Search

This article critically examines the Labour Party's policies for local school systems, focusing on its proposals for regional Directors of School Standards, for academies and free schools, and for local democracy, and offers an alternative approach.

The purpose of "A Better Future for our Schools" is to contribute to the debate about what a new government after 2015 should seek to achieve. It identifies 10 areas where current policies are clearly inadequate and damaging and identifies a range of actions to address each area. The manifesto is the outcome of debates organised by the Campaign for State Education and the Socialist Educational Association over the last 18 months. The authors are grateful for the contributions that have been made by many people during this process. The proposals are rooted in core values such as democracy, equality and inclusion as well as in the need to maximise the achievement of all our young people. Above all, they are designed to ensure that our schools prepare young people better for life in an increasingly complex and diverse society.

This paper has as its focus the life and thinking of the educational theorist and schoolmaster J. H. Simpson (1883-1959), who was not only a reforming teacher at Rugby School but was also the first headmaster of the progressive Rendcomb College. His ideas around education were outlined in a number of books. At the heart of his thinking lay concerns around democracy and self-government and the article explores how these were enacted at various points of Simpson's life with a particular focus upon his work until 1932. Attention will be paid to how his thinking evolved, moving from simple democracy in the classroom to wider decision-making within an entire school. Linked to these concerns were a number of curricular initiatives that sought to offer a point of contrast to more traditional public schools. The article will conclude by attempting to offer consideration of the legacy of Simpson's ideas.

This paper is one of two that bring together a range of education scholars to consider how education might be for democracy in a time of complex challenges facing twenty-first century societies. In this paper, scholars from Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom consider how sites of formal and informal education can respond to multiple unfolding crises, including the COVID-19 global pandemic, catastrophic climate change and ecological collapse, political upheaval, and growing social and economic inequality. What emerges is a wide-ranging set of reflections that engage with these complexities and challenges in a considered and hopeful way.

By 1989, fascism had long been defeated in Europe, and reforms in the Soviet Union appeared to signify the collapse of communist ideology, prompting Francis Fukuyama to famously declare the 'end of history'. Since then, neoliberalism has been rolled out globally. This paper argues that, with regard to higher education, Fukuyama's claim that the pursuit of knowledge will be replaced by the 'satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands' is prescient. What, then, prompted Fukuyama to qualify his predictions in 2018? Citing both the turmoil of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, Fukuyama blames identity politics for the breakdown of consensus over what the nation is, or should be, and suggests that the promotion of creedal identity might rescue Western democracy from populism. This paper disagrees: using the examples of Brexit and the promotion of Fundamental British Values in schools, it argues that creedal identity has become another expression of populism. Rejecting the claim that identity politics are the ultimate source of populism, it argues that populism is the predictable outcome of recession in the market economy.

The paper proposes a statistical model for a TEF metric that could liberate the "oppressed" (international students) and the "oppressors" (home students) from the influence of public policies which, through constructions of international students as "supplicants" and "beneficiaries" of the prestigious British education system, have created conditions for their exclusion in the classroom. It is argued in the paper that such representations have contributed to international students' subordination through coloniality and have also limited home students' agency to engage with their international peers on socially and politically equal terms. The paper conceptualises the design and philosophical nature of a supplementary TEF metric that could prevent such symptoms of public policies. It also shows how such a metric could work in practice by modelling the UK Engagement Survey (UKES) data from a case study university. The paper proposes ideas about how understandings and practice of internationalisation could be re-articulated through the proposed metric. As such, it also discusses new "standards" of internationalisation that could enter reputational rankings and ways in which they could be applied internationally.

Removal of the student numbers cap, reductions in funding and an accompanying need to generate revenue have driven education towards neo-capitalism and managerialism: students equate to income. An associated growth in performativity measures incorporates student voice as one of these benchmarking requirements. Aiming to explore and challenge assumptions about the role of student voice in post-compulsory education, this paper identifies a missing viewpoint in the wider research: perceptions from those engaged in teacher education. This paper presents research undertaken with 24 participants (teacher educators, student teachers and quality assurance managers) across three post-compulsory institutions in the UK. It explores perceptions about how student voice is espoused, enacted and experienced within the institutions, and whether this enables a democratic approach within education. The research considers questions raised about power, dialogue and engagement, as well as the impact of marketisation and consumerism on student-institutional relationships.

