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Widening participation in England has been framed around two primary needs; raising attainment and raising aspiration. Whilst aspiration is complex, policy definitions often frame it in narrow economic terms and see access to higher education as primarily about developing a workforce, the underlying logic being that to improve social mobility that individuals need to "aim higher". Pre-entry work with under-represented groups therefore has tended to adopt a deficit of aspiration approach. There has been extensive critique of the deficit model yet "raising aspirations" still endures in both national and institutional policy. Drawing on sixteen semi-structured interviews with widening participation practitioners in England, this paper considers the alignment between policy and practice. It explores the more complex and nuanced view of aspiration held by practitioners and how this more closely aligns with the theory of possible selves. This paper argues that there are two key issues; a disjuncture between policy and practice and a gap in understanding of the structural issues associated with aspiration. The paper argues that the solution involves a radical rethink of policy that returns to a focus on helping individuals to realise their own individual aspirations and more clearly acknowledges the structural constraints shaping the formation, vocalisation and realisation of aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a problem that greatly complicates the implementation of dialogic educational approaches in schools: the dilemma between driving children's talk towards normatively accepted conceptions and, at the same time, avoiding the introduction of these normative conceptions into the dialogue by the teacher. I argue that this dilemma is in fact the expression of an unarticulated theoretical tension between teleology and dialogicity in Vygotsky's theory, which is the foundation, together with Bakhtin's work, for many dialogic approaches to education. This paper describes this tension in Vygotsky's theory and presents a type of talk that enables the articulation of teleology and dialogicity at a practical level: conceptually driven inquiry. In this type of talk, children form meaning spontaneously in conditions of dialogicity, but under the influence of a higher-generality meaning that the child simultaneously forms non-spontaneously – through intellectual imitation. Although not itself the telos, this higher-generality meaning provides teleological direction to children's dialogic inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the fracturing of civic and moral virtue within curricular policies pertaining to Citizenship in England since the late 1990s. A longstanding aim of education and schooling, the teaching of citizenship gained a more secure base in the English curriculum with the introduction of Citizenship as a statutory subject for 11–16 years olds from 2002, which owed a great deal to the Report of the Advisory Group on Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (Crick Report). The report drew intimate connections between civic virtue, moral virtue, and personal character. These connections have become seriously fractured over the years since the Crick Report. In charting this fracturing, the paper will examine how the character-influenced direction taken in the early/mid-2000s was replaced by, at first, a more general emphasis on British Values before morphing into a more specific, though no less problematic, concentration on Fundamental British Values. While character education has gained significant policy attention in England over the last six years, the civic dimensions have been at best underplayed, with little connection to education for citizenship. It is argued that without greater clarity and consistency about how the moral – including moral virtues – intersects with the civic in contemporary Britain, official curricular policy (whether for Citizenship education, character education or more generally) will restrict rather than encourage the education of young citizens who are informed, wise, responsible and active participants in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academic literature pertaining to the discipline of international education acknowledges that the International Baccalaureate (IB) programme is expanding globally. Given the growing influence of the IB on international schooling, our study seeks to map the field of IB research drawing on a systematic review of 295 documents published from January 1967 through August 2018. Specifically, we conducted a bibliographic coupling analysis on the identified sample of IB-related literature. The results allowed us to unveil the most influential articles, academic outlets, and scholars along with some rankings, networks of collaborators, and bundles of contributions to the specialised literature. Our review uncovered three main research clusters that have formed in the IB field, including "growing the IB brand", "student success for the IB", and "the international identity of the IB". This bibliographic analysis is important for both offering insight into the intellectual structure of the field and assisting with the identification of new research directions within the IB domain that warrant further scholarly consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how access to the academic curriculum creates patterns of inequality in Australian schools. Examining students' access to the academic curriculum gives an indication of how schooling is structured to support students in pursuing higher education opportunities. To date, little research attention has been given to the opportunities schools offer students to access the academic curriculum in order to enter university. Using administrative data on students and schools, we find that there are fewer average curriculum subjects, and less complexity in the subjects offered, in schools with low levels of socio-educational advantage. We argue that curriculum differentiation across schools is a systemic constraint that students in schools with higher levels of socio-educational disadvantage face in progressing to university because these schools are less able to provide students with access to core academic curriculum subjects in the final year of secondary school. Previous research has highlighted the social differences reflected in both educational access and outcomes due to the marketisation of schools and policies of school choice. Our findings indeed demonstrate that there are relationships between access to the academic curriculum, school socio-educational advantage and the social composition of schools, and these factors have important educational policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Singapore has been consistently ranked in international assessments as one of the world's top education systems, it has a higher percentage of low-performing students compared to other top education systems. Increasingly, the Singapore society is becoming more stratified. In 2011, the Singapore education system revealed a new vision – a student-centric, values-driven education – seemingly expressing the desire to provide all the aid each student needs to succeed. On the National Day Rally speech 2017, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong declared the Singapore government's intention to provide all children more support at an earlier age to foster social mobility of the nation. Through glimpsing into education policies pertaining to low-performing students in Singapore and examining empirical evidence from local studies and international literature on low-performing students, the author advocates a shift in paradigm and changes of some long-held assumptions such as one single way to success and early streaming for better differentiation across the three levels of school, education system and society and family to level up low-performing students in the pursuit of the new vision and its goals as well as education equality in the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the abandonment of the Gifted and Talented initiative and the recent developments in mathematics educational policy (i.e. the new national curriculum and the "mastery" initiative), this research project aimed to explore the current primary school situation regarding educating the "most able" children in mathematics, along with teachers' views, experiences and perceived needs. This was a pilot research study gathering insights from a small number of schools in order to identify areas that could be improved by largerscale research studies. The findings obtained from 49 schools under four local educational authorities in southwest England suggested that the education of children with the ability or potential to excel in mathematics has reached a crucial stage. There is a real need for specialised support and guidance in recognising and developing mathematical potential for classroom teachers and school leaders who try on their own to discover what could enable them to meet the government's educational target of achieving "excellence everywhere". This support should have underpinnings from theory and research, preventing our schools from using questionable practices or repeating methods that have failed in the past. This article highlights research areas specifically for this reason. It also raises some questions with potential implications for the special educational needs coordinator's role, as well as for implementing new initiatives like the mathematics "mastery curriculum". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]