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Presents a comment from the author on the work of Mark Ashton, commenting the former's article "Education for Capability: A Critique." Views on conceptual analysis; Concept of a person's capability to fulfill his tasks and responsibilities; Discovery of a hidden message in the author's work in what Ashton cites as a highly satirical passage.

Comments on the paper "Primary Education in the Eighties" that looks at the practice of primary education in Scotland. Principles that underlie the practice; Reasons why the position document by the Scottish Consultative Committee on the Curriculum on "Primary Education in the Eighties" is in question; Apparentness of the doctrine of liberal education on the document.

The article presents an analysis to define the term "educational studies." Looking at a series of conferences held in the summer and autumn of 1977, that some kind of definition might result from considering such conferences. Firstly, there was the seventh world congress of the International Association for the Advancement of Educational Research at Ghent, Belgium, in July. Some fifty nationalities were present at this meeting so possibly it was not the ideal occasion for seeking an agreed definition. In fact, though the congress had a central, unifying theme, 'Self-Realization through Education', the plenary papers almost served as illustrations of the variety of approach to educational studies in different areas of the world. From Poland came emphasis on the search for quality of life and the place of art in education while from the U.S. and Canada came a complex review of aims, objectives, innovations, methods, numerous research findings. Individual papers in discussion group sessions offered equally rich variety, ranging from educational television for adults in Quebec, Canada through Yoruba myths and pupils' understanding of science concepts to school counselling in Iran.

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]

Contemporary educational goals place increasing emphasis on conferring recognition and building self-esteem for people deemed to be marginalized and vulnerable. Such goals coalesce with the language, symbols and practices of therapy inscribed within a broader 'therapeutic ethos'. The paper relates these trends to broader cultural demoralization about people's potential for human agency and evaluates their effects on educational debates. A therapeutic ethos in education appears benign and empowering. Yet, the paper argues that it produces a diminished view of people and low expectations about people's capacity for resilience and autonomy. One effect is to encourage an alignment between the values and activities of education and welfare. This both legitimizes and extends institutional and government influence over people's psychological and emotional states. The paper explores these trends and evaluates their implications for educational ideas about human agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on areas of key importance with regard to the composition of school intakes, the nature of communities, global and citizenship education, professionalism and the practice of assessment and its relationship to teaching. Aim of many education policy makers; Perspective on professionalism and on teaching as a profession; Significance of understanding the assessment and its contribution to the pedagogic endeavor.

This paper outlines a case for the reconfiguration of the public sphere as discursive space, arguing that such a reconfiguration better enables investigations into public debates on education. The paper focuses on one such investigation, which studied one newspaper's reporting of a review of the school curriculum in Queensland, Australia. It employs Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the interrelationships between policy discourses and the discourses about the review that were constructed in the print media. The paper shows how the dynamic structure of the public sphere enabled discursive connections to be made across sites in order to privilege a shared public discourse on education policy, schools and teachers. In so doing, it demonstrates the capacity of the public sphere to define educational issues and identities in particular ways. [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]

Outlines the contents of previous and recent publications of the "British Journal of Educational Studies," which talk about education and academic affairs. Effects of the transformation in the relationship of the universities to the government, which has been talked about in the article "The Open Market and Higher Education: The Universities and the Future," by John Turner in the May 1989 issue of the journal; Threats in the scenario to that conception of education; Analysis and critiques of the implications of these threats for education academics; Significant contributions of the journal to the deeper understanding and major focus of future issues.

The article discusses various articles published within the issue, including one by Anne West on school choice and another by David Hartley on educational excellence and enjoyment.