When we "learn nature," do we encounter her as 'free' in the sense of having neither cost nor price? Is she something 'given'? And is that which nature offers us 'gratis'? In the UK, many schoolchildren have been encouraged to 'give thanks' for nature's gifts. But why, if she is free, give thanks; and thanks to whom? If one learns to encounter nature as 'free', is she then really free for the taking? Walter Benjamin notably derided Joseph Dietzgen for regarding what nature supplies to humanity as 'gratis', and long argument has continued among Marxists since Benjamin's time concerning how we regard nature's 'gifts'. This paper addresses the ideological appropriation of nature, and makes this a pedagogical question best approached through readings of Benjamin and Dietzgen. It does so in a context where education policy reflects little if any concern with the acquisition of a disposition towards nature among children.

In this paper we argue that education--particularly higher education (HE)--has the potential to offer socially, economically and culturally transformative learning opportunities. Yet, for prisoners, the opportunity to engage in HE as active social citizens are often limited. Using a Freirean model of democratic, pedagogic participatory dialogue, we designed a distinctive prison-university partnership in which prison-based learners and undergraduate students studied together. The parallel small-scale ethnographic study, reported here, explored how stereotypes and "othering"--which compromise social citizenship--could be challenged through dialogue and debate. Evidence from this study revealed a positive change in "de-othering" attitudes of participants was achieved. Furthermore, participants reported growth in their sense of empowerment, agency, and autonomy--the cornerstones of social citizenship. Findings from this study contribute further evidence to the developing body of knowledge on the value of partnerships and dialogue in prison education. We conclude that policy makers, and respective institutions, need to work harder to establish prison-university partnerships, thus providing the space for dialogue--"real talk"--to take place.

The ongoing pandemic has affected all aspects of human life globally. Universities have faced significant challenges in continuing their educational and research activities while at the same time becoming more visible due to their work on identifying treatments, developing vaccines, understanding the impact of the pandemic and exploring the ways of recovering from the crisis. English universities have been at the forefront of these global efforts and have had unique opportunities to contribute, and demonstrate their contribution, to the common good. This study is the first of its kind to offer an analysis of the new empirical material on how English universities have dealt with the pandemic from the perspective of the common good. It also offers a new, literature-based conceptualisation of the material manifestations of common good in the context of the pandemic. These key manifestations include widening participation, promoting social cohesion and democracy, promulgating a global knowledge system, promoting a sense of community embeddedness, and designing and implementing common-good oriented financial models for higher education. The study demonstrates that, despite some potentially perilous financial implications, English universities' reactions to the pandemic indicate a move closer to the common good ideal. The paper explains this crisis of opportunity to argue that the pandemic offers potential for a shift towards the common good as a guiding principle for universities in order to support sustainable and equitable development.

This article explains an action research response to the need for knowledge democracy in research projects between academics in global North and global South countries. It argues that if unspoken assumptions about knowledge creation are left unexamined, such collaborations can replicate forms of 'epistemic injustice'. The paper is premised on the belief that such collaborations should be based upon practical acknowledgement of plurality in the domain of knowledge and upon the right and responsibility of people to contribute to research conceptualisations and questions as equals. The article focuses on the facilitation processes applied during an initial, five-day strategic planning meeting for a three-year Erasmus Mundus research project, in which academics from universities in Spain, Portugal, Peru and the UK participated, and the conceptualisations and strategic direction of the project were established. The authors draw upon their experiences as project co-designers and joint co-ordinators. We conclude that if international research projects are to promote knowledge democracy, processes need to be established in which relevant concepts and objectives can be articulated and the research questions established by all partners, in order to accommodate multiple perspectives. The insights offered also have relevance for collaborations between multiple stakeholders inside and outside of academia.

