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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]

Using a comparative case study, this paper explores the pedagogic practices for regulating behaviour in two Norwegian primary school classrooms with social compositions that become increasingly contrasted due to an increasing school segregation. Based on classroom observations and teacher interviews and using Bernstein's concepts of 'framing' and 'classification', the study has found that working-class students are subjected to a more visible pedagogic practice than middle-class students. The different behavioural expectations in the classrooms shape a passive and receptive learner identity in the former case and a more active learner identity in the latter case. Social class assumptions and neoliberal education policy may underlie the formation of these distinct identities. This paper argues that in an education system that advocates equal opportunities for everyone as the most important value, it is crucial to consider whether visible pedagogic practices promoted through evidence-based programmes rather contribute to reproduction of existing social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in education has long noted teachers' role in assisting social and ideological reproduction. Separately, scholarship has also investigated the use of extra-curricular activities in equipping disadvantaged students with social and cultural capital, to embark on social mobility. Positioned at the intersection of these two apparently disparate strands, this paper presents a case in which teachers' extra-curricular work is seen to simultaneously enact subtle socio-ideological reproduction, and the facilitation of social mobility attainment. Specifically, the paper draws on a study of how teachers in a lower-status junior college in Singapore prepare their students in applying for prestigious state-sponsored scholarships. Through teachers' extra-curricular work of allying and aligning, social mobility and social reproduction are simultaneously made possible, yet also exist in some tension. Thus, this paper offers a unique sociological perspective on teachers' extra-curricular work and its significance for broader issues of meritocracy, social mobility, and social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has long demonstrated the exclusion and Othering experienced by young people with disabilities in education. This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study conducted in an 'elite' sixth-form college in England, set against the backdrop of a shifting social, political, and cultural landscape, where neo-liberal discourses of dis/ability and healthism—centring on mental health and wellbeing—are becoming further embedded in educational policy. Drawing on theoretical work by Bourdieu and Foucault, we demonstrate how the students in this study appeared able to re-make disability as a liberal intellectual identity marker and use it as a form of capital within the bounded college sub-field. However, we argue that these empowered disabled subjectivities were strongly middle-classed and precarious. The findings have implications through advancing current understandings of young people's complexifying relationships with disability in education, of enduring inequalities around disability, and how social class is implicated in this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of schools in developing a sense of common British identity has taken centre stage in the face of 'racialised' accounts of violence during the twenty first century. In this paper, we argue that certain British education policy documents can be understood as hegemonic interventions seeking to resolve ambiguities surrounding constructions of British identity. We do so by examining the Department for Education (DfE) 'Fundamental British Values' (FBV) guidance within the context of its relationship to the Prevent Duty anti-terrorism programme as well as the 'Political impartiality in schools' guidance released by the DfE in 2022. Utilising Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and applying Laclau and Mouffe (2014/1985) conception of hegemony with Hall's (2021/2000) claim that 'Britishness' is an empty signifier, this paper argues that the ambiguities of 'Britishness' present a number of opportunities for power to be exercised and consolidated. Finally, we explore the possible implications for demands to 'decolonise the curriculum' within schools' existing duties and propose possible structural limits placed upon these demands by said duties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractGlobal education policy discourse is based on an unshakable belief that more and improved skills will promote economic prosperity, global competitiveness and social inclusion. In England, the Further Education and Skills sector (FES) has emerged as the vehicle to deliver these skills. However, the portrayal of FES as focusing primarily on vocational education for people often adjudged to be ‘not academic’ positions the sector at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, with negative ramifications for those who teach and study in it. This paper applies a case study approach to explore the lived experiences of five trainee FES teachers completing their initial teacher education (ITE). Drawing on contemporary interpretations of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, I develop Morrin’s notion of hauntings to explain the psycho-social, historical and spatial influences on the trainees’ responses as they re-enter the field of education as teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the roles of parental social class and cultural capital in inequalities in English school qualifications. The analytical focus is the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). Integral to Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction is the conception that inequalities in cultural capital explain the unequal scholastic achievements of pupils from different social class backgrounds. This paper is a novel investigation using data from Understanding Society and linked administrative education records from the National Pupil Database. The central empirical findings do not support the Bourdiuesian position, and there is no evidence that the substantial parental social class inequalities that are observed in school GCSE outcomes can be explained by inequalities in cultural capital. Engagement in reading related activities are mildly influential, but engagement in highbrow cultural activities are not influential. This is an important finding as the concept of cultural capital has become more prominent in Government education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As structural inequalities within universities persist, universities increasingly develop diversity policies. Much diversity research focuses on the gap between universities' commitments and actual practices. This paper takes a different approach by scrutinizing how diversity documents enact politics of time that results in their selective non-performativity. We demonstrate how diversity documents at a Dutch university compose diversity as a problem of time for which the near future is crucial. It legitimizes action in the here-and-now to realize the diverse future, while simultaneously delegitimizes it by envisioning diversity as a problem that resolves itself in time. Along such urgent, yet inevitable progress, a competition between gender and ethnic diversity emerges. As the documents engage in a white politics of time, change for white women becomes realizable in concrete, time-bound actions. In contrast, people of color appear to lag behind and have yet to arrive in a time where progress could be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the literature on network governance and new philanthropy to characterize and explain the increased involvement of non-State actors in education policymaking in the Dominican Republic. The study reveals, first, how network governance has intensified since 2010 through hybrid public-private spaces of agenda setting, second, how these hybrid spaces have given way to the emergence of new philanthropy, which engages directly with the State as part of its efforts to influence policymaking, and, third, that new philanthropy is evolving to include, as well, the generation of profits, both within and beyond the Dominican Republic, through the creation of an affiliated profit-seeking consulting entity. The paper concludes by arguing that future studies should bring the concepts of network governance and new philanthropy into conversation with theoretical approaches that emphasize the underlying political-economic structures within which non-State actors operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher wellbeing is a growing international concern. Despite teachers' experiences being deleteriously impacted by education policies and organisational conditions, dominant discourses of wellbeing focus on strategies that enhance individual self-management of wellbeing. This paper critically examines teacher wellbeing and the counter-discourses of wellbeing mobilised by teachers on an online platform, Reddit. Contributors criticise the wellbeing approaches taken in their schools and education systems. They react to the erasure of how work conditions impact their wellbeing. These forums speak back to the assumption that teachers are deficient and that teachers must be positive in self-managing their wellbeing. We coin the term 'cruel wellbeing' to critique wellbeing programs that neglect teachers' challenging work conditions. We question the practices of training teachers to assume responsibility for their wellbeing using strategies of positivity. We suggest that social media is an important political tool for creating and circulating counter-discourses of teachers' work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the sociology of education, opponents of deficit thinking would be seen as important change agents, potentially inspiring radical policy change aimed at reducing systemic discrimination of specific sociodemographic groups. That is, contestation of deficit thinking can in theory lead to its destruction. In this paper, we argue that contestation can be overruled or downplayed via public discourses. From a discourse-historical approach, we illustrate how contestation was attenuated in the context of ethnicity in Flemish higher education in the period 1985–2020. We show how a variety of discursive processes eventually marginalize anti-deficit narratives in mass media texts, even though these stances were dominant at certain moments. The major contribution of our study is that it highlights important discursive mechanisms underlying the reproduction of deficit thinking in times of contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how nursing education both exemplifies the contradictions of neoliberalism alongside its seemingly all-encompassing influence. We conduct a feminist critical policy analysis to trace the histories of nursing as a feminised vocation located outside the academy, and how this is reflected in recent policy. We then critically explore widening participation and social mobility in relation to nursing education, and demonstrate how a discourse of fairness is used to justify market solutions. The 'special case' of nursing is considered through an analysis of how 'the nurse' as subject is constituted in education policy discourse. Our discussion focuses on the effects of these reforms and demonstrates how historical discourses that centre on women as carers are assimilated into the 'neoliberal social imaginary'. The paper's scope is both local – the gendered history of nursing education in England – and global – the force of neoliberal globalisation in education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether societal changes are making space for some working-class boys to go against the grain and foster positive reader identities. Drawing on interviews with 30 Australian boys about their experiences at school, Nancy Fraser's social justice framework is used to explore their parity of participation as readers. Responses raise questions about the need for recognition of boys as readers across demographics and more equitable redistribution of reading resources to the most economically marginalised educational contexts. Boys' narratives also challenge homogeneous images of boy/girl reading preferences that are often represented in literacy policies. The article explores nuances in how working-class boys conceive of themselves as readers within their local communities amidst global shifts in the post-industrial era. It also positions Fraser's social justice framework as a transferable lens for situated analysis that educators interested in enhancing parity of participation for marginalised students can draw upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice, this paper aims to understand whether and how a reproduction of the status hierarchy of medical specialties and diagnoses occurs within a medical school in a North European context as well as students' educational strategies given the hierarchy. We report data from a cross-sectional survey conducted on a sample of Danish medical students. The 289 respondents ranked diseases and specialities, based on how they believed most health personnel would rank them. In addition, 18 in-depth interviews with medical students were conducted. Comparing the ranking responses of early, mid and late phase students, the analysis tracks the gradual convergence and broad agreement around a hierarchy. The paper concludes that medical school is a highly competitive field of higher education, where distinction is invested in and reproduced by curricular knowledge. This distinction is reinforced within wider structural elements such as governmental educational policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neoliberal agenda promotes education as a route toward success in university and career. However, a neoliberal economy requires large numbers of workers willing to accept low-paying, dead-end jobs. The students most likely to take these jobs are those who have struggled with literacy and so schools must, in Bourdieu’s terms, re/produce, vulnerable readers. This paper tracks the ways in which the neoliberal economy depends on these readers and how schools participate in this process of re/production: from educational policy, to instructional context, to reader identity. In contrast, from a radical democratic viewpoint, the primary goal of schooling is civic engagement and such engagement is bolstered by universal literacy. The paper concludes with alternatives in the realms of policy and classroom practice that are more likely to support teachers and students and foster radical democratic views. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper illustrates the influence of a new national assignment system (NSAS) on Chilean middle-class advantage. This system was designed to increase educational equity by changing the previous school admission "rules" that were prejudicial against low-income students. We use Bourdieu's conceptual tools, drawing on concepts of capitals and field, to analyse the influence of the new rules of the game on the value of middle-class capitals. To understand how the new rules shape middle-class families' advantages, we link qualitative and quantitative analyses that empirically explore how families subjectively interpret the policy change and how objectively it shapes their access to desired schools. The qualitative phase shows that middle-class parents experience the NSAS as a risky new scenario. However, quantitative analysis shows the NSAS is associated with only a modest decrease in middle class-advantages. We illustrate the difficulty of transforming marketized educational systems, where previously privileged families react against equity-driven changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the ways in which students are constructed in contemporary English higher education policy. First, it contends that, contrary to assumptions made in the academic literature, students are not conceptualised as ‘empowered consumers’; instead their vulnerability is emphasised by both government and unions. Second, it identifies other dominant discourses, namely that of ‘future worker’ and ‘hard-worker’. These articulate with extant debates about both the repositioning of higher education as an economic good and the use of the ‘hard-working’ trope across other areas of social policy. Third, it shows that differences are drawn between groups of students. Contrasts are drawn, for example, between international students, juxtaposing the ‘brightest and best’ with those who are considered ‘sham’. Finally, the article argues that the figure of the ‘vulnerable’ student and ‘thwarted consumer’ feeds into broader government narratives about its policy trajectory, legitimising contemporary reforms and excusing the apparent failure of previous policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on research into the destinations and aspirations of school leavers in Australia. It investigates the relationship between the transition to university for different groups of students and their own and their parents’ and teachers’ expectations. It draws on Bourdieu, Boudon, Nussbaum and others to investigate the way young people construct their aspirations. It examines the limits of young people’s agency, which is bound by their understanding of the hidden and informal rules that govern access to different spaces within the curriculum as well as access to