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Drawing upon empirical research carried out by the author, this paper demonstrates that the current law in England and Wales on privacy fails to provide appropriate recourse for a person who feels aggrieved at their photograph being taken and shared, particularly where this evokes emotions of embarrassment or humiliation. Whilst some improvements to the current law are discussed to improve protection for the photographed's privacy rights, the main conclusion suggests that a greater focus on education and guidance would be a pragmatic and cost-effective solution, with this shift in emphasis concentrating efforts on the actions of the photographer. In turn, this would protect the interests of the photographed as a form of preventative measure, rather than reactionary move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In England and Wales government pressures to raise attainment has led many schools to implement structured “ability” grouping in the form of setting. The introduction of selective grouping has been justified with the assumption that the differentiation of students by “ability” advances students’ motivation, social skills, independence and academic success in national tests and examinations because students are “better engaged in their own learning”. This paper critically engages with this assumption. Drawing upon qualitative research conducted in primary and secondary mathematics, science and English setted classrooms in England the aim of this literature review is to consider how teachers’ pedagogic practices with low, middle and high “ability” sets facilitates and/or constrains students’ learning and potential achievement. We also explore why, despite strenuous criticism and moves towards egalitarianism in schools, the segregation of students on the basis of “ability” continues to be a common feature in schools in England and Wales. This literature review draws attention to a number of substantive issues including (but not restricted to) fixed and permanent grouping; the potential misplacement of students to sets and a culture of stereotyping where learners within a set are taught as a single homogenous unit. We conclude the paper by suggesting foci for future research in the hope of eliciting renewed critical interest in and investigation of setting by “ability” in a broader range of subjects of the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Though there is a well-established body of research in the field of teacher professional development, it is characterised by a real dearth of any detailed historical analysis. This paper seeks to address this gap, by offering a new historical analysis of a case study of the evolution of organised teacher professional development in England and Wales during the twentieth century. Its approach is hoped to open up the wider debate and to contribute to a fuller understanding of the basis for those questions and dilemmas about teacher professional development that have long exercised teachers, professional educators and policy-makers – questions which turn on fundamental issues of priorities and purpose, funding, scale of teacher engagement, control and reach. The paper is in three main parts. Firstly, the scope of the case study is outlined with key stages in the evolution of teacher professional development in England and Wales identified. Secondly, four themes from the data which characterised this evolution are discussed. These include the restricted engagement of teachers relative to the whole teacher population; limited funding; the highly centralised control over provision for teacher professional development through Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI); and a highly selective and restrictive access to provision by teachers. It is argued that these key characteristics helped to shape a particular culture and ideology of teacher professional development which was dependent on a select cadre of elite teachers for the dissemination and modelling of what was regarded as good practice, so as to improve their colleagues’ performance – the elite excelled while the majority needed to be saved from mediocrity. The particular ideology underlying this model is conceptualised as one of ‘excellence and salvation’. Finally, it is argued that the key issues identified in this story (the restricted engagement of teachers; limited funding; highly centralised control; and ideologies of excellence) raise important generic questions for the field of teacher professional development more widely as well as framing future historical analysis of teacher professional development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the evidence relating to how primary schools are responding to the ‘gifted and talented’ initiative in England and Wales. A questionnaire survey which invited both closed and open-ended responses was carried out with a national sample of primary schools. The survey indicated an increasing proportion of coordinators, compared with a survey carried out in 1996, were identifying their gifted and talented children as well as having associated school policies. However, the survey also highlighted a number of issues which need addressing if the initiative is to achieve its objective of providing the best possible educational opportunities for children. For example, it was found that a significant number of practitioners were not aware of the existence of the National Quality Standards for gifted and talented education, provided by the UK government in 2007, and the subject-specific criteria provided by the UK’s Curriculum Authority for identification and provision have been largely ignored. The process of identifying children to be placed on the ‘gifted and talented’ register seems haphazard and based on pragmatic reasons. Analysis of teachers’ responses also revealed a range of views and theoretical positioning held by them, which have implications for classroom practice. As the ‘gifted and talented’ initiative in the UK is entering a second decade, and yet more significant changes in policy are introduced, pertinent questions need to be raised and given consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews with 14-19 year olds in England and Wales are analysed to explore young people's perceptions of the experience of school and of alternative settings for learning such as further education colleges or work-based learning. Many experience school as oppressive, suggesting a defeasance of their rights as human beings. The paper posits that conceptualisations of childhood, rather than offering protection, may lead to vulnerability, and that in secondary schools there are negative and disabling relationships