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Editorial. Comments on the developments in educational policy in Great Britain. Improvements on academic papers in school; Suggestion of the International Advisory Board to provide International Editorial for the journal; Need to discuss developments in education; Problems on the quality of the papers.

Analyzes the proposals and assumptions in the Consultation Paper `Teachers Meeting the Challenge of Change.' Two tasks that the consultation paper addresses; Tradition of teacher criticism; Changes in the organization of work and productivity; Modernization of the teaching profession in Great Britain.

The article discusses the latest White Paper "Choice and Diversity--A New Framework for Schools." It aims to complete the transformation of the organization of education which the Great Britain Secretary of State's predecessors began ten years ago and to create an evolutionary framework for the funding of schools in the future. The paper contains both an underlying philosophy and a framework for this evolution. The philosophy is summed up in five interrelated themes, quality, diversity, parental choice, accountability and autonomy.

Focuses on the implementation of the General Certificate of Secondary Education in Great Britain. Promotion of the concept of differentiation; Aim providing support for equal opportunities among students; Reaction of teachers to the use of single examination.

This paper traces the origins of the concept of personalisation in public sector services, and applies it to school education. The original conceptualisation stressed the need for ‘deep’ rather than shallow, personalisation, if radical transformation of services were to be achieved. It is argued that as the concept has been disseminated and implemented through policy documents, notably the 2005 White Paper, it has lost its original emphasis on deep personalisation. The focus in this article is particularly upon gifted and talented students whose education provides the best case example of how the theory of personalisation might work in practice. Two examples of the lessons in a sixth form college are used to illustrate the character of personalised pedagogy in practice. The implications for theory and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the current rationale for primary science in England with a focus on how competing perspectives arising from perceptions of educational ideology and policy discourse have helped to shape current practice. The aim will be to provide a conceptual understanding of this by focusing specifically on how policy has influenced practice. In particular it will consider the way in which discourse and policy text have contributed to the emergent rationale for primary science which in many ways reflects conflicting influences, views and policies. Data were collected over a year from a regional survey and from four case-study primary schools. The findings suggest that teachers in primary schools face tensions between promoting both an educational and a political rationale for learning primary science. The paper will conclude by suggesting that the justification for primary science should be based on what we already know about how children learn science as well as helping them to develop an understanding of science and how it influences and is intrinsically linked to the needs of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the somewhat neglected topic of envy and its relationship to education and social inequality in Britain. Drawing on the work of Rawls, Runciman and Crosland, the paper proposes a distinction between envy as a vice and ‘justified resentment’ aroused by perceived injustices in the social distribution of primary goods, including education. Various pejorative uses of the term ‘the politics of envy’ in UK politics are examined. The conditions necessary for a politics of justified resentment are then analysed. Current developments in higher education in the UK are discussed with reference to signs of the emergence of new social resentments among the relatively highly educated. Prospects for a wider politics of justified resentment are assessed in relation to a range of emergent policies and priorities of New Labour in government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational research in the UK has for some time been criticised in terms of both its relevance and its quality. Indeed, these issues of relevance and quality have been presented by some critics as linked with each other. One way forward that has been suggested is greater political (and thereby user and practitioner) control of research and its funding. This would presumably ensure the immediate practical relevance of future work, encourage flexibility of approach, and remove some responsibility from the ‘dead-hand’ of academic departments of educational research. This paper considers some of the counter-arguments, and contrary evidence, to this approach. It presents examples of projects by teachers, a large-scale study of teacher effectiveness contracted to consultants by the DfEE (as it then was), and of political self-censorship by intellectual fields. On this basis the paper suggests that the link between quality and relevance in research has been exaggerated, and that increasing political control of academic research alone is unlikely to lead to a marked improvement in quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the consequences of, and tensions within, New Labour's quality agenda for schools. In particular, it draws attention to the way in which official versions of quality, characterised by a narrow, economistic instrumentality, are being promoted in schools by various forms of quality control that are marginalising broader, more humanistic conceptions of quality. It is also argued that, despite New Labour's rhetorical emphasis on education for citizenship, the mechanisms of quality control favoured by the government tend to produce patterns of association which are authoritarian and, therefore, unconducive to giving teachers, students and parents opportunities to participate actively in key decisions in and around schooling. The analysis presented in this paper is underpinned by a concern to bring a consideration of educational politics back into education policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's response to the comments made on his paper "A.F. Leach on the Reformation." According to the author, his own approach was that of one interested in sixteenth and seventeenth century schooling who found that Leach's interpretation of events at the Reformation did not tally with the later evidence. This led to a detailed examination of the case argued in English Schools at the Reformation; then, since this case depended directly on a reading of earlier ecclesiastical and educational history, it was necessary to look further back. According to the author, it was the main object of his paper to suggest a reassessment of developments at the Reformation, in the interests of clarifying the course of educational history. According to the author, he suggested that there was a prima facie case for questioning Leach's assessment of the Chantries Act because it is at variance with the general views of medieval historians and with the later evidence, dealing mainly with the latter.