Statistics is one of the important branches of mathematics taught in schools, colleges and universities. It is also an important tool in public policy discussions. This paper focuses on the use of statistics in the latter context, rather than its use in adult mathematics education research. I review the key characteristics of the statistical approach to constructing public knowledge, and give a very brief history of key points in its development. I discuss how what I call the "overt crisis of statistics," the apparent disenchantment of large sections of the public with the "expert" statistical methods, outputs and pronouncements, leads to dilemmas both for citizens and for democratic governments. Recently "Big Data" and data analytics seem to many to offer new solutions to problems resulting from the essential lack of certainty surrounding efforts to understand society, and from the need to make quick decisions in a rapidly changing world. These approaches have potential, but also limitations. This leads me to consider a second, "covert" crisis of statistics, resulting from a struggle between proponents of freely available public information and public argument, and those aiming to profit from the appropriation and sequestering of information for private ends. I finish by considering what can be done by ourselves, as citizens, as adult mathematics teachers, and as researchers.

The broad aim of this paper is to track the evolution of adult literacy policy in the UK across three decades, highlighting convergences between policy phases and the promotion of democratic learning spaces. It is anchored onto the argument that, although it is generally accepted that democratic learning spaces are perceived as beneficial to adult literacy learners, policy has often deterred its promotion and, therefore, implementation. The paper identifies three block phases of adult literacy development: the seventies to mid-eighties, the mid-eighties to mid-nineties and the mid-nineties to the Moser Committees. The features of each of these phases are highlighted to map out convergences and divergences to the ethos of democratic learning spaces. The paper argues that, with the evolution of policy in adult literacy, the ethos of democratic learning space continuously diminished, such that as policy evolved year on year, the principle of democratic learning space found itself at counterpoint to policy. We draw on two theoretical frameworks, the NLS view of literacy and Bourdieu's capital framework to explain these divergences and conclude that the dominant perception of literacy and the prioritised capital in the context of policy appear to limit the vestiges of democratic learning spaces.

Apocalyptic crisis discourses of mental health problems and psycho-emotional dysfunction are integral to behaviour change agendas across seemingly different policy arenas. Bringing these agendas together opens up new theoretical and empirical lines of enquiry about the symbioses and contradictions surrounding the human subjects they target. The paper explores the relationship between behaviour change policy, enduring philosophical and political scepticism about the viability of the rational, autonomous subject of liberal and neoliberal governance, and the contemporary cultural privileging of its vulnerable, anxious and stressed counterpart. Weber's accounts of authority illuminate dangers arising from an ad hoc, shifting, unaccountable state-sponsored intervention market that targets the vulnerable subject, proselytised by new types of "therapeutic entrepreneurs." Using an education-based example of statutory legislation for counter-terrorism in schools and universities, the Prevent strategy, the paper argues that jettisoning the rational, liberal subject has extremely worrying implications for education and democracy. It concludes with questions about the implications of these under-researched cultural and political phenomena for assumptions about the subjects of governance.

This short paper is a response to Nel Noddings's article on schooling for democracy. Whilst agreeing with the basic premises of Noddings's argument, it questions the possibility of parity between academic and vocational tracks given the inequitable social and educational contexts the two types of learning would have to coexist within. Drawing on the educational philosophies of John Dewey and R. H. Tawney, I argue that both the United States and the United Kingdom need to create educational systems that reduce the social distance between people rather than, as the current systems do, exacerbate them. This is an issue of hearts and minds as well as policies and practices. As Dewey pointed out a hundred years ago, what is required is education that results in "mutual regard of all citizens for all other citizens," and the paper concludes that both countries are still far away from achieving this.

Background: Debates about evidence-based policy (EBP) were revived in the UK in the 2010s in the context of civil service reform and changing practices of policy making, including institutionalisation of public participation in science policy making. Aims and objectives: This paper aims to explore this revival of interest in EBP in the context of the Government-funded public participation programme Sciencewise, which supports and promotes public dialogues in science policy making. It is based on in-depth ethnographic study of the programme during 2013, considering the impacts on Sciencewise practices and working understandings of engaging in the EBP debate. There is a particular focus on the advantages and disadvantages of categorising public participation as a source of evidence-based policy as opposed to presenting participation as a democratic act which is separate from discussions of EBP. Key conclusions: At different times Sciencewise actors moved between these stances in order to gain credibility and attention for their work, and to situate the outcomes of public participation processes in a broader policy context. In some instances the presentation of outputs from public participation processes as legitimate evidence for policy gave them greater influence and enriched broader discussions about the meaning and practice of open policy. However, it also frequently led to their dismissal on methodological grounds, inhibiting serious engagement with their outputs and challenging internal frameworks for evaluation and learning.

