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In this paper, we consider the intensifying pressures on critical research and academic integrity in a research policy context that has come to be increasingly dominated by an instrumentalist mind-set. Using sensitising resources drawn from Geoff Whitty's critique of the 'what works' agenda, we reflect on the current conditions of academic labour and some of the key issues and dilemmas they pose for critical researchers in the sociology of education and beyond. In particular, we underline the trend for 'what works' agendas to become constitutive of academic identities and practices, including at micro-levels, such that the option of 'standing outside' them is shifting from being merely personally taxing to being institutionally disallowed. In addition to highlighting the dilemmas this creates for critical researchers and the threat this poses to expansive and democratic approaches to education, the paper emphasises the centrality of relationship-forming in understanding and underpinning academic integrity.

Higher apprenticeships are celebrated in current policy discourses as an alternative to traditional higher education, with the claim that they will prepare higher apprentices for their future careers and enhance industrial productivity through higher skill levels. This paper aims to scrutinise these claims using notions developed by Bernstein and related work in the sociology of educational knowledge, identifying how the formulation of higher vocational knowledge will affect how apprentices work, learn and access knowledge. It is suggested that the socio-epistemic processes through which "regions" of professional and vocational knowledge are constituted, and the manner in which knowledge is recontextualised, give rise to specific knowledge articulations and curriculum decisions. Drawing on an analysis of the structure of apprenticeship frameworks and their associated qualifications, as well as interviews with professional bodies, the research will demonstrate how certain types of knowledge are foregrounded as a result of sectoral and professional dynamics and the imperatives of knowledge structure. In some sectors and professions, key concepts associated with disciplinary knowledge may be downplayed or obscured, reducing what Wheelahan and others have described as "epistemic access", with a potential impact on progression opportunities for apprentices and the ability to provide valuable input in the workplace. In others, higher apprenticeships may continue longstanding traditions of higher vocational formation, involving educational institutions, employers and practitioners in constituting productive vocational knowledge and practice, albeit within a macro-context that may not promote practitioner influence over the circumstances of formation.

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 uses Bourdieu’s concept of ‘field’ as a tool to examine higher education participation in England in the context of diversified and differentiated provision. Admissions practices for courses in two institutions offering tertiary and higher education demonstrate how the official rules of the game shape the experience of students moving into and through HE on vocational and alternative routes. These examples suggest that rules created for the ‘selective’ part of the HE field can have perverse effects on other parts of the field, creating barriers rather than bridges for students seeking to participate in HE via alternative routes. The paper concludes by considering the strengths and limitations of using Bourdieu’s tools for understanding diversification in HE. Does using Bourdieu lead to the inevitable conclusion that diversity is a form of diversion, directing a proportion of the population through an easily accessible, but ultimately less rewarding path, or can Bourdieu’s tools suggest possibilities for transformation and change? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Changes in school mathematics curricula, pedagogy and assessment, and as a consequence the pressure for changes in initial teacher preparation, are consequences both of government policy initiatives and pressure from unofficial agents such as the research community, teachers and others, though with great variation across the world. In the case of England, it has resulted in strong regulation, including inspection, of initial teacher education too. In this article, I draw on sociological theory to help in mapping the relations between official and unofficial agents and in interpreting the effects on mathematics teacher educators, in particular. The article draws in the main on the changing position in England over the last decade or so, and a case study analysis is carried out of a key official document to illustrate the application of theoretical tools provided by sociologists and others for examining the relations between agents and agencies and on their consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational administration and the social sciences,the landmark text coedited by Baron and Taylor in 1969, represented the study of educational administration as an applied interdisciplinary field. George Baron's own academic career reveals the struggles involved in the construction of this new field and the resistance and opposition that it encountered. It also highlights both the strengths and the incipient tensions of the field thatEducational administration and the social sciencesfailed to take into account in its optimistic narrative of expansion and partnership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]