Search

This paper examines New Right argument on educational provision, including the establishing of a voucher scheme and the introduction of elements of a 'free market' into public sector education. The paper examines the right-wing allegation that educationalists have 'captured' the school curriculum and the argument on the need for 'consumer capture' of education. It discusses the New right tactic of privatization by stealth, and the argument that gradualism provides the most effective means of securing educational reform. The paper discusses arguments put forward by the right on the idea of a General Teaching Council (GTC) and argument on the need for the development of a teacher labour market freed from national salary scales. It goes on to examine Mary Warnock's proposals for a GTC and her views of teacher education. The paper examines the likely effects of the implementation of right-wings education policy, concluding that the 1988 Education Reform Act will prepare the ground for the privatization of education and the development of a teacher labour market of the kind proposed by the New Right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although not fully established, the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) initiative is already being presented by both government and industry as offering students, teachers and school extensive freedom and autonomy in their day-to-day work. However, this paper argues that the official discursive construction of the NGfL in this way, as a ‘panacea’ to educational problems, obscures vital issues of power and control that may only become apparent once the initiative is fully integrated at the classroom level. Drawing initially on the work of Foucault, and then Poster’s more recent conception of the electronic ‘SuperPanopticon’, this paper re-examines the basis of the NGfL and its role in extending and reinforcing existing power configurations in education. The paper concludes by considering directions for future research into the NGfL, and educational use of the Internet in the light of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper it will be argued that we are entering a 'third wave' in the socio-historical development of British education and that similar trends are also evident in the USA, Australia and, New Zealand. The 'first wave' can be characterised by the rise of mass schooling for the working classes in the late nineteenth century. The 'second wave' involved a shift from the provision of education based upon what Dewey called the "feudal dogma of social predestination" to one organised on the basis of individual merit and achievement. What is distinct about the 'third wave' is the move towards a system whereby the education a child receives must conform to the wealth and wishes of parents rather than the abilities and efforts of pupils. In other words, we have witnessed a shift away from the 'ideology of meritocracy' to what I will call the 'ideology of parentocracy'. This paper will consider the evidence to support this conclusion and examine its sociological significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The student population across world is increasingly reflective of diverse cultures, religions and ethnicities. This rich diversity may become a challenge for educational leaders, teachers, and policy-makers in the absence of an understanding of diverse sources of knowledge people draw on for directing their beliefs and daily practices. This paper explores the multi-ethnic context in Britain with a focus on Muslim students in English secondary schools, and argues for drawing on diverse ethnic knowledge sources to inform and enrich approaches towards managing diversity. It discusses the concept of Adab derived from Muslim ethics and philosophy, and debates possible contributions of such conceptual adaptations towards improving educational engagement and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate surrounding educational research in the UK has been fuelled by four recent government-funded publications that have thrown doubt on the validity, relevance and applicability of educational research. In this paper, the author offers a critique of these publications and questions their privileged role in informing government policy. She challenges the current trend towards instrumentalism in funded educational research, and explores the ways in which theories, rather than evidence, provide an essential infrastructure to teachers' day-to-day thinking and practice. Finally, she compares the restrictive effect of a narrow focus on 'what works' with the opportunities offered by postmodernism for broadening the scope, purpose and interpretation of the research of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the experiences of British parents who have children identified with ‘special education needs’ within mainstream education. Expectations of mainstream education can have a negative affect on parents when a child is unable to maintain his or her education within a mainstream school. In England and Wales, ‘inclusion’ within mainstream schools is implemented by the current government and promoted as anti‐exclusionary. However, current research indicates that actual ‘inclusion’ (the child experiencing inclusion as well as being placed in a mainstream environment) is not necessarily occurring in practice. As it stands, the conflict is between desires to embrace difference based on a philosophy of ‘equal rights’ (‘inclusive’ education) and prioritising educational performance, structuring it in such a way that it leaves little room for difference and creativity due to the highly structured testing and examination culture. Qualitative analysis of parents who have children identified with special educational needs indicate that they have hopes and expectations for their children. These hopes and expectations are challenged recurrently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines recent empirical work on the lived experience of learners in post‐compulsory education. The starting point is a brief examination of the socio‐economic context of the sector. Despite the sophistication of analyses of learning cultures, a more radical approach is needed. Failure to do so renders these analyses amenable to appropriation by ‘new labour’ modernisers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education policies introduced in the past two decades necessitated the adoption of a managerialist discourse in the restructuring, running and inspection of schools. In this paper, we critically review the nature of such discourse and outline the historical conditions that contributed to the establishment of OFSTED. Having set the scene, we report on the experiential impact of managerialist discourse on the lives of primary school teachers in the period running up to, including, and in the year following OFSTED inspections. Exploring the accounts of teachers, we draw attention to the effects of intensified control on the overall well being of teachers and, by implication, the quality of classroom experience for children. Foucault's notions of the 'disciplinary regime' and 'normalizing judgement' prove useful in framing teachers' descriptions of themselves feeling professionally compromised, intimidated and stressed by the inspection process. Despite the evident intensity of the OFSTED experience, teachers in our study uniformly indicate that, 1 year after inspection, it has had no lasting impact on what they do in the classroom. If OFSTED has questionable direct influence on teaching practice outside nominal compliance with its formal procedures in the run-up to and during the inspection visit, we are left to question what purpose it actually serves. Our conclusion is that, just as teachers 'stage manage' a performance for the visiting inspectorate, the whole OFSTED apparatus itself is little more than a grand political cipher created and maintained to satisfy the imagined scrutinising gaze of a wider public. In short, OFSTED is stage-managed public 'accountability'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors' opinion on the sociology and politics of the curriculum in Great Britain. Indeed, despite its early promise of transcending some of the conventional dichotomies between theoretical and empirical work and between educational theory and practice, British sociology of education of the 1970s was characterised by a progressive separation of theoretical and empirical analyses and by an increasing marginalisation of issues of curriculum policy and practice. American sociology of the curriculum can be seen to have been affected by three main tendencies that distinguish it from most recent British work in this field. Apple's edited collection is centrally concerned to show the potential complementarity of often disparate traditions of economic and cultural theorising. Thus, in a discussion of high school history textbooks, Anyon analyses the ideological import of their content and absences and tries to relate both the textual messages and their mode of production to the interests of capital. For the analysis of content, Wexler recommends a critical semiotics of school texts which avoids idealism by relating internal structures and content to external conditions. The neo-Marxist analysis of the hidden curriculum did, indeed, seem at one stage to have adopted a strangely monolithic view of the school as a conservative force, oddly reminiscent of the functionalist tradition that it had sought to counter.