The author reflects on pedagogical principles in studying education in Great Britain. He argues that the country's obsession with educational testing, specifically IQ testing, has contributed to the lack of progress in pedagogical research. While some improvement has been made, such as the establishment of the ORACLE project, the author suggests that emphasis on common pedagogical practices need to be enacted. Papers published in the periodical "British Journal of Educational Studies" address this issue in addition to studies on education policy.

This paper argues that the introduction of access agreements following the establishment of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) has consolidated how English higher education institutions (HEIs) position themselves in the marketplace in relation to widening participation. However, the absence of a national bursary scheme has led to obfuscation rather than clarification from the perspective of the consumer. This paper analyses OFFA's 2008 monitoring report and a sample of twenty HEIs’ original 2006 and revised or updated access agreements (2008) to draw conclusions about the impact of these agreements on notions of ‘fair access’ and widening participation. The authors conclude that, unsurprisingly in an increasingly market-driven system, institutions use access agreements primarily to promote enrolment to their own programmes rather than to promote system-wide objectives. As a consequence of this marketing focus, previous differences between pre-1992 and post-1992 institutions in relation to widening participation and fair access are perpetuated, leading to both confusion for consumers and an inequitable distribution of bursary and other support mechanisms for the poorest applicants to HE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on recent work by John Clarke and Janet Newman and their colleagues to analyse a relatively coherent governmental project, spanning the decades of Conservative and New Labour government in England since 1979, that has sought to render teachers increasingly subservient to the state and agencies of the state. Under New Labour this has involved discourse and policies aimed at transforming teaching into a ‘modernised profession’. It is suggested that this appropriation of both the concept and substance of professionalism involves an attempt to silence debate about competing conceptions of what it might be to be a professional or to act professionally. The overall process is thus arguably one of de-professionalisation in the guise of re-professionalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a distinction between two types of politics developed by Michael Oakeshott in his book The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (1996) and argues that the theoretical framework proposed supplies an illuminating and productive perspective for examining the notion of political extremism. These positions are linked to two other important aspects of his work, namely his account of ‘enterprise’ and ‘civil’ association and his differentiation between abstract philosophical entities and concrete political situations. There is also a discussion of the idea of ‘perfectionism’ which is central to the politics of faith. The paper concludes with a consideration of some of the implications for political education arising from this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores concepts of multiple and nested identities and how these relate to citizenship and rights, and the implications of identities and rights for active citizenship education. Various theoretical conceptions of identity are analysed, and in particular ideas concerning multiple identities that are used contingently, and about identities that do not necessarily include feeling a strong affinity with others in the group. The argument then moves to the relationship between identity and citizenship, and particularly citizenship and rights. Citizenship is treated non-legalistically, as one of the locations of belonging. The paper draws on three successive categorisations of citizenship rights: by T.H. Marshall in the 1950s, Karel Vasak in the late 1970s and John Urry in the 1990s, and is illustrated in part by the development of European citizenship in parallel to national identity. This is then linked to how contemporary citizenship education might use the exploration of contested rights as a way of developing practical enactive skills of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effects of enacting a collaborative and enquiry based model of teacher professionalism in the UK. Based on work with Chartered Teachers in Scotland, it indicates that the barriers to changing the basis of teacher professionalism are complex and multi-faceted because of the contested nature of teachers’ work identities. Chartered Teacher status is achieved by qualification against an occupational standard which positions those who attain it as leading teachers, exerting a significant influence with their colleagues to improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools. This paper looks at some of the conceptual and practical difficulties faced by Chartered Teachers as they try to enact what this new ‘status’ means. It argues that those with an interest in the professional development of teachers need to position themselves as knowing agents in the complex systemic and political aspects of changing practice in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the linkages between national identity and educational traditions, and the range and flexibility of the incarnations of tradition. It investigates in detail three versions of a specifically English tradition in education that have been generated at different times in England over the past century. These are Cyril Norwood's account of the English tradition in the 1920s, Fred Clarke's portrayal of education and social change in the 1940s, and the ideals of teachers' professional autonomy as they were articulated in the postwar period. In each instance the 'tradition' developed as responses to contemporary challenges and threats, and asserted particular images of the past to justify a given approach to present and future changes. These representations of the national tradition have thereby established sets of values and principles drawn from idealised versions of the educational past that provided guidelines for reform, and the direction and guidelines of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper links the history of educational research in the United Kingdom to changes in the philosophy and practice of science. Its thesis is the claim that the lifetime of the British Journal of Educational Studies corresponds to a notable ferment in the social sciences, sometimes characterised as 'post-positivism'or 'post-cartesianism'. After the Second World War, the philosophy of science was subjected to a series of challenging criticisms, many of them directed against so-called logical positivist ideas developed in Germany and Austria during the 1920s and transported, often by refugees, to the UK and elsewhere in the following decade. To accommodate these criticisms, social scientists grappled with new ideas, methods and assumptions. Over the last 50 years, the history of educational research — and educational studies — has been deeply marked by the circulation of these criticisms, by efforts made to surmount them, and by new controversies fostered in the wake of such revisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the contributions of scholar, Neil Postman in the field of education research in Great Britain in the 1970s. Challenges set by Postman for many aspects of conventional schooling in the country during the period; Position taken by Postman on the role of television in the field of education research.

