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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]

This paper examines whether women and men publish journal articles at a level comparable with their representation within the social sciences. The paper also explores sex differences in patterns of single authorship and co-authorship. To do so, demographic data of the UK social sciences is compared with a sample of UK-authored journal articles. The findings of the study show that, overall, female academics contribute to a lower proportion of journal articles than the proportion of academic staff that they constitute. However, within certain disciplines (social policy and psychology) women publish articles at a level comparable with the proportion of the discipline that they constitute. These findings, it is argued, can be helpfully understood as both cause and consequence of the gendered academy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is about mothering an intellectually disabled child identified with special educational needs. It specifically looks at the parent partnership rhetoric that has dominated UK government policy and directives for nearly three decades and yet research suggests parents and more often mothers have to battle to be recognised as legitimate experts. This paper engages with sociological analysis as it highlights via qualitative narratives that mothers are weighed down by the sheer number of professionals involved in their day-to-day life. Moreover, mothers whose children are not identified in the early years are often blamed in the first instance for playing a part in their child's difficult behaviour. This research ultimately suggests that partnership work is important and necessary for practice within health, education and social work professions, not least of all because the emotional roller-coaster that mothers experience during the assessment and statementing process is disabling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary art is a popular feature of the cultural landscape in the United Kingdom, and recent research has recommended introducing its practices into state education. Yet these practices are still rare in schools, and this paper argues that the many difficulties that arise from attempts to introduce them are indicative of their socially contingent character, which threatens to disrupt the ideological underpinnings of orthodox school practices. The school art projects 'Room 13' and 'Teaching through contemporary art' are used as prominent examples of contemporary art practices that support a relatively high degree of learner autonomy within state education, yet are situated outside of government initiatives. Through these projects the paper explores the dilemmas that the participants face, which include questions of learner agency, choice and creative risk, and the effects of regulatory assessment systems upon collaboration, experiment, play and ephemeral learning outcomes. The paper concludes by examining the possibilities of encouraging these more 'risky' contemporary practices in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of school social class composition on pupil learner identities in British primary schools. In the current British education system, high-stakes testing has a pervasive effect on the pedagogical relationship between teachers and pupils. The data in this paper, from ethnographic research in a working-class school and a middle-class school, indicate that the effect of the 'testing culture' is much greater in the working-class school. Using Bernsteinian theory and the concept of the 'ideal pupil', it is shown that these pupils' learner identities are more passive and dominated by issues of discipline and behaviour rather than academic performance, in contrast to those in the middle-class school. While this study includes only two schools, it indicates a potentially significant issue for neo-liberal education policy where education is marketised and characterised by high-stakes testing, and schools are polarised in terms of social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the fascist vision for education in 1930s Britain through the presentation of extracts from official publications of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), as well as from the writings of Party members. The paper presents a socio-historical study of British adherents to fascism and provides an account of their thinking in relation to education and schooling, exposing a milieu of ideologues, Party functionaries and serving teachers who were animated by their political commitment. Following a brief outline of the early years of British fascism, there is an account of some key members and their educational ideas, followed by a discussion of the BUF's educational policies and of its approach to internal education and training. The orientation of the BUF and its membership to education, and the Party's formulated policies in this field present a modernist vision that was calculated to have particular appeal to educational professionals. There is a consideration, through memoirs, of the experiences of two BUF members who were teachers. The paper reveals a relatively hidden episode in the social history of British educational politics; one that contained paradoxes of intent and outcome, and of means and ends, when ostensibly progressive and socially elevating concepts were employed in ways that had an ultimately destructive impact on individuals, both personally and professionally, as well as on whole societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the class distribution of young people, aged 16-17 years, in colleges of further education (FE) using data from the Youth Cohort Study. It finds that, contrary to popular perceptions of FE colleges as being for 'other people's children', middle-class students as well as working-class students are well