Religious education (RE) has often found itself at the centre of debates about education's role in promoting social cohesion in contemporary multi-religious societies. The paper considers RE's relationship to religious plurality within the broader context of politics of curriculum and debates on pluralism. Drawing upon the recent works on the history of religion and using the teaching of the histories and cultures of Muslims in RE as a case study, it argues that RE has yet to fulfill its potential in this regard. The paper examines reasons for this and recommends alternative approaches to content which may help RE rise to the challenges posed above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to explore apparent contradictions between claims or assumptions to the effect that: (i) teaching is a profession; (ii) good teaching involves the cultivation of positive personal relationships with pupils; (iii) professional relationships should be of an essentially formal or impersonal nature. It is argued that the very real contradictions to which teaching as a professional occupation is prone are a function of fundamental tension between the essentially deontic character of professional principle and regulation, and the inherently ‘virtue ethical’ nature of teaching as a form of pre-theoretical and non-technical moral association. The paper concludes by identifying and offering some comment on three such areas of tension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the system of banding used in England by the former Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) in order to seek to obtain an intake to secondary schools that was balanced in terms of ability. The first part of the paper provides a brief history of the system of banding, how it was informed by verbal reasoning testing and how it was subsequently based on the results of a specially constructed reading test. The second part of the paper examines the extent of banding after the abolition of the ILEA. Whilst LEA-wide banding is currently only used by three LEAs, many schools in inner London that are responsible for their own admissions (i.e. voluntary-aided and foundation schools) have introduced banding. The problems associated with banding at a school level are discussed and it is argued that banding at the level of the LEA is likely to be more equitable, more transparent and more likely to reduce social segregation; in addition, there is some evidence to suggest that the ILEA banding system resulted in a higher percentage of parents achieving their stated first preference school than more recent admissions policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the existence of a canon of established and privileged texts in the primary literacy curriculum in England can be traced historically and has informed current national policy and practice. This canonisation of a particular set of literature has served to marginalise popular cultural and media texts, often the preferred texts of children in contemporary society. The paper examines the historical development of an established, hegemonic body of texts and critically analyses current national curricula frameworks for primary literacy in order to determine the way in which reading material is framed. It is argued that current national policy enshrines particular textual traditions at the expense of more popular forms of material and that this has major implications for the relevance of the future primary literacy curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates teachers’ use of prior knowledge in whole class teaching contexts and draws on data from an ESRC-funded study. The paper explores how teachers conceptualise prior knowledge, principally as that which has been taught in school. It demonstrates strong teacher awareness of how the teaching under consideration fits with learning previously undertaken by the class, but less awareness of how the learning might build on prior learning outside school. The paper considers how teachers make connections between new learning and prior learning, and how those connections can variously support or confound children's acquisition of new knowledge and understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary work-related education and training policy represents occupational competence as the outcome of individual performance at work. This paper presents a critique of this neo-liberal assumption, arguing that in many cases competence should be regarded as an attribute of groups, teams and communities. It proposes a theory of collective competence in terms of (1) making collective sense of events in the workplace, (2) developing and using a collective knowledge base and (3) developing a sense of interdependency. It suggests that the language of competence would become a more effective tool for understanding performance at work if the collectivistic sense of the term ‘competence’ were used in conjunction with the more established individualistic sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper in BJES, John Wilson (2002) examines the question of the desirability of education and argues that the enterprise can only be justified if it is thought to be necessary ‘as a means of salvation’. Here I expose a number of flaws in Wilson's argument and defend a rather more prosaic justificatory strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a framework for conceptualising social justice in education, drawing particularly on Martha Nussbaum's (2000) capabilities approach. The practical case for consideration is that of widening participation and pedagogical implications in higher (university) education in England. While the paper supports the value and usefulness of Nussbaum's list of ten capabilities for developing a more radical and challenging language and practice for higher education pedagogies, it also argues that her approach is limited. Other ways of conceptualising social justice are also required in order to develop adjudicating theories which enable us to judge which practices take us closer to social justice. An argument is made for ‘bivalent’ theorising which integrates individual and institutional development and agents and social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important changes in the environment of schooling during the last decade has been the establishment of educational markets and inter–institutional competition which, in turn, has led to the development of a new management culture in schools. In the light of these developments, this paper draws together the research on heads’ responses to marketisation and suggests theoretical hypotheses on the impact of its underlying features on their psychological well–being. Our argument is that the major features of educational marketisation may promote the emergence of both the determinants of professional growth and self–renewal and of occupational stress and job burnout among headteachers. These determinants, in turn, lead to the appearance of two types of well–being among school heads. To support our hypothesis we refer to the work of others and empirical findings from various fields of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs that educationist W.H. Winch is the founder of the experimental approach in education. Current literature concerning the early history of educational psychology in Great Britain leaves the impression that little of any consequence occurred prior to researcher Cyril Burt's appointment to the post of psychologist to the London County Council in 1913 and that this in particular marks the origin of the experimental tradition in this field. The most important member of this group of researchers, and the subject of this paper, was William Henry Winch, who is distinguished not only by the range and volume of his published writings but also by the fact that he never held a full-time university or college post. The dominant aspect of his work was his concern with the systematic testing of specific hypotheses relevant to the organization and conduct of the process of education by means of controlled experiments in the classroom, and it is in being the first writer to devote a large part of his life to work of this kind that the importance of Winch lies.

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.

The article presents information on the 21st annual general meeting of the Standing Conference on Studies in Education held at King's College in London, England, on December 15, 1972. The new Chairman of the Conference, J.R. Webster, of the of the University College of North Wales, Bangor, was elected at the beginning of the business meeting and took the chair throughout the day. Margaret Sutherland, of the University of Leeds, and S.J. Eggleston, of the University of Keele, were elected to the Editorial Board. The meeting endorsed the change of Publisher that had been negotiated by the General Purposes Committee during the summer, from Messrs. Faber and Faber to Messrs. Basil Blackwell of Oxford, to begin with this first Number of Volume XXI. The afternoon session was a private meeting devoted to discussing the future function of the Standing Conference in the light of the James Report and the White Paper. The morning session, however, following the business meeting, was a public session to which representatives not only of the universities and colleges of education were invited as normally, but also of the polytechnics.

Comments on the European Conference on Educational Research. Perspectives on research in education; Analysis of the country of origin of the presenters and other contributors; Nature of the conference.

Editorial. Presents information on the aspects which affects education. Reference to the Labour Government's education white paper entitled `Excellence in Schools;' Affects which the student contributions would have;