Search

This paper explores UK school students' protest activism relating to their schools' policies and practices, drawing on two datasets: 1) a newspaper analysis of media reports relating to school protests between 2000 and 2021; 2) a survey of 800 secondary school pupils in Wales. Drawing on social movements literature and adapting concepts for the school environment, we present a framework for exploring children's protest repertoires that distinguishes between institutionalised, legitimated and disruptive forms of activism. Our analysis outlines trends in pupil protest activities and explores stated motivations for protesting. We find that pupils are using a broad range of protest actions, often in combination, to voice concerns about school-based issues. Our data also suggest that pupils link their grievances to wider themes of social justice, rights, fairness and solidarity. Using principles of critical pedagogy, our study challenges hegemonic and deficit-laden ideas about children's (mis)behaviour as potential mis-readings of activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of 'class strategies' in policy formation is sometimes unseen as plans are unrealised in practice over long periods of historical time. 'Subterranean class strategies' are an extension of existing work on class to consider 'class work' on policy in the 'long unenacted'. Using the example of emergency feeding in a national crisis, the stark difference in school meal planning for post-World War 2 emergencies when compared to the COVID-19 crisis is discussed. Through an analysis of archival records, it is shown that 'subterranean class strategies' - the devaluation of school catering expertise by the army and the private sector, the lack of co-operation of independent schools, and localisation and privatisation - diminished the role of schools in emergency feeding. The paper concludes by considering how the concept of 'subterranean class strategies' could inform work on educational think tanks, privatisation and subsumption, and intersectional areas such as race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequality in students' degree outcomes has been a concern for the higher education sector and the UK government for more than a decade. Since its inception in 2018, the Office for Students in England has prioritised the need for evidence of causality through requiring institutions to evaluate the effectiveness of their initiatives as set out in Access and Participation Plans. This policy development responds to several reports which identify a dearth of evidence-based interventions and scant knowledge of 'what works'. This paper traces the interplay between policy and research, focusing on the assumptions they make about causality. It concludes that unwarranted positions are taken in both spheres of practice, making progress unlikely. A conception of causality situated in extant formal theory on evidential pluralism and that draws on current practices would help us address inequality more effectively. Alternative framings of the problem of inequality in students' degree outcomes is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private schools have long played a crucial role in male elite formation but their importance to women's trajectories is less clear. In this paper, we explore the relationship between girls' private schools and elite recruitment in Britain over the past 120 years – drawing on the historical database of Who's Who, a unique catalogue of the elite. We find that alumni of elite girls schools have been around 20 times more likely than other women to reach elite positions. They are also more likely to follow particular channels of elite recruitment, via the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, private members clubs and elite spouses. Yet such schools have also consistently been less propulsive than their male-only counterparts. We argue this is rooted in the ambivalent aims of girls elite education, where there has been a longstanding tension between promoting academic achievement and upholding traditional processes of gendered social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the first-hand accounts of disablist school violence experienced by young people with dwarfism during their secondary education in the United Kingdom. A narrative, qualitative methodology was utilised, which turned nineteen young people with dwarfism into the storytellers of their schooling experiences. Drawing together a poststructuralist approach to bullying and Critical Disability Studies, it presents and discusses stories of physical, cultural and systemic violence they experienced, as well as their resistance to it. In doing so, it challenges dominant discourses around disability and school violence, including the representation of disabled young people as 'passive victims' of school violence or disability being the trigger of such violence. Finally, it provides a sociological analysis of such violence, shifting the focus from the individualistic blame to the cultural, institutional and systemic underpinnings of such violence and the role of disablism in its perpetuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic conferences have a central role in shaping career trajectories, reproducing or resisting exclusions and moulding relations in and to academia, thus shaping academic networks. In this paper, we consider how precarious academics subvert and navigate conference spaces, including emerging online forms. Particularly, we explore how academic conferences generate and nurture friendship as an enduring political practice that undermines neoliberal economic, political and social structures. This is contextualised in UK higher education amidst mass job losses, increased precarity and the subsequent breaking of academic bonds. In interviews with academics and our own auto/ethnographical experiences, we explore how friendship emerges in and resists the exclusions of the conference space for precarious researchers. Finally, we explore how the nurture of friendship by precarious scholars at academic conferences promotes collective action to resist neoliberalism within the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the sociology of education would benefit from greater integration with social scientific research focused on morality. This body of research offers a rich set of resources that can illuminate and extend many of the