This paper takes as its starting point the special provision made for grant maintained schools through the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act and suggests that the compromise it represented may be considered as an example of New Labour' Third Way in politics. The latter is discussed in terms of general and educational policies with specific regard to the characteristics of self-governing schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the quality control in education and schools in Great Britain. Different approach to the definition of quality comes from the literature of total quality management;Ways in monitoring the quality of schooling; Advantages of educational research over the other methods of judging the quality of schools.

This article focuses on the new proposed changes in the conditions of awarding the Scottish Leaving Certificate in the filed of education. According to the author, the proposed changes in the conditions of award of the Scottish Leaving Certificate would at once bring it more closely into line with the recommendations of the Advisory Council on Education in Scotland and with the General Certificate of Education in England. The changes, reportedly, involve the issue of a certificate to pupils who leave school around the age of sixteen after completing four years of secondary education, by the institution of papers at a lower level than those taken usually in the fifth year. Scotland, like England, is faced with the problem of early leaving. Recent figures published by the Secretary of State show that 56% of pupils leaving five-year courses of senior secondary education do so before reaching the age of sixteen, without completing even four years of the course. It is proposed to institute advanced level papers designed for pupils who have completed the university requirements in their fifth year, and who remain for a sixth year at school. The effect of the new proposals would, supposedly, be to encourage the extension of Sixth Form work, which has never flowered so freely in Scotland and England.