between teachers and learners. If secondary pupils are conceived as vulnerable and marginalised, frameworks to address issues of social justice and inclusion for disadvantaged groups may be relevant. A capabilities approach to assuring the well-being of young people is explored as an alternative theory within which to evaluate schooling and to adjust relations between young people and staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the role of the Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO), the teacher responsible for the implementation of policies relating to the teaching and learning of children with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream schools in England and Wales. SENCOs also have a role to play in the inclusion of children with learning difficulties/disabilities in mainstream schools. Yet research indicates that despite the revision of the Special Educational Needs Code of Practice in 2001, many SENCOs are still overwhelmed by the operational nature of the role with little support, time or funding to consider more strategic aspects of inclusion and SEN. The article draws on research by the author and offers the voices of SENCOs from two unitary authorities in the north of England which suggest that where the SENCO is supported by senior management within the school, the role can be a powerful one in relation to inclusion. It concludes by arguing that the role of the SENCO needs to be re-conceptualized, redefined and remunerated as a senior management post within mainstream schools. If this were to be enforced by national policy, every mainstream school could have at least one powerful advocate for the inclusion of children with learning difficulties/disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the issue of recruitment of men into primary teaching, with particular reference to the early years of schooling. The latest UK statistics reveal that there are 27,000 male primary teachers and 141,000 females. However there are disproportionately greater numbers of male head teachers. The presence of men in this environment is perceived as crucial. The public discourse, then, calls for more men to function as role models and this paper examines the different voices within this discourse. It also surveys the initiatives taken by the UK government and the Teacher Training Agency as part of the recruitment drive to secure more men in the primary sector. The second part of the article presents research undertaken with female teachers. It explores their perceptions and experiences of male teachers at key stage one. Women suggest that rather than recruiting men as a group, what is needed is the 'right kind of man'. This paper considers this notion and concludes that there needs to be greater clarity within the public discourse as to the meaning of male role models and the need for more men working with young children. The voice of female teachers is currently absent from the public discourse. Given their knowledge and experience, women can offer a significant contribution to policy and should have the opportunity to be heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main trend in urban/rural migration is a continuous gain, in net terms, of towns from villages and large cities. But this is a result of two distinct migration streams associated with the process of family formation. While before marriage there is positive net migration from villages to both large cities and towns (and from large cities towards towns), after marriage there is a tendency for couples to move towards villages. This is explained by the desire of families, particularly those belonging to the middle class to move out of the urban centres to better accommodation in smaller communities. Considerable variations in migrations within and into regions are observed. These reflect the continuation of long-term trends in internal migration (as described in Part I of this paper) in particular, population dispersal from Greater London and larger distance migration into the Southern and Eastern regions. Some social characteristics of migrants and non-migrants are compared. Associations between the intensity of internal migration on the one hand, and occupational status, education, social mobility and family size on the other are observed. An attempt is made to assess the extent of migration associated with the marriage process. Although this process increases mobility, its relative contribution to total adult mobility appears to be only slight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable literature has been written over the last decade which indicates that the National Curriculum for Physical Education in England and Wales is being delivered ineffectively in primary schools. This paper discusses the key issues currently faced within primary PE and identifies why within Physical Education, primary matters appear to be of secondary importance, despite research indicating that such a stage of schooling holds the key to lifelong physical activity and proficiency in more complex activities such as sport. It is argued that to create a more successful model of PE and sport within the UK there needs to be a shifting of priorities and resources into the primary sector and the creation of a 'bottom-up' model, rather than continue to pursue policies that are 'top-down' in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collection of ethnic and racial statistics has become common in a growing number of institutional settings. Yet contemporary approaches to race and ethnicity suggest that the very process of compelling people to assign themselves to one of a small number of racial or ethnic 'boxes' is, at best, essentialist and, at worst, racist. This article will explore this problematic terrain, and venture a pathway through it, with the aid of findings from a study of ethnic minority English and Welsh student teachers' attitudes to ethnic classification. The discussion comprises three parts. The first sets out to provide a brief theoretical analysis of the genesis of ethnic monitoring within the modern state. It is concluded that ethnic monitoring may usefully be regarded as a problematic necessity, a process that itself needs constant monitoring. With this agenda in place, we move on to assess the implications of our findings on student teachers' attitudes to ethnic monitoring. Their pointers for reform are discussed in the third and final section of the paper, where the policy implications of research are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transfer from primary to secondary school in England and Wales is a status passage, from child to teenager. Research on the anxieties and anticipations surrounding that transfer over