post-school destinations. Navigating these transitions is becoming more important and more complex with the increasing emphasis on higher level qualifications in an education market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how affirmative action in Brazilian public universities has evolved from the start of the new millennium up to recent years. After an overview of the existing policies in public universities, we explain these patterns based on an analysis of the processes internal and external to the universities. Although these policies were initially thought of as racial quotas, class-based criteria have predominated, while the racial criteria became relatively circumscribed. Within the institutions, affirmative action brought new concerns about how to support and retain low-income students, as well as a discussion about racism, although the latter remains controversial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on the sociology of Basil Bernstein to show how his detailed theories of ‘recontextualisation’ and the ‘pedagogic device’ provide useful analytic levers to examine the politics of educational change. We focus on recent policy developments that have significantly impacted Australian school education: the Program for International Student Assessment; the National Assessment Programme for Numeracy and Literacy; and the government’s public dissemination of school achievement data through the MySchool website. The analysis illustrates the ways in which the logics of economic rationalism not only have become ubiquitous in Australian education policy, but have come to recontextualise – or reshape – discourses of social and educational equity through new norms of competition, standardisation and commensurability. In doing so, the paper highlights the value of a Bernsteinian approach to understanding the vernacular character of neoliberalism in contemporary educational policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The launch in Australia of a government website that compares all schools on the basis of student performance in standardized tests illustrates the extent to which neoliberal policies have been entrenched. This paper examines the problematic nature of choosing schools within the powerful political context of neoliberalism. It illustrates how key elements of the neoliberal worldview are normalized in the day-to-day practices of schooling and how certain norms and values that characterize neoliberalism are shaped and reinforced in the education system and also in personal, family and social imaginaries. The task for educational sociology, therefore, is to problematize and ‘re-imagine’ the prevailing neoliberal imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the re-articulation of social justice as equity in schooling policy through national and global testing and data infrastructures. It focuses on the Australian National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyse the discursive reconstitution of social justice as equity in Australian and OECD policy, and analyse NAPLAN and PISA as technologies of governance that re-articulate equity as a measure of performance. These re-articulations are set against the extension of neo-social economistic rationalities to all domains of life and the topological production of new spaces of policy and power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we examine the factors contributing to gender inequality in secondary schooling in India by critically reviewing the government’s secondary education policy. Drawing on the findings of a study in rural Gujarat, we couple this analysis with an examination of the gendered dynamics that restrict girls’ ability to fully benefit from the education infrastructure and initiatives that do exist, using Connell’s Gender and Power framework. We propose that an extension of the government's current approach to educational reform, focused primarily on expanding infrastructure may aggravate the gender, class and caste asymmetries at secondary level. Fostering an environment that enables vulnerable adolescent girls to benefit from enhanced educational provisions is essential to realizing their rights and the achievement of an equitable system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Parental involvement, presented as a normative construct, is widely considered a key strategy important to educational inclusion and democratic citizenship. Yet, migrant parents continue to experience exclusion within national educational settings. This study focused on the positions and participation of fourteen immigrant and refugee parents within Icelandic schools. Findings suggest that, regardless of the kind or level of involvement practised, all the parents were affected by positional boundaries in relation to their parenting practices, whereby many struggled to become involved only to find their knowledge and experiences invalidated. Such internal exclusion occurs in sharp contrast to the inclusive and democratic citizenship ideals presented as part of Icelandic educational policy and works against parents' hopes for inclusive futures. We suggest applying Arendt's metaphor of visiting as a way to disrupt binary power dynamics and normative understandings of parent practices and to rethink the process of parental involvement and inclusion within education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst there has been increasing focus on the impact of neoliberal education policy on the curriculum covered in schools, as well as on teacher and student subjectivities, less research has been done on the possibility, or otherwise, for teachers to challenge curriculum constraints. Arguing that these curriculum constraints are not simply imposed by an external censor, this article takes up Judith Butler’s concept of the ‘domain of the sayable’ to theorise what it is possible to imagine teaching in the primary