This article attempts to suggest alternatives to the modes of conceptualization of education and schooling which have predominated in contemporary sociological theories of education and have influenced the Left in Great Britain. In the theoretical debate in sociology of education during the 1970s, it is clear that radical rather than Marxist theory had more appeal among those who regarded themselves as Left-radicals and Left-libertarians working in the sphere of education either as teachers or in some other related capacity. It is precisely in the area of educational policy and the means of affecting it, that a major distinction is to be found between the traditional sociology of education and its radical challenge. The work of the traditional sociologists of education, and in particular their exposition of the inequalities in educational opportunity and achievement, provided much of the argument for the reform of educational provision in the parliamentary struggle and the struggle at the level of local government. The future of democratic socialism lies not in dogma and the rhetoric of empty slogans but in informed, democratic political debate. The role of education in the struggle for democracy and democratic socialism is to contribute to the development of conditions of existence of informed, democratic political debate.

Occupational therapy pre-registration education stands at the intersection of the fields of health and social care and higher education. UK Government agendas in both fields have seen an increase in the number of students entering with non-traditional academic backgrounds, a group noted to experience particular challenges in negotiating the transition to, and persisting and succeeding within, higher education. Drawing on data from an ongoing longitudinal case study, a Bourdieuian lens is applied to exploring the early educational experiences of a group of these students during their first year of study and highlights a number of key issues, including the high-value status of linguistic capital and its relationship to understanding the rules governing practices within the learning environment, the processes via which students manage to adapt to or interestingly, to resist, the dominant culture of the field, and some of the barriers to finding a foothold and legitimate position within the new field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education Law in Great Britain has evolved into a legitimate category of academic law and legal practice. No longer simply an aspect of public, welfare or family law, it already has its own specialist practitioners, legal associations, case reports and journals. Much of the existing academic work focuses on the rights and responsibilities of parents, schools, governors and local educational authorities. More critical approaches have explored the theoretical, political and social conflicts underlying the changing roles of local education authorities and parents, and identified the tensions between policies that emphasize both enhanced consumerism and central regulation. While this article draws on much of this work, it differs radically in that it is not concerned primarily with the structure of education, its content or the competing rights and responsibilities within in. This article focuses in particular, on how education law responds to and defines appropriate pupil behavior. Section 9 of the Education Act of 1997 introduced a category, that of children with behavioral difficulties. This term is not defined by statute, but the provisions indicate that it includes excluded children and children with special educational needs and it is these educational and legal responses that are the central focus of this article.

In Britain, an emerging slogan in the Labour government's educational policy is 'standards, not structures'. With it may come a discursive shift in the management of the school Just as educational structures have been marketized, so now there are some signs that school management is itself becoming marketized, thereby revealing an emergent 'common marketing' within the field of education. Although the signs are few within education, within the broader realm of management theory, the indications are stronger. In exploring this, the argument draws upon two concepts from the academic literature on marketing: relationship marketing; and internal marketing. What is common to both modes of marketing is the instrumentalization of the expressive, or the rationalization of the emotions for performative purposes. In relation to these concepts, brief reference is made to recent policy initiatives in the training of headteachers in Britain. In theorizing this, the relevance of Mestrovic's theory of 'postemotional society' is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Article considers the changing nature of political relationships between educational management agencies in England ad Wales during the 1940s and 1980s, within the areas of scientific, technical and vocational education and training, and within the school system. It suggests that the general agreement among writers that there has been a marked shift towards the centralization of power masks a number of important problems concerning the processes underlying this development. In particular, the assumptions by many researchers that increased government control was the consequence of a cumulative process generated by actions intended to achieve this outcome seems to be misconceived. The occasions of greater central control should be seen more as 'drifts towards centralization that were both transformative and the outcome of developments in which unintended consequences played a significant part. The dynamic relationships between structure and agency which underlie such processes can be illuminated through the development of the 'structuring' model currently being constructed by sociologist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of the National Advisory Council on Education in Industry and Commerce in 1948 Was an example of corporatist trends in British Technical education Inspired by offcials of the Central Government's education department to regulate the orderly development of higher technical education, NACEIC marked a Joint of interest representation where interests were recognised, legitimated and participated in the development and exercise of enhanced state powers Yet officials were so sensitive to the strength of existing pluralist forms of representation that only rudimentary 'quasi- corporatist' institutions emerged Using a case study of Official Records to show officials making decisions offers evidence of the significance of both economic developments and political concerns in corporatist developments It confirms the basic weakness of corporatist developments in Britain in the lack of lower level corporate organisation, particularly among industrial employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]