represented. However, this does not imply that FE colleges are institutions of choice; middle-class representation is often related to lower achievement and, for low-achieving working-class students, leaving education entirely is more likely than entry to FE. These findings are explored using notions of habitus and field. Their relationship with studies of the education of middle-class children is also discussed, and the paper suggests that research on class in FE colleges must come to terms with middle-class presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper argues that university quality assurance (QA) promotes a masculinist culture leading to systemic discrimination against female academics. The analysis relates to the question of what it is about academic life that results in persistent gender inequality. Based on an ethnographically informed comparative study, textual/discourse analysis of 30 interviewee transcripts reveals disguised messages about QA. The interpretation argued draws on a theoretical scrutiny of the covert power of a masculinist QA movement to disproportionately disadvantage female academics. The paper suggests that this has been made possible by a QA presentation discourse harnessed by male academics to manage identities. It argues that dominant definitions of the 'competent academic' that discriminate against females are normalised and cemented within a societal conscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the conceptual limitations of the bully discourses that ground UK anti-bullying policy frameworks and psychological research literatures on school bullying, suggesting they largely ignore gender, (hetero)sexuality and the social, cultural and subjective dynamics of conflict and aggression among teen-aged girls. To explore the limitations of bully discourses in practice, the paper draws on a pilot, interview-based study of girls' experiences of aggression and bullying, illustrating how friendships and conflicts among the girls are thoroughly heterosexualized, en-cultured and classed. Drawing on girls and parent interview narratives, I also trace some of the effects of bully discourses set in motion in schools to intervene into conflicts among girls. I suggest these practices miss the complexity of the dynamics at play among girls and also neglect the power relations of parenting, ethnicity, class and school choice, which can inform how, why and when bullying discourses are mobilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department for Education and Skills currently shows a high regard for the potential of technology transforming the British education system. Government White papers demonstrate e‐learning‐based unification strategies that reinforce the message that introducing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will raise standards in schools. This paper examines the effect of these developments on teachers and pupils, and questions the government’s motivation for change. The introduction of ICT has not been complemented by increased levels of effective professional development for teaching staff in the pedagogy of ICT across the curriculum and may have merely served to reinforce the generational digital divide. In attempting to enchant the pupils, the government may have alienated the teachers. This paper suggests that the Department for Education and Skills should place more emphasis on developing strategies and providing funding for solutions to gaps in the professional development of teachers in their pedagogical understanding of ICT across the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the changing nature of professional practice in English further education. At a time when neo–liberal reform has significantly impacted on this under–researched and over–market–tested sector, little is known about who its practitioners are and how they construct meaning in their work. Sociological interest in the field has tended to focus on further education practitioners as either the subjects of market and managerial reform or as creative agents operating within the contradictions of audit and inspection cultures. In challenging such dualism, which is reflective of wider sociological thinking, the paper examines the ways in which agency and structure combine to produce a more transformative conception of the further education professional. The approach contrasts with a prevailing policy discourse that seeks to re–professionalise and modernise further education practice without interrogating either the terms of its professionalism or the neo–liberal practices in which it resides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines claims that recent reforms to UK education have led to significant organisational changes in primary school and higher education. It also examines two main theoretical explanations for these, namely post-Fordism and New Managerialism. Examples of changes in both schools and universities, including flexibility and teamwork, are explored. Up to the mid-1980s, publicly funded educational organisations did display bureaucratic features, including rules, staff hierarchies and complex procedures. However, professionals employed in these organisations retained discretion and autonomy in their work. Since then, the introduction of an audit culture and a greater emphasis on management and regulation of the work of teachers and academics has decreased discretion and autonomy. This paper suggests that theories of New Managerialism offer a more satisfactory explanation of the changes explored than post-Fordism, which has more often been used as a normative model of what contemporary organisations should look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on research in three English Midlands local education authorities to analyse the changing role of the teacher trade union representative in schools. It focuses on representatives of the largest teachers' union in