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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]

This paper draws on interview data from national policy makers in England, Scotland and the European Commission to illustrate differences in the referencing of 'Europe' in education policy-making in England and Scotland in order to highlight the emergent complexity of post-devolution policy-making in education through a focus on relations and interactions with Europe, as expressed in the negotiation and development of performance data systems. We suggest that policy-makers in England reference global influences, rather than Europe, while policy-makers in Scotland reference Europe in order to project a new positioning of Scotland in closer alignment with Europe. Europeanisation in education thus produces differing policy responses from closely aligned, indeed, in the case of England and Scotland, contiguous policy spaces. Thus the paper seeks to contribute to the literature on 'travelling' education policy and its 'local' mediation and to connect the development of devolution and the changing policy space of education in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In England, adjustments to policy in teacher education have had implications for how subject knowledge is understood and for how job descriptions are defined. That is, the interface between teacher educator and subject knowledge representation has been changing. This paper reports on a wider study that considers the experience of university teacher educators adjusting to new academic and operational conditions. On the one hand, the teacher educators are confronted with their subject specialism being set according to new learning objectives and to new time and curriculum constraints. On the other hand, their professional identity is reshaped in response to structural changes to teacher education where earlier job definitions had been reconfigured or removed. The paper analyses resultant conceptions of subject knowledge and of teacher education emerging through this changing interface and how these conceptions are variously located across staffing arrangements. A Lacanian model of subjectivity provides a theoretical approach to depicting teacher educator and pre-service teacher identification with subject knowledge. The paper provides a theoretical account of how the teacher educator/trainee interface has been reshaped in line with the market-led terminology that governs current practices. Specifically, the analytical tools enable us to dismantle and restructure the prevalent symbolic order guiding current teacher practice and understanding, particularly our entrapment within specific discourses and identity constructs that shape our interactions with subject knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together data on national policies for improving reading achievement with student reading outcomes according to the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment ( PISA) 2009 data. It is based on a two-step analysis. Firstly, the prevalence of national policies for improving reading achievement (i.e., specialist reading teachers, national tests for identifying individual learning needs and curriculum guidelines on reading comprehension strategies) is described in 32 European countries. Secondly, a three-level regression analysis is performed in order to assess the relative impact of the analysed national policies. The results indicate that the provision of reading specialists for providing targeted support to students with difficulties and advice to teachers seems to be the most important measure. Moreover, central level regulation by education authorities can be an effective way to assure the right to a reading specialist for every student in need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that direct control of the early years literacy curriculum recently exercised by politicians in England has made the boundaries between research, policy and practice increasingly fragile. It describes how policy came to focus most effort on the use of synthetic phonics programmes in the early years. It examines why the Clackmannanshire phonics intervention became the study most frequently cited to justify government policy and suggests a phonics research agenda that could more usefully inform teaching. It argues that, whilst academics cannot control how their research is eventually used by policy-makers, learned societies can strengthen their ethics policies to set out clearer ground rules for academic researchers working across knowledge domains and with policy-makers. A stronger framework to guide the ethical interpretation of research evidence in complex education investigations would allow more meaningful conversations to take place within and across research communities, and with research users. The paper suggests some features for such a framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English primary schools are considered quasi-collegial institutions within which staff communicate regularly and openly. The activities of staff, however, are bound by institutional norms and conditions and by societal expectations. Wider agendas of governmental control over the curriculum and external controls to ensure accountability and learning standards have influenced the development and purposes of middle leaders’ roles. This is a conceptual paper that explores issues around the agency of primary school middle leaders within a wider context of the political and educational agenda. Through a reconsideration of research conducted by one of the authors since the inception of the notion of ‘subject leaders’, we exemplify ways in which primary school middle leaders’ attitudes have developed and changed over the past 15 years. In this paper we identify attitudes to leadership, the influence of distributed leadership on primary school role-holders and possible ways forward for middle leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws upon research into the nature of teachers' learning practices in the context of current policy conditions in the state of Queensland, Australia. The research explores how teachers in one school in the north of the state responded to policy pressure