This paper examines understandings of community and safety for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) groups in schools in a metropolitan borough. One school in particular was identified as being the ‘Gypsy school’ and was attended by the majority of GRT children in the borough. The school was recognised as a model of ‘good practice’ reflecting its holistic approach towards the GRT community but it was also successful for wider reasons. A picture of the intersection of different communities emerged from interview accounts in which a GRT community with strong local attachments, socially negotiated and maintained, figured very strongly. The GRT community was also identified as sharing racist attitudes towards other non-white immigrants. This article examines children's perspectives of their engagement with the education process and how the strong GRT community played an important part in their understandings of safety and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of levels of participation in post-compulsory education has been emphasised by the current policy initiatives to increase the age to which some form of participation is compulsory. One of the acknowledged weaknesses of research in the field of children's intentions with regard to participation is the lack of longitudinal data. This paper offers a longitudinal analysis using the Youth Survey from the British Household Panel Survey. The results show that most children can express intentions with regard to future participation very early in their secondary school careers and that these intentions are good predictors of actual behaviour five years later. Intentions to stay on are more consistent than intentions to leave and most children who finally leave at 16 have at some point said they want to remain in education post-16. The strongest association with participation levels is attainment at GCSE. However, there are also influences of gender and parental background and these remain, even after attainment is held constant. The results show the value of focusing on intentions for participation at a very early stage of children's school careers and also the importance of current attempts to reform curriculum and assessment for the 14–19 age group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the findings from a study of the admission arrangements for all secondary schools in England. We sketch the history of selection, answer questions about the scale and extent of selection by attainment or aptitude including an account of partially selective schools, consider the similarity and differences between selection by aptitude and by attainment and analyse some of the issues associated with both kinds of selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principle that emergent writing is supported by talk, and that an appropriate pedagogy for writing should include planned opportunities for talk is well researched and well understood. However, the process by which talk becomes text is less clear. The term ‘oral rehearsal’ is now commonplace in English classrooms and curriculum policy documents, yet as a concept it is not well theorised. Indeed, there is relatively little reference to the concept of oral rehearsal in the international literature, and what references do exist propose differing interpretations of the concept. At its most liberal, the term is used loosely as a synonym for talk; more precise definitions frame oral rehearsal, for example, as a strategy for reducing cognitive load during writing; for post-hoc reviewing of text; for helping writers to ‘hear’ their own writing; or for practising sentences aloud as a preliminary to writing them down. Drawing on a systematic review of the literature and video data from an empirical study, the paper will offer a theoretical conceptualisation of oral rehearsal, drawing on existing understanding of writing processes and will illustrate the ways in which young writers use oral rehearsal before and during writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper problematises the official discourse of economic competitiveness and social inclusion used by the 2007 Education and Skills Bill to justify the proposal to extend compulsory participation in education and training in England to the age of 18. Comparisons are drawn between this attempt to raise the age of compulsion and previous attempts, which took place in a significantly different socio-economic context. It is argued that the needs of those most likely to be affected by the current proposal – young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) – are subordinated to the needs of an English economy that is increasingly based upon low-skill, low-pay work relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses his opinions regarding a September 2007 report by the British Academy journal regarding the use of peer-review as a primary engine for research study and publication in the humanities. An overview of the report is given, citing its comments on the positive and negative aspects of the process. The author affirms the importance of peer-review as an academic system but criticizes the report's and the Academy's lack of investigation into "secondary" review activities. It is suggested that the problems of complacency and the pressure of academic conformity are underestimated when considering the value and condition of peer review in academic circles.

This paper describes the characteristics of people who return to learning to achieve at least a level 2 qualification, drawing on the 1958 National Child Development Cohort Study. Results show that adults who gained level 2 were more likely than those who did not to have been engaged in a range of learning activities at earlier ages, including learning during childhood, staying in education during adolescence and undertaking courses leading and not leading to qualifications during adulthood. The factor that has the highest impact on progression by age 33 and by age 42 is early school attainment. This means that for individuals who do well at school there is a greater chance of achievement of qualifications during adulthood, even when this qualification is not achieved by age 23. We further find that socioeconomic constraints in adulthood may be less of a barrier to progression than is often believed. Taking together, these findings suggest that the main focus should be on paying particular attention to attitudinal barriers to learning, rather than just being concerned with removing economic and social constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One problem faced by teachers of citizenship is that ‘politics’ is negatively valued. The concept is actually ambiguous in value. The paper sets out a neutral, a negative, and a positive meaning of the term. It then goes on to explore the way that even on the positive construction there can seem to be ethical problems with politics. This explains both aspects of numerous projects to ‘depoliticise’ society and government, and to depoliticise citizenship education. But, the alternatives mean that we lose important political values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critiques what it sees as a tendency on the part of certain social researchers to engage in moralistic critiques of middle-class parents, especially in relation to the choices and actions of such parents within educational quasi-markets. It proceeds to a linked critique of the influence within education of certain aspects of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, with particular reference to the concepts of symbolic violence and the depiction of cultural meanings as arbitrary. It is argued that both these developments involve unhelpful and unjustified forms of reductionism that could have the effect of alienating middle-class support for a range of broadly progressive political endeavours within and beyond education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the ‘progressive’ influence of the English Plowden Report and Scottish Primary Memorandum on British primary curricula from the 1960s onwards, secondary education has generally continued to follow a more traditional subject-centred route and post-war educational theorists have not generally been favourably inclined to other than subject-based modes of curriculum planning and organisation. However, in the light of current curriculum reviews on both sides of the Scottish border – calling for more educationally meaningful curricula – the perennial issue of how school knowledge might best be ordered for the coherent educational experience of pupils seems worth revisiting. To this end, this paper examines some of the influential post-war philosophical arguments against integrated and interdisciplinary approaches to the curricular organisation of knowledge, concluding that they are not as compelling as they might formerly have seemed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Carr argues that the intelligibility of spiritual development as an educational activity is dependent upon there being a framework of propositions that relates to spiritual experience and that there is a methodology for establishing their truth. These propositions and the accompanying methodology need to be constructed along the lines of a traditional but re-worked form of religious education. Michael Hand argues to the contrary that there can be no methodology for the evaluation of the truth claims in relation to ‘spiritual’ propositions since they invariably psychologically, if not logically, involve reference to a transcendental being and are therefore seen as substantially matters of faith. Since the presentation of faith-based propositional knowledge is inappropriate to the secular school, the only route for spiritual education is in terms of those emotional qualities that we identify with the human ‘spirit’, that is, generosity, magnanimity, good heartedness, etc. In this paper it is argued that neither position is satisfactory in addressing the existential anxieties and tensions that underlie the construction of religious and other spiritually relevant forms of articulation. We do not need Carr's ‘true’ spiritual propositions. Analysis of spiritual discourses can take the same epistemological form as enquiry in arts criticism, one that recognises the elasticity of its propositions in terms of meaning and a fluidity in terms of its boundaries. The ‘truth’ of such propositions depends upon how they answer to the existential tensions felt by the pupil. Insofar as Hand's analysis is concerned, to reduce spiritual education to a form of emotional and social development neglects the clear intelligibility of spiritual discourse to the religious and non-religious minded alike. The unifying element in spiritual discourse is those existential questions that lie at its foundations. Spiritual education seeks to address these questions as ones of both passion and intelligibility, helping pupils to make choices in light of their own experience of the tensions and anxieties that are embedded within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to articulate a new perspective on British multi-faith religious education that both complements and, in part, subsumes existing critiques. My argument, while controversial, is straightforward: it is that British religious education has misrepresented the nature of religion in efforts to commend itself as contributing to the social aims of education, as these are typically framed in liberal democratic societies. Contemporary multi-faith religious education is placed in context and its underlying theological and philosophical commitments identified and criticised. It is concluded that current representations of religion in British religious education are limited in their capacity to challenge racism and religious intolerance, chiefly because they are conceptually ill equipped to develop respect for difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response by Stephen Gorard to an article by Paul Connolly. Gorard critiques Connolly's article, which called for using the phi effect size to analyze gaps between student groups. Connolly argued, for example, the academic achievement gap between boys and girls could be measured utilizing this method. The author discusses the importance for further debate on the subject of measuring student achievement. The author also argues that many older studies were still valid even if they did not utilize the phi effect size method.