sociology of education's intellectual concerns. In support of this argument, the paper draws on data from Millennium Cohort Study in the UK to empirically examine how a wide range of socio-demographic characteristics are related to young people's moral attitudes. The analysis focuses on the extent to which adolescents state that a range of actions are wrong. In doing so, the paper makes an important contribution to studying the moral lives of young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the research examining students' university choosing in England focuses on rates of access to 'elite' universities for high-attaining state-educated students. By contrast, the experiences of students applying to 'new' universities remain under-researched. This paper considers moderately attaining 16–18 years olds as a discrete group and highlights how a combination of England's Higher Education (HE) policy and school performance measures may influence levels of support for students' university applications. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a London state school, it finds that support for students' university applications was differentiated in ways which overwhelmingly disadvantaged moderate attainers. A competitive school market, combined with a policy focus on 'fair access' to 'elite' institutions, meant high attainers' university applications were consistently prioritised. Some teachers were found who navigated dominant HE discourses, drawing on an ethical teacher habitus and their social and cultural capital to support students applying to less prestigious universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on international students' post-study plans centres on factors influencing migration and career decisions. However, few studies have considered the impacts of individual institutions on students' aspirations and their subsequent transitions after graduation. In this paper, I employ the notion of institutional habitus in order to explore the extent to which higher education institutions expand or limit the range of options that international students could envisage or realise. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 55 non-EU international postgraduate students from three different UK universities, this study aims to uncover the complex diversity that underpins ostensibly similar UK higher education degrees. Notwithstanding the overlapping influences of individual, family, friends and institution, I argue that individual institutions play a significant role in shaping the ways in which participants imagine and experience the field of possibilities after graduation. This perspective also enables a more detailed examination of differences between and within the institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks whether concerns about social problems decline with age. Unconditional growth models (without covariates) revealed a decline over 25 years (age 18 to 43) in concerns about racial discrimination, treatment of Aboriginal Peoples, female job discrimination, unemployment and environmental pollution. Educational attainment was not associated with these change trajectories in conditional control models, providing no support for enlightenment or social reproduction hypotheses. Higher household income (age 43) was associated with faster declines in concerns about racial discrimination, treatment of Aboriginal Peoples and unemployment. With household income as a predictor, downward trajectories in treatment of Aboriginal Peoples, female job discrimination and environmental pollution were no longer significant, and the racial discrimination trajectory was reversed direction. These results provide compelling evidence for status defence theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on social capital theory to discuss the way social class plays out in the friendships of teenage students. Based on data from individual interviews and focus groups with 75 students in four London secondary schools, it is suggested that students tend to form friendships with people who belong to the same social-class background as them. Social-class ‘sameness’ is considered to be an element that importantly exemplifies the quality of their friendships, and hence close, inter-class friendships were significantly less common than close, intra-class ones. In addition, class differentials were evident and often reproduced by students, even in the context of the rarer inter-class friendships. This paper concludes that social class is of continuous importance in teenagers’ lives and despite some agentic negotiation of class boundaries, as in the case of omnivorousness, students’ friendship networks are dynamically informed by class inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role that social characteristics play in determining the academic success of students who begin university with roughly similar entry grades. The data used were drawn from the administrative records of over 38,000 UK-domiciled undergraduate students from one British university between 1998 and 2009. Results show that the characteristics of entrants have varied only slightly over this period and intake is still largely in favour of ‘traditional’ entrants: namely those from professional occupational backgrounds, the privately educated and those of traditional age. The relationship between background characteristics and eventual academic success also reflects patterns seen at earlier education stages. However, when prior attainment was taken into account, the link between degree outcome and many social characteristics does diminish – notably for students who were privately educated and who came from professional occupational groups. This suggests that once students have overcome barriers to admission, it is entry grades rather than social characteristics that may most strongly influence eventual academic success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Employing students to market higher education (HE) and widen access is established practice in the United Kingdom and other developed countries. In the United Kingdom, student ambassadors are held to be effective in aspiration and attainment-raising work and cited as ‘role-models’ for pupils. The focus of this paper is student ambassador outreach work in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics including medicine) at two contrasting universities. The study deployed ethnography and