This article draws on insights gained from three projects described as participatory action research (PAR) undertaken in the UK. What binds them together is that each project coordinator raised the issue of the under-representation of opportunities for disruption in the possible trajectory to knowledge democracy.PAR places a relational process at the centre of the research practice. It brings together people with varied knowledges, perspectives and experiences and aspires to be a non-hierarchical, relational, collaborative endeavour. This challenges the traditional hierarchical hegemony of the external expert in research situations. Bringing people together does not, however, equate to shared agency, authentic participation and knowledge democracy. For different knowledges to be created previous knowledges need to be disrupted.The argument raised in this paper is that a neglected element of PAR has been the deliberate intent to nurture disruption within communicative spaces in relationally based engagements. It is posited that the disruption of beliefs and assumptions that underpin local actions, is an important enabler of other voices and knowledges being recognised and acted upon. The three projects described reveal how and why the harnessing of power through disruption contributes to creating a functional knowledge democracy for more radical change.

In this paper we set out proposals that constitute a democratic Marxist manifesto for teacher education for economic, environmental and social justice. In doing so, we of course recognise structural limitations on progressive action but also that teacher agency is shaped and not erased by these. We therefore sketch the strategic shape a transformative UK teacher education might take in resistance to attacks on workers from longstanding neoliberal hegemony and, more recently, from so-called 'austerity'.

This paper offers a critique of current definitions of active citizenship and argues that children and young people need to be seen as citizens within their school communities and not just citizens of the future. Pedagogy and school decision-making should reflect the aims of active citizenship and thus engage children and young people as active participants within their school communities. This requires a radical change to the way in which many schools are currently structured and organised. A case study of a small democratic school is used as an illustration of an exemplary model of education for active citizenship. This school does not offer citizenship as a curriculum subject nor explicitly aim for active citizenship--and yet active citizenship is integral to its ethos, values, structures, processes and pedagogy. Throughout the paper, it is suggested that democratic schooling is not just one way--but the best way--of providing education for active citizenship.

Rhetoric about young people's "ownership" of future socio-technical change is a familiar part of much educational and political discourse. This does not, however, translate in practice into a meaningful dialogue with young people about the sorts of futures they might wish to see emerge. This paper argues that a number of social and technological developments currently being envisaged by researchers, developers, industry and politicians bring with them a responsibility to rethink the relationship between young people, education and socio-technical futures. It focuses specifically on trends in the areas of personal augmentation, digital working practices and intergenerational spaces and discusses the implications of projected developments in these areas for young people's educational, economic and democratic futures. It argues that schools need to be cognisant of these future possibilities and need to create spaces and practices that enable young people together to understand and explore these issues. The school also is not immune to socio-technical change. The potential growth of online learning communities, the emergence of a body of adults able to participate as informal educators and the development of networked publics, in particular, have the potential to change the relationship between school, young people and society. These changes have the potential either to erode or to radically reinvigorate the capacity of schools to act as public spaces within which young people can be supported to negotiate and explore future socio-technical change. (Contains 7 notes.)

Collaborating with universities in Hong Kong, Finland, the United Kingdom and Australia the research project outlined in this paper takes up one of the key initial findings related to the importance of children's online spaces away from school. The project brings together complementary strengths from each partner nation to assist our mutual need to understand the worlds of our young "netizens"--the new public citizens of cyberspace. Differing in social and cultural context, each setting is recognised as a strong contributor to understanding the competencies of young people's digital expertise. We work from the shared view that the arrival of Web 2.0 and 3.0 social networking tools is educationally challenging and demands futuristic thinking for sustainable education and social connectivity globally. Our research aim is to use a common research design to discover how young people are behaving in the new online spaces; what guides their decision-making; and what, if any, common values appear to emerge when results between countries are compared. Locally derived knowledge gained from samples of 12-year-olds will be subjected to cross-cultural comparisons and validation. In doing so, we make some assumptions about the homogenising process that shared global networks may be fostering. Bringing together these contributions will strengthen the decision-making process and provide new knowledge about meaning making, agency and citizenship for the twenty-first-century e-democracy. This paper reports on the conceptual process underlying the research and the research design. (Contains 2 figures and 4 notes.)

