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The period when the British Educational Research Association (BERA) was founded was one in which there was an increasing recognition amongst the research community that a wind of change had stirred up the settled traditions of educational research. It was a time which celebrated the promise of alternative paradigms for research. Ten or so years on we are entering another era where the emphasis is not on the reconceptualisation of what research is but on how it is organised. I think one can discern at least two factors, not wholly separate from each other, that will increasingly influence how a substantial part of research will be organised. These two factors are the changes which have taken place in the composition of the research community and the direction of current Government policy concerning the school system. I aim to show how these are leading to a fruitful form of collaborative research at local level which should be encouraged and supported—not least by BERA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networking and collaboration in educational settings have become increasingly important in terms of supporting innovation and policy developments in many educational systems. However, to date, the role and action of the middle tier remains an under-researched area, especially in the United Kingdom. This paper draws on findings from a study of district level (local authorities (LAs)) capacity to broker and facilitate school-based networks within a context of complex multiple agendas. The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) Innovations Unit and the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) involved 19 LAs over a two-year period. The authors worked as second order action researchers supporting local authority staff develop a range of strategies to broker and facilitate school-to-school networks. This paper draws on Habermassian notions of a critical theorem to describe the construction and use of a new theoretical framework outlining the strategies adopted by the middle tier officers within the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only a view of extreme pessimism or arrogance discounts the knowledge already acquired by those who enter the study of geography in higher education. The changes which occur in the teaching of school geography should be of considerable interest to those who teach geographical and related studies in higher education. This paper outlines and assesses the significance of the major changes which have occurred in geography teaching in schools in England and Wales in the past two decades. It also seeks to identify some of the influences which are likely to shape such teaching in the future. [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]

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]

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]

Recent reforms in England’s education system have been justified on the grounds that other countries have pursued similar approaches to education reform. Many such policies that by-pass or otherwise diminish meso-level institutions demonstrate a commitment to the idea of devolving authority to local actors. The current reforms in England and elsewhere reconfigure governance structures to diminish intermediate-level institutions on the grounds that these reforms lead to more effective and equitable educational systems. But in lieu of compelling evidence of such an impact, it appears that such policies are often instead simply a political attack on meso-level authorities, and may in fact represent an opportunity for new policy players to occupy the space left by receding meso-level institutions. This article surveys some of the specific policies that have emerged from recent policy trends, particularly those that have undercut established intermediate-level institutions in the USA and New Zealand. Reviewing the empirical record from these cases, I argue that, rather than simply devolving power away from intermediate authorities to local actors in order to produce more effective or equitable outcomes, many of these reforms have been more successful instead in creating the conditions in which new, non-state actors are able to accrue policy power for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]