school classroom in the first place. I draw on two different ethnographic data episodes to explore the parameters of the domain of the sayable in the space of the classroom in which I taught, mapping the silences and sudden swerving away from topics that seem to be straying close to what is impossible to say or hear. This process offers new insight into how we might conceptualise teacher resistance and counter politics within the current educational policy milieu in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The question of professional trust urgently needs closer attention in relation to teacher recruitment and retention, as this research shows it has significant bearing on the symbolic capital that may help to attract, motivate, and sustain high quality teachers. In Australian schools, teachers are frequently subject to initiatives to improve their practice, address their perceived limitations, and hold them accountable for failing students, schools, or systems. We argue that teachers, in the advent of these reforms intended to improve them, come to believe they are distrusted in their professional roles. Denying teachers the sense of themselves as capable professionals risks contributing to the problems of retention that are becoming ever more urgent in the Australian context and elsewhere in the world. This article explores the impacts of discourses and policy directions on teachers' perceptions of professional trust. Drawing on case study data from two schools in the state of Victoria, Australia, we highlight the ways discourses of professional distrust emerge through policy directives that position teachers as 'the problem' in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses speeches made by UK higher education ministers, from the election of the Conservative government in May 2015 through to September 2020. The article uses disruptive innovation as a theoretical framework through which to analyse ministers' perspectives on innovation. The methodology is content analysis with a directed approach. Fourteen speeches are analysed. Innovation is shown to serve an economic agenda, enabling students to transact their higher education quickly and subsequently function without state support. Innovation is also a flexible term offering numerous solutions, from providing economic growth; to militating against the isolationism of Brexit; to providing a route out of the pandemic. Innovation is intended to enhance economic performance and to deliver efficiency, but not to fundamentally disrupt the existing organisation of the UK's higher education sector. Innovation, as articulated by Ministers for Higher Education, comprises sustaining innovation and efficiency innovation, but not disruptive innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article problematises the discourse on 'immigrant parents' against the backdrop of a broader transformation of the welfare state in migration societies such as Germany. While studies have shown that post-welfare rationalities play a prominent role in shaping perceptions of what constitutes a 'good parent', little research has been conducted on how these dynamics influence political perceptions related to diversity in school and to 'immigrant parents' in particular. To fill this gap, the article presents results from a discourse analysis of the culturalist framing of 'immigrant parents' – in interaction with assignments regarding social background and gender – within the field of education as gleaned from political documents from the post-war period. By exploring developments in political narratives around the school-parent relationship, the study highlights how current educational reforms foster processes of parents' 'exclusionary participation' in schools by emphasising and strengthening individualistic and assimilationist approaches to education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate regarding the ability of co-operativism to challenge the consequences of neoliberal policy reform in UK schooling remains concerned with the organisation and policy of co-operative academies. This article follows school research which applies a Foucauldian approach to power to explore and identify violently unequal consequences of neoliberal reform. In considering the interaction of co-operativism and neoliberalism in the experience of students at a Co-operative Academies Trust school, through semi-structured interviews with vignettes, it shows co-operativism being exploited to shape neoliberal governmentality. Whilst participants draw on their co-operative schooling to challenge notions of meritocracy and success, co-operativism is ultimately instrumental in the infliction of symbolic violence, as students self-govern towards racialised, classed and gendered ideals. Applying a Foucauldian lens and centring the experience of students are thus vital to the evaluation of co-operativism in schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the construct of 'externalisation', this article examines how and why national policy experts use international knowledge in education policymaking. To understand how national policy experts deal with external source of information and expertise, I analysed the bibliographic references in policy documents prepared for an education reform and conducted network-cued interviews with local policy experts in the United States, South Korea, and Norway. The results revealed that national policy actors' utilisation of international knowledge varies across countries in terms of frequency, function, and level of engagement. The national differences suggest that each country has internalised the act of externalisation in the national policy process, reflecting its own policymaking and reform contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancing the 'temporal turn' in the sociology of education, this article explores how a strong national discourse