Mission schools in Africa in the first half of the twentieth century were in many ways microcosms of the great educational debates of the times. The objectives of policies regarding access, governance and curriculum were part of a historical evolution of mission education but they were also increasingly a reflection of significant new trends that were to reshape the theory and practice of colonial education. New forms of educational research and professional expertise were to play an ever-increasing role in shaping the forms and content of the education provided. The brief of the mission churches was to meet with the increasing demand for schooling. Church and state gradually expanded their cooperation in the field as the costs of education outstripped the resources of the missions and the demand for mass education came to be linked to nationalist demands for political and economic rights. This paper is concerned to map the background to those international influences that shaped the policy and practices of mission education and the increasing engagement of colonial governments with the field of education. It addresses the question of the worldwide Protestant mission church's response to the changing political, social and economic environment of the first half of the twentieth century. In particular it seeks to explore how mission initiatives shaped thinking about education in Asia, Africa, Oceania and Latin America by the 1930s. It also attempts to situate those issues within a wider educational framework by linking them to the emergent debate concerning pragmatism and utilitarianism in regard to progressive education in the USA and the quest for social democratic education in the United Kingdom and Europe as part of a response to socialism, nationalism and totalitarianism. In short, the paper explores the influence of the Christian mission churches with regard to social policy, in general, and the provision of education, in particular, during the interwar years, with special reference to areas influenced by the work of the International Missionary Council. At a time when there was a crisis of support for "foreign missions" how did the debates between fundamentalist-evangelicals and supporters of a "social gospel" transform themselves into debates regarding the role of missions in non-Western societies? And how did these essentially ecclesiastical/theological issues come to influence public policy, specifically educational policy, in the long term? The conclusions are that mission churches had a very significant influence on the shaping of educational thinking in the colonial and imperial context at a time when state influence in the sector was still often quite weak. The origins of the conference and research culture that has informed educational policy since the establishment of the United Nations Organization had its roots in the broad context of the Charter of the League of Nations, with a meeting of religious and secular goals, prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Between 1910 and 1939 there was a significant history of educational reform and community development that has only been partially documented in relation to its global significance. This is an attempt to build a framework for understanding the nature of those changes and what was achieved. The investigation is conducted through an exploration of the three great World Mission Conferences of the International Missionary Council (IMC) held at Edinburgh (1910), Jerusalem (1928) and Tambaram, India (1938). The attempts of Christian churches to engage with dramatic social changes associated with industrialisation, urbanisation, poverty, cultural change and the rise of anti-colonialism, with specific regard to the field of educational policy, are documented and analysed. (Contains 5 boxes and 114 footnotes.)

This paper takes a feminist perspective on the UK literature on mass higher education in the 21st century, building on US critiques about marketization, neo-liberalism and "academic capitalism". Concepts of equality and diversity have been transformed by neo-liberalism and how these changes have constrained democratic contributions to UK higher education policies and practices is the focus. Diversity has replaced more traditional conceptualizations of socioeconomic inequalities, and has shifted from being about ethnicity/race to one of "widening participation" or "fair" access to higher education, including social class, disabilities, gender and age. Debate focuses on individual students on first or undergraduate degrees, whether full or part-time, and how higher education institutions can contribute to graduate employment, individual or social mobility, rather than re-inscribing social stratification. I present an analysis that demonstrates the challenges and dilemmas about equality and diversity in UK mass higher education and conclude that despite expansion of higher education "persistent inequalities" remain. I reveal UK policy shifts around gender as concerning women, as students or academics, to one about lack of educational opportunities in post-compulsory education for young men from poor or disadvantaged family backgrounds as students, ignoring the question of women's opportunities and contributions to new forms of academic practice. I argue that this illustrates how new forms of higher education, despite expansion and increasing participation, remain resistant to some of the feminist and critical yet creative challenges about transformations in academic practice and development.