a 30-year period shows continuities and discontinuities. As well as the contrast of sociological approaches, the perceptions of children in 1977–1978 and 2003–2004 are compared to explore whether their anxieties and anticipations have changed. The transfer studies conducted by Galton in the 1970s are shown to have revealed concerns and enthusiasms among children that are an enduring feature of British pupils’ lives. Two different sociological approaches to researching children are contrasted, one current in the 1970s, the other predominant in the new century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century control over their schools was central to the sense of a Catholic identity for English Catholics, and its defence was a priority of their bishops. The 1944 education act threatened the financial viability of these schools. Between 1942 and 1944 the divided and uncertain response of the Catholic Hierarchy of England and Wales to the state’s proposals for educational reform opened the way for the intervention of lay catholics into the education debate. The Sword of the Spirit movement is commonly remembered as the central organization for lay initiative in Church affairs. However, for Catholics and for participants in the education debate the organization known as the Catholic Parents’ and Electors’ Association (CPEA) was far more significant. From local initiatives in Ilford, south-east London, and Bradford, in the north, between 1940 and 1942, the CPEA expanded, until by 1944 it could claim a nationwide membership running into tens of thousands, as well as the enthusiastic support of the Catholic press. It engaged in vigorous political activity, in most cases without the sanction of clerical authority. To some extent the movement troubled Catholic authority as much as the education issue itself. With the re-establishment of authority, following the appointment of a new cardinal-archbishop of Westminster the movement foundered but was by no means extinguished. It embodied the extending power within the Catholic community of an urban middle class, related to, but increasingly distinct from, the growing Catholic professional elite exemplified by the growth of the Newman Association. The CPEA could be harnessed by the clerical leaders of the Catholic community, but its history indicates the social, psychological and political stresses attendant on educational change in a minority community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the guidance system in England and Wales which has involved schools and Careers Services. During the 1990s the terms partnership approach and guidance community have been used to refer to the guidance system. Descriptors confirm what is taken to be a strength of the system. This in many respects is ironic given that the dual system underlying this provision is a historical legacy and belies the struggle for control between two sectors, education and employment, over which was most suitable to offer guidance and advice to youngsters about to leave school. There are two dimensions to guidance provision, careers education and careers guidance. Often there is a tendency to conflate the two and simply talk of careers education and guidance or CEG. Careers education is school-based curricular provision (usually structured around four key elements: decision making; opportunity awareness; transition skills and self-awareness) and includes work experience programmes for students, usually in year 10 (age 14-15 years).

When historians discuss the impact of examinations on elementary education in mid-Victorian England and Wales they typically focus on the Revised Code of 1862. The Revised Code is famous for instituting a policy of "payment-by-results" for teachers in state-supported voluntary schools. "Payment-by-results" made government grants to schools -- and, by extension, for teachers' salaries -- contingent upon student attendance and pass rates in reading, writing and arithmetic. As this article emphasises, however, "payment-by-results" was not the first, or even the most significant, instance in which competitive examination was used by the state as an instrument for establishing the pedagogical fitness and salaries of teachers. Less often explored by historians is the formative role that state-mandated competitive examinations for teachers played in developing a professionally aspirant body of schoolteachers and, consequently, the schoolteachers' later role in developing competitive examination as a broad-scale national accreditation apparatus. But while the use of competitive examinations came to shape modern British academic and professional life in fundamental ways, the strengthening effects that they had for certain occupations and institutions, such as physicians, civil servants and middle-class secondary schools, were in fact ultimately denied to state teachers and the elementary education sector generally. With the introduction of "payment-by-results" in 1862, competitive examinations were converted into an instrument that weakened rather than strengthened teachers' professional identity and policy influence. This article explains how the nineteenth-century English state structured examinations and examination results to manipulate the professional status of teachers in order to suit state priorities during different stages of national development. This historical narrative is framed in reference to present-day examination-based reforms of teacher compensation systems such as performance-related-pay and value-added modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines prison education in England and Wales arguing that a disjuncture exists between the policy rhetoric of entitlement to education in prison at the European level and the playing out of that entitlement in English and Welsh prisons. Caught between conflicting discourses around a need to combat recidivism and a need for incarceration, prison education in England exists within a policy context informed, in part, by an international human rights agenda on the one hand and global recession, financial cutbacks, and a moral panic about crime on the other. The European Commission has highlighted a number of challenges facing prison education in Europe including over-crowded institutions, increasing diversity in prison populations, the need to keep pace with pedagogical changes in mainstream education and the adoption of new technologies for learning. These are challenges confronting all policy makers involved in prison education in England and Wales in a policy context that is messy, contradictory and fiercely contested. The article argues that this policy context, exacerbated by socio-economic discourses around neo-liberalism, is leading