on the length of the school day influences pupils' articulations of their temporal experiences. The discourse of 'the long school day' emerged as part of a fierce debate on the implications of a Danish school reform passed in 2014. We use a discourse-analytical framework to examine focus group data from pupils aged 8–12 to show how the discursive context of the reform influences the pupils' articulations of their temporal experiences. The pupils' reproduction of the adult discourse of 'the long school day' conceals a diversity in temporal experiences and reduces them to being a concern about the number of clock hours spent in school. To understand the broader impact of pupils' temporal experiences of their school day, we need to rethink the linearity between clock hours and articulations of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the paradoxical nature of 'pedagogic governance', developed from Bernstein's 'pedagogic device', that is, the use of pedagogic means (including knowledge) to govern entire populations in a 'totally pedagogised society'. While knowledge structures have received extensive coverage, not much attention has been given to the tensions between/within the distribution and evaluation of curricular knowledge. Through Derrida, I elaborate on the nature of distributive rules, theorising why a weakly framed curriculum is always open to transgression, that is, the 'potential discursive gap'. However, the subversive power of knowledge is hamstrung by the evaluative rules through high-stakes public assessment and legal-juridical regulations, over which the state is attempting to wield greater influence. Constant struggles between distributive and evaluative powers entail the paradox of pedagogic (mis)governance. To illustrate my argument, this article draws on the politics of curriculum reform in postcolonial Hong Kong as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widening participation in higher education is driven by policy that is then enacted by individual practitioners. Practitioners bring with them a wealth of personal and employment experiences which shape their interpretations and enactments. Drawing on 16 in-depth semi structured interviews with practitioners across seven universities in England, a classification is developed in order to conceptualise their orientations to policy enactment. Whilst nationally focused, this study has international resonance especially in marketised higher education systems where policies are similarly enacted. The model developed within the article proposes that personal and professional experience can cause practitioners to orient towards the interests of the institution or the individuals they work with. This orientation can be in compliance with institutional policy or adopt a more transgressive stance. Through deeper theorisation of practitioner positions, we can better understand how to ensure work in this area better serves the individuals whom it is targeted at. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhancing learner agency in urban schools is seen as increasingly important in educational policy for narrowing existing attainment gaps. However, notions of learner agency are contested and require conceptual clarity. To help generate such clarity a conceptual synthesis of the field was undertaken that resulted in a mapping framework around three distinct and yet interrelated perspectives: (a) micro-individualistic self-authoring, (b) macro- and meso-level structural and cultural determination, and (c) macro-meso and micro level conflation and interconnection. Based on conceptual shortcomings in the field, we develop our own fourth approach that focuses on a relational, pragmatic transactional perspective. This suggests the young person as a separated learning agent is an incorrect unit of analysis to explain intent behind action. Instead we are argue for the holistic and integrated (Deweyan) notion of transaction that focuses on young people being subject and subjected to conditions as much as being subjects of their conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we use data from ethnography-inspired studies of eight Swedish schools. We describe and analyse how a number of neoliberal-inspired economic and political processes have (re)organised social and relational practices in local school settings. There is an increased focus on individuality in the everyday working lives of teachers, where result-centred practices, relations and professional identities have replaced notions of equality and compensatory interventions. In our study, the teachers describe an increasing focus on performativity, competition and hierarchisation. We use fairness as a lens for illuminating these changes in social relations, changes in the organisation of teachers' practices, and teachers' struggles with these changes. The purpose of this study is to analyse how the current reforms are enacted and how they affect the working lives of teachers, and thereby to contribute to the current discussion on how the last decades of political and administrative changes have affected educational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how the Scottish Government's (SG) political management of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has reinforced the economic goals of lifelong learning (LLL) under the skills for work agenda. Youth unemployment has been prioritized as the main social problem to be addressed, and most of the limited public resources for LLL have been targeted towards youth at risk of unemployment at the expense of the rest of the adult population. The article adopts a Cultural Political Economy perspective to examine LLL policy discourses contained in 12 policy documents published by the SG during the period between the Scottish National Party's arrival in power and the Independence Referendum (2007–2014). The analysis draws attention