This paper offers a preliminary tribute to the work of the late Jean Rudduck, pioneer of student voice, both as an academic field and as a potential agent of school transformation. Tracing the roots of her student voice work back to CARE (Centre for Applied Research in Education) and the Humanities Curriculum Project (1967-1972), the author follows the intellectual narrative of her student voice work from the mid-1990s up to and including her forthcoming (2007) book, "Improving learning through consulting pupils," co-authored with Donald McIntyre. The paper closes by suggesting eight aspects of Jean Rudduck's work that make a distinctive, enduring contribution to the field of student voice and thereby to a more humane, more creative approach to education in and for democracy. (Contains 5 notes.)

The last three decades have seen an intensification of commercialization throughout the public sector in general and state schools in particular. Policies designed to introduce business ideologies, structures and practices have operated in tandem with a push to include the corporate world in the running, governance and provision of educational services. Together these policy instruments are eroding the influence and power of education professionals and precipitating a transformative shift in the nature of public education. A specific threat which these policies may encourage is the use of corporate propaganda techniques targeted at schools which may harm children, undermine the proper purposes of education, subvert the moral and social fabric of school life and damage the foundations of civil society. This paper argues that educators must recognize the dangers of commercialized schools and organize to protect civic education, speak up for its values and preserve the distinctiveness of educational practice operating within non-commercialized public spaces. Such a strategy also offers the opportunity to redefine the central role of educators as servants of the twin professional ideals of children's civic welfare and democratic citizenship.

Against a background of declining union significance and falling membership, this article reviews the recent development of trade union workplace learning in Britain. It is argued that the dominant framework within which this learning is currently undertaken is one of "employability". Instead of an employability framework, it is suggested that an educational framework informed by "democratic citizenship" better serves the need for unions and their members to engage with changes within the workplace and within the wider societal context. The first section of the article will provide a brief descriptive overview of these union learning activities in recent years. It will be argued that the focus on learning has represented an important and dynamic new area of trade union organisation and activity at workplace level. The second section of this paper will examine the dominant conceptual framework underpinning this development of learning opportunities and services for union members. It will be argued that the notion of 'employability', with its uncritical focus on skill formation, has resulted in an undue narrowness of the learning agenda. This has resulted in marginalising important aspects of trade union activity in pursuit of their wider societal objectives and aspirations.

In spite of the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights grants parents the right to an education in conformity with their own religious convictions, this paper argues that parents should have no such rights. It also tries to demonstrate that religious and cultural minorities have no rights to establish faith schools and that it is a child's right in trust, to autonomous well-being, which trumps any such claims. Faith schools, it is argued, represent a real and serious threat to children's autonomy, especially their emotional autonomy. As such, they are incompatible with the aims of education required by a liberal democracy. (Contains 16 notes.)

The argument of the paper proposes that learning grows out of motivation which depends upon recognising and valuing the distinctive qualities of each and the cultural traditions they embody. If learning expresses a journey between worlds, the challenge for the school is to create a learning community that brings together local and cosmopolitan in its pedagogic practices. This configuration of the school and its communities, by interconnecting the symbolic orders of each, creates the conditions for relevance, motivation and learning. Excellent teachers have always sought, as a defining principle of their individual practice, to relate activities within their classroom to the interests of the child. But the argument being developed here proposes that this configuration is a strategic and systemic task for the governance of school as a whole institution. (Contains 1 figure and 1 note.)

This is the second and concluding part of the interview which Melissa Benn and Jane Martin conducted with Clyde Chitty in the summer of 2017. The first part appeared in the previous issue of the journal, "FORUM," 59(3). When Clyde stepped away from regular duties with the FORUM board, Michael Armstrong dubbed him "the patron saint of the movement for comprehensive education". Clyde talked with Melissa and Jane about his working life as a teacher-researcher who notably campaigned for the universal provision of comprehensive state education. His unshakeable conviction that education has the power to enhance the lives of all is illustrated by plentiful examples from his work-life history. The interview is structured like a narrative. Phrases or sentences in brackets are interpolations for sense and by way of additional context. The section in italics comes not from the interview, but from Clyde's chapter in the book edited with Melissa Benn: A Tribute to Caroline Benn: education and democracy. As a coda, we append details of all Clyde's articles for this journal from 1981, beginning characteristically with a piece entitled "Why Comprehensive Schools?", along with details of his editorials from 1995. [To read Part I of the interview, please see EJ1161433].