Character education is a specific approach to morals or values education, which is consistently linked with citizenship education. But how is it possible for a heterogeneous society that disagrees about basic values to reach a consensus on what constitutes character education? This article explores how character education has returned to the agenda of British education policy, having been largely neglected since the 1960s in response to unsatisfactory attempts at character education going back to the nineteenth century. Between 1979 and 1997 Conservative governments attempted to reverse a perceived decline in moral standards, established State control of the schools curriculum, imposed on State schools the duty to provide for moral and other development, and established a National Forum which attempted to articulate a set of consensus values in education. Labour has extended these developments in the curriculum, introduced compulsory citizenship education, and its White Paper of September 2001 speaks of ‘education with character’. The character and virtues Labour seeks to promote through schools are pragmatic and instrumental in intention, linked to raising pupil school performance, meeting the needs of the new economy, and promoting democratic participation. Otherwise the vision is pluralistic and evades explicit directives, and there is no explanation or analysis of its theoretical basis. The question of how agreement can be reached on what counts as character education may benefit from Sunstein's analysis of how law is possible in a heterogeneous society –‘incompletely theorized agreements on particular cases’ allow for common laws without agreement on fundamental principles. Many schools in fact operate in this way, but such a consensus is not entirely stable and runs the danger of teaching character education as a series of behaviour outcomes taught in a behaviourist fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an introduction to this issue. The author discusses the articles contained in this issue, focusing on topics such as: religious education and the importance of recognizing religious diversity in a society; the purpose and meaning of a university; and teacher training. Other articles discuss attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and changes to submission process for manuscripts to the journal. Finally, a debate about the measuring of educational achievement gaps by Stephen Gorard and Paul Connolly is presented.