England and Wales--the National Union of Teachers. The paper draws on mainstream industrial relations literature, and more recent research into school sector industrial relations, to assess how the role of the union representative is changing in an era of autonomous schools. The research indicates that new issues are emerging in schools, and these have the potential to transform the role of the representative. Where representatives can respond to the emergence of these new issues there is the prospect of a new, more participative trade union culture developing in schools. However, it is far from certain that school union representatives will want to assume these increased responsibilities, and this poses a major challenge for the development of teacher trade unionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which British Chinese pupils are positioned and represented within the popular/dominant discourse of teachers working in London schools. Drawing on individual interviews from a study conducted with 30 teachers, 80 British Chinese pupils and 30Chinese parents, we explore some of the racialised, gendered and classed assumptions upon which dominant discourses around British Chinese boys and girls are based. Consideration is given, for example, to teachers' dichotomous constructions of British Chinese masculinity, in which British Chinese boys were regarded as 'naturally' 'good' and 'not laddish', compared with a minority of 'bad' British Chinese boys, whose laddishness was attributed to membership of a multiethnic peer group. We also explore teachers' constructions of British Chinese femininity, which centred around remarkably homogenised representations of British Chinese girls as 'passive' and quiet, 'repressed', hard-working pupils. The paper discusses a range of alternative readings that challenge popular monolithic and homogenising accounts of British Chinese masculinity and femininity in order to open up more critical ways of representing and engaging with British Chinese educational 'achievement'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to develop a more sophisticated notion of multiculturalism in Britain. It starts by examining the philosophical basis of the Crick Report on citizenship education to resolve the theoretical tension between liberal and multicultural approaches to the subject. To achieve this resolution, it compares the Crick Report to the Parekh Report on the Future of Multi Ethnic Britain, published on 11 th October 2000. The Parekh report is then used to critique the Crick report and re-theorise the practical imperatives of multicultural citizenship education. I claim that the Crick report, typical of liberal analyses, is suspicious of departure from the presumption of a unified social structure, and represents citizenship education as the imposition of a uniform standard applied to all groups and peoples. On this basis it is claimed that, although the Crick Report's conception of citizenship fails to adequately take account of cultural difference, it need not do so, as there is room within liberal approaches to citizenship education for a recognition of difference. The paper explains how such a resolution can be effected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enduring inequities experienced by African-Caribbean students in UK schools has been well documented. This paper aims to better understand how these inequities have come to be so enduring. Through detailed analyses of data generated through a school ethnography, this paper demonstrates the processes through which African-Caribbean students are identified as undesirable, or even intolerable, learners. The paper builds on the insights offered by earlier school ethnographies while deploying and developing a new theoretica1 framework. This framework suggests that the discursive practices of students and teachers contribute to the performative constitution of intelligible selves and others. Drawing on this framework, the paper demonstrates how African-Caribbean race and sub-cultural identities, and further intersecting biographical identities including gender and sexuality, are deployed within organisational discourse as evidence of these students' undesirable learner identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of the computer as an inherently 'educational' machine has been a powerful influence on both the conceptualisation and consumption of information technology in the UK over the past 20 years. Most recently, a belief in the teaching and learning capabilities of the computer underpinned much of New Labour's policy agenda during their first term of office, most notably in the form of the #1.6 billion 'National Grid for Learning' initiative. Yet all too often, the high-profile social shaping of computing as 'educational' has been more grounded in rhetoric than in reality, with the 'hype' of the educational computer noticeably at odds with the actual impact of computing technologies in schools and at home. From this background, the present paper explores how the computer became to be so strongly 'configured' as educational during its integration into mainstream British society and culture. In so doing, the paper examines the various actors and routes of transmitting information that were involved in the construction of the computer as an educational machine and, as a result, goes on to consider the underlying motivations behind this process. In asking these questions, the paper focuses on the period 1979-89 as marking the birth of mainstream educational computing in the UK, and therefore identifies and discusses the prevailing influences of the incumbent Conservative government, the burgeoning home computer industry as well as the print and broadcast media as powerful actors in the formative discursive shaping of 'educational' computing. Having mapped out these shaping forces, the paper concludes by considering the implications