approaches from across the social sciences to trace and analyse discourses surrounding ambassadors, and to explore their positioning within learning contexts, relationships with pupils and the learning that takes place. Findings indicate that where ambassadors work collaboratively with pupils in contexts with ‘informal attributes’, pupils can identify closely with them. However, in contexts with more ‘formal attributes’, differences, not similarities, are highlighted. Stakeholder interests are found to significantly impact on learning contexts and on ambassadors’ efficacy as HE ‘role-models’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy, yet the relationship appears consistent and permanent. This paper draws on findings from the largest study into the stripping industry in the United Kingdom to explore the relationships between students, sex work and consumption. To make sense of the relationship between students and participation in the sex industry, a deeper understanding of other social and cultural processes is needed. In this discussion we argue that the following points are relevant and interlinked: changes to the nature of sexual commerce and sexual consumption as they become part of the marketplace; changes in social attitudes and the rise of ‘respectability’ in sexual commerce; the ‘pleasure dynamic’ amongst students; and changes in the higher education structure that place students as consumers as well as financially fragile. We set out a future research agenda given that this relationship is set to grow as the individual bares the cost of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the neoliberal reforms to British education in the 1980s, education debates have been saturated with claims to the efficacy of the market as a mechanism for improving the content and delivery of state education. In recent decades with the expansion and ‘massification’ of higher education, widening participation (WP) has acquired an increasingly important role in redressing the under-representation of certain social groups in universities. Taken together, these trends neatly capture the twin goals of New Labour’s programme for education reform: economic competitiveness and social justice. But how do WP professionals negotiate competing demands of social equity and economic incentive? In this paper we explore how the hegemony of neoliberal discourse – of which the student as consumer is possibly the most pervasive – can be usefully disentangled from socially progressive, professional discourses exemplified through the speech and actions of WP practitioners and managers working in British higher education institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Extant research on family migration for education has focused almost exclusively on the education of children. We thus know very little about family migration when it is driven by the educational projects of parents. To begin to redress this gap, this paper explores the experiences of families who have moved to the United Kingdom primarily to enable the mother or father to pursue a degree. It argues that, in common with what we know of UK student-parents, both choices about and experiences of higher education are strongly differentiated by gender. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper asks whether the institutional hierarchies defined by ‘golden triangle’, other Russell Group, other pre-1992 and post-1992 universities in England, and by ancient, old and new universities in Scotland, have become weaker since the 1990s. Using indicators constructed from Universities and Colleges Admissions Service data for 1996–2010, the article finds a stable hierarchical relationship among the sectors within each country, with some indicators showing a slight widening of status differences between sectors towards the end of the period. The main exception was a slight ‘upgrading’ of new (post-1992) universities in Scotland early in the period. There was little change in the association of institutional sector with social class, but in England the association with private secondary schools became slightly stronger and the association with ethnicity weakened. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While student parents now represent a significant proportion of the higher education population in England, this group has been given limited consideration in policy circles. Using a social constructivist and feminist theoretical framework, this paper draws on a research project investigating the role of higher education policies in supporting student parents in England. It focuses on findings from 40 interviews conducted with student parents enrolled on university programmes. It shows that, in the context of the default construction of the university student as carefree, student parents often describe their experience of navigating academia as a struggle, in which time-related, financial, health and emotional problems prevail. However, the stories they tell also emphasise the benefits associated with their dual status. By doing so, they resist the discourse of deficit typically applied to ‘non traditional’ students and produce a counter-discourse that disturbs the long-lived binary opposition between care and academia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The notion of ‘competitive excellence’ is an enduring cornerstone of UK educational policy. Most recently, expanding and adapting New Labour’s Academy project with the introduction of free schools, the Coalition’s approach advances and embeds competitive market-based forms of community engagement in education. Responding to this policy paradigm, this paper draws upon history in order to open up the notion of excellence. Through examining alternative practices of achievement and success in histories of community education, I aim to disturb the unquestioned attachment of educational excellence to the ideals of competitive meritocracy. Comparing across two community educational movements – Socialist Sunday Schools (established 1892) and Black Saturday Schools (established 1968) – I explore how achievement and excellence have been mobilised to very different educational aims. In distinct times and circumstances, both of these community initiatives practiced versions of educational achievement that challenged dominant knowledge hierarchies and underlying assumptions of incapability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]