to adopt a specific standardised approach to 'explicit teaching', associated with an elite private school in Victoria, Australia. The research utilises literature on the privatisation and commodification of education, in conjunction with Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of practice, to elaborate the nature and complexity of the teacher learning/take-up of this approach. The research reveals how the 'explicit teaching' approach in question had become legitimised through its take-up in this elite private school setting, and how this influenced teachers' work and learning in a very different context. This was not a straightforward process, however, with evidence of contestation occurring alongside these legitimation processes. The result was a complex and contradictory process in which teachers resisted a standardised, commodified form of teaching and its associations with a particular elite private schooling context, even as they were dominated by these practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on research investigating the impact of health imperatives around obesity, diet and exercise on the actions of teachers and pupils in schools, this paper offers a reflexive account of the relationships between the 'noise' of obesity discourse in the public domain, policies forged to tackle health issues and the realities of teaching in schools. Our analyses suggest that intersections of bio-policies, body pedagogies and human agents forge assemblages of meaning that frame and regulate but cannot determine either teachers' or young people's lives. Teachers and pupils experience the capriciousness of policies as they flow through specific school contexts and intersect with 'local' institutional cultures, expectations and interests. We suggest that Basil Bernstein's concepts and poststructural social theory prove useful when addressing how the aforementioned processes are emplaced, enacted and embodied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that educational research and policy-making in Great Britain is in crisis. Centrally funded research as subject to increasing intervention and restrictions on reporting; Misreporting of research findings in the press.

Argues that much of the money spent on the National Curriculum development program in Great Britain has been wasted and little has been learnt from the exercise. Criterion-referenced assessment; Performance assessment; Organization and pedagogical issues in the national curriculum and assessment program; Learning hierarchies; Use of assessment results.

Family policy was a key component of the 'New' Labour government's family, social and education policy, and a wide range of family focused initiatives and interventions designed to 'support' families and improve individual, family and social outcomes were introduced. The post-May 2010 coalition government's family policy exhibits key elements of policy continuity. There have been strong, class-based critiques of this approach to social policy, which have argued that policies were informed by a project to recreate the working class. A key English family policy initiative, the Parenting Early Intervention Programme ( PEIP) ran from September 2006-March 2011. The national evaluation of the PEIP was a large scale combined methods study of the implementation of parenting programmes in all local authorities in England, and forms the evidential base of this article which was built upon the completion, by participating parents, of three standardised pre and post parenting course questionnaires (N = 4446). A sample of 133 participating parents was also interviewed using semi-structured interview schedules. The evidence from the PEIP evaluation showed the heterogeneous class nature of the PEIP cohorts, which over the roll-out of the initiative, incorporated a larger number of middle class parents. In addition, the qualitative data indicated that parents had strongly positive participant perceptions of PEIP courses, characterised by 'mutual reach', and did not experience the courses in classed terms.The evidence from the quantitative and qualitative data collected for the national evaluation suggests that it is difficult to conceptualise the PEIP, as an example of the Labour government's family policy, in class terms-such an approach requires, at the least, major qualification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This presidential address argues that there is a pressing need in the UK to build educational research capacity at system level and to do so collaboratively. It advances three main arguments for doing so. These are (i) the increasing concentration of research resources; (ii) the dangers of increasing separation of research and initial teacher education; and (iii) the complexity of the links between research, policy and practice. Drawing on evidence about research quality and on demographic trends of academic staff in education departments, it illustrates one approach to collaborative capacity building in Scotland, the Applied Educational Research Scheme. It concludes by drawing attention to the nascent Strategic Forum for Research in Education as an important forum for monitoring the health of educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TLRP project reported on in this article attempts to understand how the Learning and Skills sector functions. It traces how education and training policy percolates down through many levels in the English system and how these levels interact, or fail to interact. The authors first focus upon how policy impacts upon the interests of three groups of learners: unemployed people in adult and community learning centres, adult employees in work-based learning and younger learners on Level 1 and Level 2 courses in further education. They focus next upon how professionals in these three settings struggle to cope with two sets of pressures upon them: those exerted by government and a broader set of professional, institutional and local factors. They describe in particular how managers and tutors mediate national policy and translate it (and sometimes mistranslate it) into local plans and practices. Finally, the authors criticise the new government model of public service reform for