of the on-going trend towards the educational mythologising of information technology in British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite UK government initiatives aimed to address social exclusion, local experience of those who have the poorest access to economic and social resources is that they continue to be marginalised from education and other mainstream institutions, and excluded from a voice in designing remedial initiatives. This paper draws on the experiences of particularly women and children in a study undertaken with non-English-speaking and other culturally excluded groups in two inner-city areas. It aims to explore both common and discrete experiences of social exclusion in relation to mainstream institutions; and to locate these within a frame of some current social and education policy interventions. The paper contributes to a growing literature that seeks to examine the local effects of new policy initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academic staff in universities continue to be male dominated, particularly at the higher levels, despite the introduction by many of equal opportunities (EO) policies. This paper draws on data from a qualitative research study undertaken in an old (pre-1992) UK university. The main aim of the study was to measure the impact of gender issues on the university campus, an important part of which was the issue of the effectiveness of its EO policies. Using a theoretical lens of hegemony, this paper develops an account of the adapting responses in the academy to the perceived demands of EO. It attempts to categorise these responses into four types: three different types of accommodation, and one of more overt resistance. It is not claimed that these are mutually exclusive, as any one academic may use different responses at different times, but it is proposed that they go some way to explaining the relative ineffectiveness of EO policies in an academic setting, and the maintenance of male dominance. [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]

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]

Post-16 providers in the UK now offer a wide range of courses and training in order to respond to the expanded, diversified and 'non-traditional' post-16 market. School leavers are invited to 'choose' from a range of courses and pathways which are being provided in a variety of post-16 educational institutions. These providing institutions are in competition with one another and 'need' the students as their funds are contingent upon successful recruitment (and retention). As a result, many post-16 providers are turning to aspects of marketing in order to publicise their courses and maintain or increase their share of the market. This paper examines two major tactics in the promotion and marketing of post-16 provision--brochures and open days--in relation to issues such as access, targeting, response to 'difference' in the client group/market segment and 'professionalism' of approach. The paper argues that market tactics do semiotic 'work' as class-taste markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the gender gap at GCSE in eight contrasting English secondary schools, and discusses the reality and rhetoric of classroom interactions, focusing on the views of teaching staff, the perspectives of Year 11 students, and observations of teacher--student, interactions in the classroom. In an earlier paper (British Journal of Sociology of Education, 17 (3)), the authors examined the extent to which there was less positive teacher-support for the learning of boys than for the learning of girls, and this issue is reviewed in differing school contexts. Research in this broader context suggests that most teachers believe that they give equal treatment to girls and to boys, particularly in support of their learning, but focus group interviews with students and classroom observation suggest that this is rarely achieved; in most schools, boys appear to dominate certain classroom interactions, while girls participate more in teacher--student interactions which support learning. If the underachievement of some boys is to be addressed successfully, these patterns of interaction need to be challenged, to enable boys to begin to develop the very learning strategies which many girls employ effectively to enable them to learn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores, through the life histories of a group of first and second generation immigrant pupils from the 'Asian' and 'African' diasporas, the complex ways in which 'black' identities have evolved in British society over the past two decades. The phrase 'black identities' is used here not as a racially descriptive term but rather as a signifier of ethnic 'otherness'; to make distinct (from white society) and, at the same time, to unify the experiences of disparate groups of ethnic minority groups as marginals within metropolitan societies. Charting the life histories of a group of students in an inner-city comprehensive school in their own collective and individual voices, the paper provides a glimpse of their perceptions of their status as citizens, their views on cultural identity, and their dreams, aspirations, hopes and desires as young people growing up in contemporary British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contract researchers constitute an expanding occupational group in UK higher education and contribute significantly to national research output Despite recent concern and debates over their marginal status and inferior conditions of employment, little is known about the actual complexities of contract researchers' working lives. Drawing upon qualitative interviews, an attempt is made to remedy this lacuna, by portraying certain kinds of occupational knowledge and practices utilised by social science contract researchers. The paper focuses on the understandings and strategies