to the fact that the GFC has been used by the SG to legitimize selective cuts to the further education sector as well as a stronger labour market orientation within LLL provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics claim that outsourcing the running of 7000 state-funded schools under England's Academies Programme has caused a rapid increase in the number of pupils taught by teachers without Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). However, it is unclear whether Academies are simply more exposed to contexts associated with higher rates of teachers without QTS than schools still controlled by local government. Analysis of a newly compiled dataset reveals that, net of context, the percentage of teachers without QTS is increasing in Academies relative to non-outsourced schools and that business-style governance is associated with greater Academy divergence from non-outsourced schools. Moreover, the Academies programme is widening class-based inequality in pupils' access to qualified teachers. This research, the first nationally comprehensive assessment of the impact of Academies on school workforces, draws into question the merits of neoliberal policies which outsource public services and undermine systems of professional accreditation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequalities in health and well-being are important contemporary public health issues. This article is the first to investigate the institutional causes of inequality in well-being among youth in a comparative perspective. Data from the European Social Survey are used to analyse how educational policies moderate the association between social background and well-being. Multilevel techniques are used to investigate cross-level interactions between social background and educational policies on life satisfaction. Four indicators of inclusive educational policies are analysed: age of tracking, costs of education, enrolment rates, and second-chance opportunities in the educational system. The results show that educational policies indeed moderate the association between social background and well-being: inequalities as measured by the father's social class are smaller in countries where educational policies are more inclusive. Moreover, the analysis shows that the moderating impact of education policies is mediated by individual-level education, activity status, and income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent UK Government commissioned study found concerning levels of unemployment among computing students from disadvantaged, black and minority ethnic backgrounds. The study highlighted that work experience was a factor in increased levels of graduate employment. As such, it is vital that students have equal access to such work experience. This study considers the availability of work experience to 140 computing students at two city centre UK universities. Data analysis considered socioeconomic background and ethnicity to determine if these influenced attitudes to work experience. While students' socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnicity had little influence on their interest in work experience, patterns of success in gaining work experience reflected worrying graduate (un)employment patterns, with those from disadvantaged, black or minority ethnic backgrounds less able to secure work experience. These findings have serious implications for university and government policies promoting work experience and highlight the need for national interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on case studies of four English schools to explore some of the ways in which trade union representatives in these schools see their roles and the role of their unions in relation to how policy gets done in their schools. The article attempts two things. First, it details and describes some discomforts, oppositions and resistances that are evident in these schools in relation to some of the educational reforms and policy imperatives that are in play. Second, the article connects these empirical instances to an understanding of resistance that embraces subtlety, contingency and contradiction, as well as the elision of accommodations and resistances that can occur, in order to trouble what is sometimes taken as ‘a high level of compliance amongst teachers’ in neoliberal times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of a research project which examined the factors enabling educational upward mobility. The findings are based on 58 qualitative interviews with successful first-generation students who are scholarship holders from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. From an in-depth analysis of the individual resources, three general requirements of upward mobility are derived. Based on these it is possible to distinguish three types of educational upward mobility. These types differ in the barriers they were confronted with, the resources available to them, the structure of their educational path and the way they experience upward mobility. A spectrum becomes apparent: at one end we find upward mobility due to a family which offers relevant resources, and at the other we see mobility despite a family which impedes higher educational attainment. The conclusion describes key aspects towards the development of a theory of educational upward mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers moral agendas projected onto parents that mobilise them to supplement school literacy education with private tutoring. The theoretical frame draws on the concepts of responsibilisation as emerging market-embedded morality, ‘nudge’ social policies, edu-business and hidden privatisation in education. This framing is applied to two empirical moments: firstly, debates around the Australian government’s ‘Tutorial Voucher Initiative’ of 2004; and secondly, tutoring advertisements and items in school