This paper is an introductory survey of the evolution of multiculturalism in Britain and Germany over the past two centuries. The historical approach argues that the main determinants of difference between these nation states lie in their long-term traditional attitudes towards immigrants and ethnic minorities. It focuses upon the patterns of immigration into Britain and Germany as well as the differing imperial traditions, which have both left differing legacies. An equally important historical factor has been the legal position of aliens in the two states, in which, until very recently, Britain adopted a policy of "jus solis", whereas Germany pursued one of "jus sanguinis". The paper then examines the realities of multiculturalism in the two states. Due primarily to the historical traditions of nationality legislation, immigrants and their descendants in Britain have come to play a more important role in recent British history than their contemporaries in Germany, particularly if we examine their role in the political process and in popular culture. While the conclusion reiterates the differences, it also stresses that we should not view Britain and Germany as the opposite ends of the multicultural spectrum, as both are modern liberal democracies with significant ethnic minority populations.

The broad concern of this paper is how the relationship between education, democracy and emancipation might be conceived. This theme is explored through examining the contribution of a Rancierian conception of emancipation and democracy to rethinking widening participation in higher education. Following Ranciere, it is argued that taking equality as a starting point in higher education, rather than as a goal to be achieved through education, disrupts a prevailing logic of education as necessarily providing a pathway to emancipation. From this view the pedagogic practices of explication and mastery, which Ranciere argues work to separate academic reason and practical reason, need no longer be understood as the only way to be academic. It is proposed that this 'redistribution of the sensible' enables higher education to be conceived in ways other than available in ongoing educational debates and enables a move beyond an assimilation--recognition binary. Instead, widening participation can be understood as a space for opening up to experience, transformation and change for both academics and students. From this view, democracy is enacted in the here and now, rather than a goal for the future, and practice can be understood as a site for change.

Transnational political communication today is being reconfigured by digital technologies and global power transition. Authoritarian state actors such as China are increasingly active on global social media platforms such as Twitter to directly advance their preferred frames with foreign publics in Western democracies, most notably in what could be called Chinese Twiplomacy contesting narrative globally over contentious issues. This paper problematises such Twiplomacy from authoritarians to Western democracies as 'networked transnational frame contestation', arguing that the political and cultural distance between the sending and target countries, the networked affordance of social media, and the national prism of the target countries, all contribute importantly to the complexity of such frame contestation. Through a case study on China's Twiplomacy in contesting coronavirus narrative in the UK, this paper further provides empirical evidence on how 'networked transnational frame contestation' works between politically and culturally distant countries. Using a mixed-method approach combining social network analysis and discourse analysis, this study finds that China's emotion-evoking discursive strategy draws traction but the authoritarian nature of the highly centralised networkedness and that of its discursive strategy, together with the strong cultural discordance with British publics, lead to networked recontextualisation of its intended frames in Britain. British publics, heavily relying on British political elites and press for foreign affairs, invoke shared cultural reference to recontextualise Chinese frames into culturally resonant counterframes. This study proposes a paradigm of 'networkedness within cascades' to understand frame contestation between politically and culturally distant countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shena Simon (1883–1972), a leading English socialist and educationist, actively called for the reform of secondary education in the 1930s and 1940s in order to bring the ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’ into the English educational system. This paper explores the continuity and changes in Simon’s proposed reforms in relation to her ideals of social democracy from the appearance of the Spens Report (1938) to the publication of her book,Three Schools or One?(1948). In addition, Simon’s transnational visits to the Soviet Union, the USA and Scotland, as well as the impact of her international and comparative perspectives on different educational systems on her policy agenda, are also examined. It concludes that as many policy issues shown in the current paper continue to be debated, Simon’s democratic ideals and discourses are still relevant in the present and suggest implications for the future of secondary education in England. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper advances a functional analysis of the UK constitution. It explores how the UK constitution discharges three minimum 'constituting', 'legitimating' and 'limiting' functions that citizens living in modern liberal democracies may legitimately expect all constitutions – irrespective of form – to perform. This functional enquiry breaks with dominant trends in the legal scholarship that remain focused on theorising the constitution's underlying political or legal nature or, likewise, identifying its ultimate source of authority. In addition to offering a richer descriptive account of constitutional practice, this paper identifies, normatively, an institutional responsibility for Parliament to discharge the UK constitution's three minimum functions. Recognising that institutional responsibility unlocks fresh insights into two constitutional conundrums: the legitimacy of judicial review and the status of 'constitutional statutes'. At the same time, it also exposes deficiencies and tensions in relation to the quality of Parliament's institutional performance on matters of minimum constitutional functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary suggests that a countermovement for educational and social justice must learn from the dominant global neo-liberal movement and its successes in creating institutions and knowledge-making processes and networks. Local struggles for educational justice are important, but they need to be linked to a broader educational justice movement. Such a movement itself has to be seen as part of a struggle for genuine democracy.