failing to harness the knowledge, good will and energy of staff working in the sector, and for ignoring what constitutes the main finding of the research: the central importance of the relationship between tutor and students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001-02, the Nuffield Foundation funded research into the impact of government policy upon the management of sixth form colleges since 1992. National and regional questionnaire surveys were carried out among senior managers at sixth form colleges, further education colleges and schools. Case studies were undertaken at five sixth form colleges in the North-West and South-East of England, and in the East Midlands. This article reports on the findings in relation to the following factors: the prevailing ethos of sixth form colleges, the changing context within which that ethos is maintained, and the role of leaders at all levels of the colleges in maintaining it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the system of school inspection in England has not changed radically since the 1997 general election, one significant policy development is that the Labour Government has given the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), the school inspection agency for England, a lead role in monitoring how schools are preventing and addressing racism. This article draws on findings from research funded in 1999-2000 by the Commission for Racial Equality which set out to examine the effectiveness of OFSTED school inspection processes in monitoring race equality objectives in schools. It considers the extent to which the school inspection framework provides an effective model for the promotion of race equality in English schools and its potential for wider applicability in other European contexts. It examines how the British Government's pledges to eradicate racism and promote race equality in British society are being interpreted in one area of social policy, that of education. In particular, the authors explore the potential of school inspection to contribute to race equality and OFSTED's effectiveness in fulfilling its designated role to examine and report on initiatives to prevent racism and promote race equality. The inspection framework is analysed in terms of its overall fitness for the purposes of promoting race equality and preventing inequality. The article focuses on the consistency and adequacy of the reporting framework as it relates to race equality; the extent to which there was a commonality of understanding among inspectors about the framework, its processes and outcomes; how headteachers understood OFSTED's role and assessments of race equality; and the potential and actual impact of that reporting upon subsequent school-based developments. The reasons for the relatively low profile given to issues of race equality in inspection reports and the considerable variations in levels of understanding and perceptions about race equality among inspectors are discussed. New legislation at both European and national levels will strengthen anti-discrimination legislation and place greater responsibilities on employers and on public bodies to ensure greater racial equality. Such legislation will require inspectorates, including school inspection agencies, to monitor how various public authorities and employers are fulfilling race equality objectives. The authors provide a case study where the instrument of inspection meets legal and political demands for greater racial equality but where its implementation fails as a result of institutional inertia and lack of accountability to local communities. Their conclusions point to an urgent need to revise inspection processes so that inspection might have a positive impact upon the maintenance of standards for equality and racial justice. Some key recommendations are made for policy and practice to achieve greater equality in education, addressing the relationships between external assessment and self-evaluation and between organisations and the communities they serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the policy of the UK Labour Government between 1997 and 1999 in relation to the production and implementation of the National Numeracy Strategy, within the structure of context of influence, context of policy texts and context of practice. It examines its roots in, and differences from, numeracy and mathematics policies of previous regimes. Some tensions between the philosophies of modernisation and traditionalism, which are represented among those responsible for the New Labour education policies and which are reflected in the National Numeracy Strategy are discussed. Finally, evidence from the context of practice demonstrates that despite the attempt at tight prescription and control, cyclical recontextualisation and multiple interpretations exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the British government's plan to introduce an assessment process in primary schools which would be criterion-referenced, formative, moderated, related to regression and evaluative. Process' emphasis on accountability; Previous assessment processes used for schools; Issues related to the implementation of the assessment process.

The debate over democratised school government continues and is particularly pertinent at a time when legislation is proposed which aims to significantly alter the system in favour of the parent interest. This article describes a research project, undertaken in Birmingham from 1981-1985, which investigated how a system of democratised primary school government, in which parents were prominent, was functioning after three years experience. The findings suggest that reforming governing bodies in this manner is an effective, acceptable and practicable reform. These bodies were achieving some success in liaising with, monitoring and supporting the school, but administrative and structural factors were inhibiting their influence. The system in Birmingham provides a creditable exemplar of a policy of democratised school government in practice and is able to offer a number of strategies and guidelines for those currently concerned with developing and improving policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]