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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]

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 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]

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]

The New Education movement was a remarkable coalition of national reform movements that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. As a heterogeneous movement that was united only in its opposition to the schooling system at the time, its structure and boundaries in the UK have remained a matter of academic debate. This article implements the previously proposed idea of treating New Education as a social movement and analysing the networks between reformers. A social network analysis of the central 58 reformers suggests that the movement was initially divided into two ideologically separate subgroups, but that from ca. 1905 onwards the reformers were strongly interconnected despite their different interests. Thus, by focusing on the social structure of the movement's core rather than its educational thought, the article challenges the assumption that the New Education movement was fragmented and characterised by tensions. It also furthers the discussion on the feasibility of social network analysis for studying educational reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the education remit presented by the Scottish Parliament's Education and Culture Committee between February and July 2013. Topics include the national qualifications for the educational initiative Curriculum for Excellence, an educational research study conducted by the Centre of Educational Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and the implications of cyber-bullying.

Fertility, health, education, and other out comes of interest to demographers are the product of an individual's genetic makeup and their social environment. Yet, gene x environment (GxE) research deploys a limited toolkit on the genetic side to study the gene--environment interplay, relying on polygenic scores (PGSs) that reflect the influence of genetics on levels of an out come. In this article, we develop a genetic summary measure better suited for GxE research: variance poly genic scores (vPGSs), which are PGSs that reflect genetic contributions to plasticity in out comes. First, we use the UK Biobank (N ~ 408,000 in the analytic sample) and the Health and Retirement Study (N ~ 5,700 in the analytic sample) to compare four approaches to constructing PGSs for plasticity. The results show that widely used methods for discovering which genetic variants affect out come variability fail to serve as distinctive new tools for GxE. Second, using the PGSs that do capture distinctive genetic contributions to plasticity, we analyze heterogeneous effects of a UK education reform on health and educational attainment. The results show the properties of a useful new tool for population scientists studying the interplay of nature and nurture and for population-based studies that are releasing PGSs to applied researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to share ideas from 5x5x5=creativity, a research initiative established in Bath (UK) in 2000, with the aim of developing and embedding a creative and reflective pedagogy in schools and early years settings. 5x5x5=creativity research, in partnership with schools, educators, artists, creative professionals, mentors and cultural centres, aims to raise the aspirations and improve the life chances of children and young people as creative learners. In our research we want to develop creative reflective practice and influence systemic educational change. This research defends the special role of the arts in developing a more flexible concept of education through curiosity and creativity, together with the capacity for the arts for allows 'possibility thinking' through a creative and critical pedagogy. In this article we analyse the impact of the artists' involvement on the development of a creative, reflective pedagogy in schools. As both artists and educators we believe it is necessary to challenge current orthodoxies and establish creative and critical thinking at the heart of learning for both children and adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we show what insights can be gained by considering the relationship between expert and non-expert texts about scientific topics through the lens of 'translation'. We focus specifically on the metaphors used to discuss climate change in a range of educational materials and in interviews with secondary school students in the UK. We show the complex web of relationships among the people and genres that may influence students' understandings of climate change, and focus on the role of teachers in particular as 'translators' of scientific knowledge. We then report on several comparisons of metaphor use among texts and genres that stand in source–target relationships within this web of intralingual translations, and also consider the metaphors used by students themselves to express their understanding of climate change. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of the differences we have observed, and suggest that a translation perspective can usefully highlight the challenges and potential pitfalls involved in mediating scientific knowledge for the benefit of non-experts such as school-age students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the state of the Sheffield psychological service in Great Britain following the Education Reform Act (ERA) 1988, which introduced Local Management of Schools (LMS), based from the author's observation as principal educational psychologist from 1991-1995. It addresses the development of a determined quality psychological service. It also offers the author's reflections on the period from the 1970s on which this development was established.

