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This paper critically analyses a nationwide school-building programme in England: Building Schools for the Future (BSF). It is argued that, between 2003 and 2010, the UK Government's policy guidance for BSF represented a (re)turn to utopian discourse in governmental policy-making, mobilised in order to justify a massive programme of new school building in the UK. In doing so, BSF connected with the promise of three further discourses: school(-children), community and architectural practice. It anticipated that new school buildings would instil transformative change-modernising English schooling, combating social exclusion and leaving an architectural 'legacy'. However, it is argued that BSF constituted an allegorical utopia: whilst suggesting a 'radical' vision for schooling and society, its ultimate effect was to preserve a conventional (neo-liberal) model of schooling. The paper highlights the critical role that notions of utopia might have in negotiating-and challenging-promise-laden mega-building policies like BSF. In doing so, it develops recent geographical research on utopia, education and architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the impact agenda in the UK to realign debate about the relationship between schools, universities and (human) geography. It positions this debate in systemic tendencies within UK higher education. It argues that, whilst impact can be seen as a further instance of neoliberalism, emphasising the gap between accountability and accounting allows an identification with communicative and reflexive knowledge and, more broadly, critical praxis. The paper draws on a year-long research-based collaboration with school teachers and their students involving performance work and the development of decision-making curriculum materials. It argues that working in these ways with schools can provide the basis for public engagement partnerships between schools and universities and a means to constitute diverse research publics. In these ways, it is argued, a wider sense of impact can be reappropriated, to reclaim the critical subject and to constitute academic value [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the influences on children's eating habits in both school and home spaces in the UK. Since 2002 the UK government has been committed to halting the increase in child obesity rates, and has sanctioned particular parental and school based practices as more “healthy” than others. This study examines this through critically questioning, in particular, the classed discourses written into health education advice and advocates a new way of thinking about health education messages. Based on qualitative research with children from one secondary school and with eight families in the North of England the paper reveals that while parents and children make decisions about their lives with reference to dominant discourses about ideal “healthy” family eating practices, their ability to realise these practices is limited in numerous ways. Moreover, the influences on children's eating habits in both home and school spaces are intricately interrelated and children's practices are clearly influenced by the spaces they inhabit. Their decisions involve balancing health education knowledge with a range of other knowledges that are bound up in the socio-spatial relations of their everyday lives. A holistic approach to understanding children's eating habits therefore requires a critical understanding of class background, parental influences and contemporary parenting practices as well as the microgeographical relations found in the school dining room. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]