to a race-to-the-bottom in the standards of educational provision for prisoners in England and Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teaching assistants (TAs) comprise a quarter of the school workforce in England and Wales. There has been controversy over TAs' deployment and appropriate role regarding supporting learning and these debates have been transformed by findings from the largest study of school support staff (the DISS project), which show that TA support has a negative impact on pupils' academic progress. This article conceptualises the most likely explanations for the negative effects of TA support in the form of the wider pedagogical role model, the components of which enable us to understand the effects of TA support in terms of the decisions made about TAs, rather than by them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers in the English and Welsh State education system have experienced a changing and turbulent relationship with the State in recent decades. This article adopts a historical analysis and argues that the concept of 'partnership' is key to understanding the relationship between teachers and the State in the period since the Second World War. Initially a partnership based on a commitment to welfarist values, professional autonomy and collective bargaining; this has been systematically dismantled and reconstructed as a 'social partnership' based on teacher union involvement in workforce reform coupled with a significantly more managerialist conception of professional accountability. Re-engineering the terms of its partnership with teachers has been central to the State's restructuring of public education along neo-liberal lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Children with specific speech and language difficulties (SSLD) pose a challenge to the education system as a result of their language needs and associated educational and social-behavioural difficulties. Local education authorities (LEAs) in England and Wales have developed language units to meet their needs but previous research has indicated this provision was inadequate. The development of inclusion raises questions regarding this type of provision, compared with full inclusion into mainstream schools. The present study reports on a national survey of LEAs in England and Wales (97 respondents, 49.5% response rate) and interviews with 37 LEA special educational needs managers. Provision varied by age group with designated specialist provision more prevalent at key stages 1 and 2 (age 5–11 years), and relatively little at key stages 3 and 4 (11–16). LEAs’ decision-making regarding provision varied, influenced by the lack of common criteria, which was highlighted by the difficulties in distinguishing children with SSLD from those with autistic spectrum disorder. There were also difficulties translating policies into practice, including the shortage of speech and language therapists. The implications of the study are discussed with reference to inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of citizenship education to school in England (and Wales) in 2002 has generated interest and concern among religious educationalists, some of whom welcome the opportunities this new educational territory opens up for religious education and some of whom suspect it augurs religious education's demise. This article reports findings of a school-based study of the early implementation of citizenship education and its impact on religious education. It discusses those findings in the context of the current debate about the future relationship between the two subjects, noting a similar ambivalence toward citizenship education among religious education heads of department, as there is among religious educational lists. The discussion includes an examination of the Crick Report, noting its lack of interest in religious education, and argues that its conceptualization of citizenship leaves it open to two quite different broad interpretations of what might be meant by an education for citizenship, one of which religious education practitioners appear to endorse and associate with religious education, and one of which they reject and associate with citizenship education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of education management has grown rapidly in the past 30 years with members positioning themselves in all parts of the education system. The main claim for distinctiveness is working with and on behalf of the practitioner, and intellectual positioning is based on the nature of intervention with the practitioner such as empirical research, course provision, and consultancy. In undertaking an intellectual analysis of the field, Bourdieu's theory of practice, developed through and with Habitus and Field, is used to think with and to develop an understanding of the 'possibilities' and 'traps' for the professional practice of field members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the vocational education and training system in England and Wales. Both the changing demands of work and the changing aspirations of a larger and increasingly diverse population of students constitute a challenge for educational and vocational training systems. In the 1980s, the European Commission launched a wide range of programs to support the member states in their efforts to extend and renew their educational and training systems. In England and Wales, education is compulsory from age five to age sixteen. The framework of general, job-specific vocational training and vocational schooling constitutes the core clement of the educational and vocational training system in England and Wales, characterized as substantially qualification-driven. "Youth unemployment Youth Training" and its predecessor, the "Youth Training Scheme" was introduced in 1983 to tackle the problem of providing training with financial incentives for employers and public funding. Among the latest attempts to reform the training system in England and Wales are the new arrangements for Modern Apprenticeships. These are aimed at building upon the qualities of the traditional apprenticeship system and solving the shortfall in intermediate-level skills.

The article compares the degrees and levels of formalized parent participation in education in France, Wales, England and West Germany. Key issues discussed include the emergence of formal parental involvement in the control and management of schools as a key trend in education in Western Europe, the administrative structures designed to encourage parental participation that are indicative of changes in social relations, the key role of parent associations in school management and the issues' implications for comparative education.