This article examines African female education reform between the wars as a conjuncture of transnational philanthropic initiatives and state and missionary objectives on the ground. Through a comparative treatment of four schools in West, East and South-Central Africa, it shows that the search to recover and re-create the authentic African subject was a gendered process that aimed to critique one brand of colonialism (settler and industrial capitalism) by bolstering another (indirect rule). The schools at Achimota (Gold Coast), Kabete (Kenya), Hope Fountain (Southern Rhodesia) and Mbereshi (Northern Rhodesia) all idealised women’s traditional education as the key to offsetting the dangers of modernisation and preserving the integrity of the social body, and ‘adapted’ their curricula accordingly to their perception of women’s normative economic and social roles. However, the internal contradictions of this project stymied any possibility of implementing it in a cohesive way, and even its advocates and architects were often forced to admit the limits of tradition as a coherent logic or redemptive force. The gendered contours of adaptation, therefore, showed the potential of education to destabilise as much as to reinforce the shifting paradigms of the colonial project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that our present model for defining spiritual development within the English school context unhelpfully lends itself to a binary of spirit-body, evoking potential distracting questions about whether or not the soul/spirit actually exists as a separate entity from the body, a question more specifically suited to the religious education curriculum. Instead, using an interdisciplinary approach, the author argues for an alternative model of spirit-soul, based on definitions taken from the contemporary Wholeness movement, in which spirit is perceived as that in us which seeks vision and transcendence, and soul as that which seeks engagement, depth and rootedness. Although the model provides us with an alternative binary, no duality is intended. Rather, the argument is that personal and community maturity implies balance and wholeness of body, soul and spirit, which is more clearly exemplified within this proposed new conceptualisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on ‘objective list’ accounts of personal well-being and the related view that schools should aim at inducting students into a wide range of objective goods. It reviews various objective lists and notes that very many of them include knowledge, a love of beauty and close personal relationships. It then seeks to explain why this might be so and cautions against narrowness in specifying intrinsic goods, before exploring the role of extensive personal time in engaging in them. This article links all this to the current UK government’s advocacy of knowledge and other cultural goods in English school aims, seeing this as an instance of a more global tendency. It argues that this approach both assumes a too restricted notion of intrinsic goods and – especially – is unrealistic in the light of widespread time-poverty. It suggests, finally, that if more personal time is to be sought, school reform must go hand in hand with wider social changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the redefinition and distribution of powers between central governance and local actors in English independent state-funded schooling. Earlier research on governance confirms the importance of the local and the school level in reshaping national-level reforms and steering policies. The research draws on data from interviews with national-level policymakers and an ethnographic school case study, thereby yielding contrasting views and perceptions of governance at the national level, and the day-to-day reality at the local level. The empirical analysis gives mixed results in that the national visions of innovative local practices seem not to be manifest at the local level. Despite the legal and financial freedoms granted to academy schools, the case academy is constrained by the national policy of steering by evaluation, namely inspection and testing, and the managerial practices of the sponsor. The article concludes that the real effect of academies is still under construction and meanwhile their space for action is strongly restricted by the tools of evaluation. As a more theoretical conclusion the analysis suggests that future analysis should concentrate more on action rather than structures and on evaluation as an embedded practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued in this article that the marketisation of schools policy has a tendency to produce twin effects: an increase in educational inequality, and an increase in general satisfaction with the schooling system. However, the effect on educational inequality is very much stronger where prevailing societal inequality is higher. The result is that cross-party political agreement on the desirability of such reforms is much more likely where societal inequality is lower (as the inequality effects are also lower). Counterintuitively, then, countries that are more egalitarian - and so typically thought of as being more left-wing - will have a higher likelihood of adopting marketisation than more unequal countries. Evidence is drawn from a paired comparison of English and Swedish schools policies from the 1980s to the present. Both the policy history and elite interviews lend considerable support for the theory in terms of both outcomes and mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For three years from 2008 every school in England had a designated school improvement partner (SIP), portrayed as a critical friend, whose role was to support and challenge the headteacher. A mixed-methods study involving a national survey and face-to-face interviews evaluated the enactment of the national policy from the perspective of the direct recipients – the headteachers/school principals. Headteachers’ perceptions of their school improvement partners, and their experiences of the support and challenge provided by SIPs, varied. Much seemed to depend on individual SIP’s expertise and conduct. The SIPs’ prescribed agenda was seen as too focused on data rather than discussions about learning and teaching, and requirements for SIPs to report to the local authority and governors were in tension with trustful relationships with headteachers. The SIP programme could be interpreted as a commitment to the entitlement of headteachers to support and challenge, or as a mechanism for surveillance and discipline. Lessons are drawn for the ‘national’ and ‘local leaders of education’ who have replaced SIPs, and for anyone internationally concerned with support and challenge for school principals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The new Labour government that entered office in 1997 made early childhood education and care (ECEC) a policy priority, after decades of neglect. The article provides an overview of the subsequent policy developments, looking at three areas in more detail: governance and finance; the organisation and management of services; and the workforce. It then brings the story up to the present day, with policy developments since the 2010 election, during a period of severe public austerity. The article concludes by providing a critical assessment of these developments. From all the attention and activity that has surrounded ECEC in England in recent years, what actually has been achieved? Has it been a case of evolution or transformation? Overall, the article concludes that the period since 1997, despite some important gains, has overall been a story of missed opportunities, a case of more of the same rather than transformative change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focusing on data and policies from England, trends in educational disadvantage by area are traced from the late 1960s when the first pilot projects were established in the UK, to the present. The origins of these developments and the subsequent rises and falls of such area-based policies in England are reviewed. Specially collected data for the pilot areas from the 1960s and national data for England from 2000 are used to draw out some striking patterns of changes over the period. Though many of the areas remain highly disadvantaged, educational measures at age 16 and at entry to higher education (HE) indicate some important changes. Thus the settled, white working-class pilot area in the 1960s with just below average results had fallen back very substantially by 2013, particularly in entry to HE. By contrast the newly settled Asian immigrant area in Birmingham where educational performance was exceptionally poor in the 1960s had moved above average despite remaining highly disadvantaged. Analysis of the national results since 2000 using local area data showed that these trends were widespread across England. Disadvantaged ‘multicultural urban areas’ were doing markedly better than the disadvantaged white working-class urban areas, where in many cases traditional industries had closed. This was especially marked at entry to HE where multicultural areas had rates close to the national average of 40% while white working-class urban areas had rates of entry to HE of between 10% and 15% of the age group and this gap has widened rapidly in recent years. These trends are likely to be the source of major resentment, with one group finding itself increasingly excluded from higher level employment opportunities, and the other failing to find opportunities that match their expectations once they leave education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the relationship between pre-service teacher education (ITE) for primary schooling and primary teaching in England between 1974 and 2014, and explores the ‘fitness of purpose’ of the current system of preparing teachers for the classrooms of the twenty-first century. Our historical analysis suggests that, despite 40 years of change in ITE, there are still a number of unresolved issues in ITE. These include: how to prepare for the multisubject, class teacher role which the majority of primary teachers still undertake; how to equip future teachers to deal with the social and emotional aspects of primary teaching; how to ensure that they are creative and flexible practitioners, able to cope with the demands of future curricula, pedagogical changes and the new roles and responsibilities which will inevitably occur during the course of their teaching careers in the next decades of this century; and how to structure ITE to provide adequate long-term foundations for the necessary professional development as a teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]