra of ‘never again’. Yet as we approach the twentieth anniversary, it remains a relatively marginalised entity within mainstream English education. This paper argues that a study of the Rwandan genocide introduces a number of important issues, which are not emphasised within Holocaust education. It also draws upon a small-scale empirical study of 41 teachers’ attitudes in England, perceptions and experiences of teaching the genocide in a range of disciplines and demonstrates emerging patterns on how it is integrated into curricula and individual lessons. It concludes by advocating the study of the Rwandan genocide in its own right and the importance of students appreciating its contemporary relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the introduction of tuition fees for undergraduate programmes in the UK universities, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the impact of the changes on higher education. But the lack of coverage given to the effects of the growing consumerist discourse that was influencing teaching methods and assessment approaches was puzzling [Naidoo, R., and I. Jamieson. 2005. “Empowering Participants or Corroding Learning? Towards a Research Agenda on the Impact of Student Consumerism in Higher Education.”Journal of Education Policy20 (3): 267–281]. There has been a similar silence within the critical management education (CME) literature despite the anecdotal accounts of the progressive erosion of the educational space for criticality. The changes to the educational environment present an opportunity to take stock of how critical approaches are able to respond – or if they are able to respond – to a more consumerist environment where different generational priorities and expectations of education are being expressed. This paper seeks to open up the debate and outline a research agenda to examine CME in the new higher education in the context of marketization, generational change and internationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]