newsletters collected in early 2016. In the first moment, parents were somewhat reluctant to take up free supplementary tutoring; in the second, private literacy tutoring is increasingly normalised and legitimated as parents are nudged to supplement the work of the school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the case of academic work produced by Colombian scholars, to address the debate on the persistent failure of policy efforts to improve school effectiveness. Realist meta-theory plays a significant role in this research, because it provides a general framework to identify ontological problems and inconsistencies in empirical and theoretical positions informing policy debates in the country. The analysis focuses on the contributions and weaknesses of empiricism, structuralism and post-structuralism in the work of Colombian scholars, and concludes by arguing for the need to deploy research methodologies that study stratified emergent social processes behind observable educational outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The professionalisation of teaching in Australia is a policy shift that transpires within broader policy dynamics which are increasingly influenced by neoliberal logics. In this article we examine teacher responsibility through analysis of a new measure introduced in Victoria. This requires teachers to prove professional development hours in the area of teaching students with special needs in order to maintain their professional registration. Through our analysis of this policy move we draw out some tensions that emerge in relation to teacher responsibility, accountability and autonomy to reveal that (often hidden) neoliberal governing logics can operate to shift teachers’ focus from care of the student towards care of the (professional) self. With the theoretical support of Nel Noddings’ ‘ethic of care’, we argue that teacher responsibility to care can be torn between market-based regulations and the care of the student, paradoxically de-professionalising teachers’ work in the act of attempting to professionalise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

School governing bodies in England have considerable powers and duties, and their formal role positions them as decision-makers. This article draws on qualitative research in the governing bodies of four maintained schools. Using deliberative democracy as a sensitising concept, the article considers some processes by which decisions are made (or not made) in governing bodies. Without claiming that governors never make decisions, it explores constraints and limitations on their ability to do so. Governors exhibit a paradoxical combination of busy-ness and passivity. On the one hand, governing bodies are constituted and structured around activity and technically decisions were made. On the other, decisions could rarely be attributed to active choices by governors. Rather, their more passive agreement with actions and positions was presented as almost unavoidable ‘common sense’, either due to the national policy context or the headteacher’s presentation of the available options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article gives an account of the use of knowledges from emerging scientific fields in education and youth policy making under the Coalition government (2010–15) in the UK. We identify a common process of ‘translation’ and offer three illustrations of policy-making in the UK that utilise diverse knowledges produced in academic fields (neuroscience, network theory and well-being). This production of ‘new knowledges’ in policy contexts allows for the identification of sites of policy intervention. This process of translation underlies a series of diverse revisions of the rational subject of policy. Collectively, these revisions amount to a change in policy-making and the emergence of a different subject of neoliberal policy. This subject is not an excluded alterity to an included rational subject of neoliberalism, but a ‘plastic subject’ characterised by its multiplicity. The plastic subject does not contradict the rational subject as central to neoliberal policy-making, but diversifies it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article first offers a survey of what has become an area of increasing interest in higher education: the rise of the so-called ‘student-consumer’. This has been linked in part to the marketisation of higher education and the increased personal financial contributions individual students make towards their higher education. Drawing upon a qualitative study with students across seven different UK higher education institutions, the article shows that while there is evidence of growing identification with a consumer-orientated approach, this does not fundamentally capture their perspectives and relationships to higher education. The article shows the degree of variability in attitude and approaches towards consumerism of higher education and how students still perceive higher education in ways that do not conform to the ideal student-consumer approach. The implications for university relations and how policy-makers and institutions themselves approach the issue are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In his liquid-turn writings, Zygmunt Bauman has come to identify liquid modernity as a period of interregnum. Education has a central role to play within the contemporary interregnum by opening up a new public sphere for dialogue. However, the processes of liquefaction manifest themselves in conditions that severely limit a person’s ability to exercise their human agency. Bauman provides no indication of how the educators can escape the processes that limit agency, nor does he explain how educators can combat the seductive consumerism that students need to overcome before they can engage in a reconstruction of the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]