which are developed and refined as researchers attempt to sustain employment in a highly insecure realm. What is portrayed is not the technical expertise required for this kind of research, but rather the knowledge, acumen and action which are more informal, tacit and indeterminate. This paper examines the cognitive and interactional processes which need to be developed and combined with technical expertise, if employment is to be maintained in such a competitive and insecure field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the relationships between the understanding of gender equity and gender issues in education held by academic staff in an institute of higher education, and their views on the importance of incorporating gender into the curriculum. The paper discusses findings pertaining to how academics approach gender issues in their teaching in their relationships with students and with other members of staff In so doing the question is raised--what messages are trainee teachers receiving about gender issues? The findings also discuss some of the pedagogical implications arising from the absence of theoretical perspectives or orientations in relation to gender in preservice teacher education. [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]

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]

The UK is typical of many industrialised countries at the present time in searching for new kinds of assessment procedure which will be appropriate on the one hand to the goals of the more vocational curricula currently being developed and, on the other, be relevant to the whole range of pupil needs and achievement. The paper explores the impetus behind such changes and argues that the policies so generated embody a number of political and educational contradictions. Using recent developments in England and Scotland as a case study, the paper argues that, despite their egalitarian potential in educational terms, the underlying political climate of cost-efficiency and laissez-faire individualism which in turn inhibits any substantial change in traditional educational values is likely to result in reinforced, rather than reduced social divisions being associated with such initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In this paper we offer a unique contribution to understandings of schooling as a site for the production of social class difference. We bring together the rich body of work that has been conducted on middle-class educational identities, with explorations of the centrality of the feminine in representations of class difference from the field of critical girlhood studies. This is done in order to explore how young femininities mediate the representation of class difference in the environment of the private girls’ school. Drawing from our two research studies, located in private girls’ schools in Australia and the United Kingdom, we argue that the notion of ‘disgust’, commonly used in recent engagements around class, has only limited purchase in understanding the representation of class difference in these schools. It is the inconsistencies and complexities in how class and class relations are produced that we wish to illuminate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the layered transitional experiences of a semi-professional athlete named Jack (a pseudonym) between the fields of professional sport and further and higher education. Our analysis is framed by the quadripartite framework of structuration and focuses on Jack’s ‘in-situ’ practices at his college and university in order to illustrate how these can operate to reproduce, transform, and challenge the habitual discourses and rituals that circulate within these institutions by generating forms of corporeal empowerment for young athletes who have valued conjunctural knowledge. The findings highlight the fragility of the transition process and raise questions regarding how the experiences of young people are shaped by the relationships between employment and post-16 education. Jack’s experiences have implications for both policy and practice within further education and higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper problematizes dominant discourses of social mobility. It begins by discussing social mobility from a philosophical perspective before examining current policies on social mobility in the United Kingdom, drawing on data from both recent mobility studies and the contemporary labour market. I then broaden out the discussion by exploring subjective aspects of social mobility, juxtaposing my own personal history with Jackson and Marsden’s classic study ‘Education and the Working Class’ in order to exemplify the complexities of mobility journeys. Finally, I argue for better ways of achieving a socially just society, ones that, echoing Tawney, make a case for less distance and greater parity between social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the role of curricular content on social mobility, an issue largely neglected by social mobility studies. Using data from the National Child Development Study we investigate the extent to which secondary school curricula account for social class differences in the chances of entering into the service class and avoiding a low-skilled occupation. The results show that curriculum matters in the acquisition of different social classes of destination but it matters more for children from advantaged social backgrounds than for children from lower classes of origin. This is because of their higher propensity to choose subjects such as languages, English, mathematics and science, which were found to be highly valued in the labour market. Moreover, net of the effect of origin class and individual ability, all or most of the advantage associated with attendance at selective schools is accounted for by the curriculum studied there. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]