In 2002, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) published the report of an independent panel of experts into maintaining standards at Advanced Level (A-Level). One of its recommendations was for: ‘limited experimental double marking of scripts in subjects such as English to determine whether the strategy would signi-ficantly reduce errors of measurement’ (p. 24). This recommendation provided the impetus for this paper which reviews the all but forgotten literature on double marking and considers its relevance now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a 'conceptual map' by which to chart contemporary developments in policy on school diversity. In part this has been prompted by the prospect in England of (private) Steiner schools becoming more closely involved in mainstream state-funded education. Whilst generated principally by policy developments within the UK, the conceptual thinking may also have wider applicability. We conceptualise diversity in the context of a differentiating public domain and a concern with existential questions which, arguably, persists in educational policy even where narrow 'performative' criteria are dominant. Four diversity models are outlined and a policy path over time suggested in relation to these. We suggest that this may be leading towards diversity policy which affords greater recognition to different conceptions of valued learning and encourages co-operative exploration of these, though it is acknowledged that there remain strong contrary pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of mass public education posed unfamiliar problems for the governments of modern states, and the ways in which governments worked through those problems can reveal much about the culture and values of a state. This paper focuses on central Government officials and the Ministers they advised, with particular attention to the pivotal period 1960-1976. Trends identified include: the shift from postWar optimism to the more pessimistic view of schooling since the late 1960s; the dynamics of professional development amid over-rapid expansion and contraction; relationships between training institutions and schools; and policy-makers' changing perceptions of teachers as professionals. Four themes are considered in detail: the imperatives of numbers; status concerns as a driver of change; linkages among the partners' in the schooling enterprise; and accountability. Some questions are posed about the sustainability of the schooling enterprise in England and Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship in education beyond school has developed largely outside university departments of education, and has rarely engaged systematically with the study of education in schools. The paper concentrates on three areas: adult education, higher education, and further education. The development of the extra-mural tradition meant that adult education was less an object of scholarly study than a means of spreading scholarship to the wider population, with important exceptions such as historical studies. Since the 1970s, the volume of research and postgraduate education in adult education in British universities has grown considerably. The study of higher education was marginal until the 1960s; its subsequent development was relatively slow until the 1990s, when the quality of university teaching came under wider external scrutiny. The study of further education and vocational training is characterised by disciplinary fragmentation, with much activity taking place in departments of psychology, economics, sociology and management, as well as in those former polytechnics that specialised in training further education teachers. The rise of integrative concepts such as lifelong learning suggest greater potential for crossdisciplinary scholarship that can engage the diverse body of those interested in teaching and research about this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Britain, numerous policies have attempted to strengthen the subject knowledge of primary teachers. This paper assesses the evidence base for applying research on subject knowledge to teachers in primary schools. It concludes by suggesting that researchers and policy-makers would do well to reconsider the current emphasis on subject knowledge in initial teacher education and professional development; and, instead, give a higher priority to developing our understanding of the relationship between tacit and formal knowledge, and of how teachers learn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the 1985 to 1986 Review of Vocational Qualifications' (RVQ) internal debates. Background on the development of RVQ, a competence-based vocational qualifications in England and Wales; Policy context of the RVQ; Structural and administrative options.

Studies the role of appraisal in performance related pay (PRP) for teachers in Great Britain. Four different types of PRP in schools as proposed by the Labour Government; Salience of appraisal in the proposed scheme; Inconsistency of the key features of the Labour scheme; Relation of the Labour proposals to the Treasury framework.

Editorial. Comments on the findings of a report about educational research in Great Britain. Quality of educational research; Quality of articles in leading education journals.

Examines the ways in which the history curriculum in Schools in Great Britain has been subject to contestation, and highlights the implications of the impact of postmodernism upon the teaching of history. Relationship between `official history' taught in schools and `unofficial histories' which influence children; Discussion on the future direction of history in schools.

Focuses on the peer review and quality control in higher education in Great Britain. Aim of the government to inform students, employers and those in education about the quality of teaching and learning being offered; Need for public accountability for the substantial public funds invested in higher education; Complexity of the notion of quality in education.

This article examines changes in the culture of universities in Great Britain. The government's White Paper, "Higher Education: A New Framework," aims to encourage the youth to participate in university education. Through it, the government adopted and promoted a polytechnic type commitment to quality in teaching, course design and efficiency and to the widening of access to the university system. The country's education system has awakened to the idea of student centered learning through modular degree patterns. The British university in the future could well be a modular regional and yet international centre of learning and excellence.

Focuses on the concept of quality control in higher education in Great Britain. Need for proper accountability for the substantial public funds invested in higher education; Analysis of quality assurance into a number of components amongst which are quality control, quality audit and quality assessment; Importance of the choice of institution in which to pursue higher education for personal happiness and professional satisfaction.

Focuses on the idea of the city technology college in the Great Britain. Preparation for adult and working life; Alleviation of the consequences of the educational selection; Significance of secondary technical schools in terms of the curriculum initiatives.