This article explores the gap between people and rule (demos and kratos) in democratic societies by exploring the history and practice of broad-based community organising, as applied by London Citizens, United Kingdom (UK). The paper outlines the origins of this model of politics and how it has been translated from the United States to London and the UK. The paper highlights the power of mobilising the demos to put pressure on the decision-making governance structures that determine the kratos. While London Citizens does this through kratos-at-a-distance, the article goes on to explore how hyper-local, neighbourhood-scaled governance structures—'community councils'—could provide a powerful tool to further connect demos to kratos. Such councils could underpin a democratic revival that combines representation and participation at the scale at which people still live their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political accountability requires that voters understand the distribution of policy outcome responsibility among their vote choice options. Research on partisan‐motivated reasoning suggests that voters do not meet this requirement. The problem is that voters condition their attributions of responsibility to the government on their party identification. Government identifiers credit the government for desirable outcomes and blame external forces such as the global economy for undesirable outcomes. This paper draws a more optimistic conclusion. It argues that focusing on the perceived responsibility of the government and external forces is not sufficient for understanding whether voters meet the responsibility attribution requirement. It is also necessary to compare the perceived responsibility of government parties to the perceived responsibility of opposition parties because those are the options that voters get to choose from. This party distribution of perceived responsibility is analyzed with original survey data from Denmark and the United Kingdom. The results demonstrate that while party identification does indeed condition voters' responsibility attributions, both government identifiers and independents attribute systematically more responsibility to the government than to the opposition regardless of the desirability of the outcome. This suggests that voters tend to meet the responsibility attribution requirement of accountability despite the presence of partisan‐motivated reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores pedagogies of surveillance and counter pedagogies of radical democracy and co-operative practice and their implications for continuing professional development (CPD). Teachers have had to respond to an increasing naturalisation of surveillance in schools. However, this naturalisation can be countered by drawing upon the emergent development of the co-operative education movement in the UK. I argue that critical to developing effective pedagogies of radical democracy and co-operation is the formation of a "public space" of discussion and debate about courses of action. This will be illustrated through research drawn from a co-operative school and its use of information technologies. Although the intentions are to improve standards of learning, the hidden curriculum implicit in the use of the technologies can lead to "supersurveillance." Teachers, I argue, have a critical role in the deconstruction of the naturalisation of supersurveillance and both pre-service and CPD urgently need to address this.

Increased attention to the relationship between democracy and education in the UK has been accompanied over the past thirteen years by an interest in how art can be used to promote democratic citizenship. While this approach has led to increased funding for the arts, it is not without its problems, and has often entailed an apolitical and instrumentalist view of both art and education. This paper turns to the political philosophy of Mouffe and Rancière, the work of Rancière in aesthetics, and Biesta's educational philosophy to develop an alternative way of understanding the significance of art for democracy and education. Building on their work, I take a performative and collective view of democratic subjectivity as the basis on which to construct this alternative understanding. I further argue that this conceptualisation can aid our understanding of democratic learning and our ability to provide opportunities for it through art and educational practice.

This paper reports on an action research project into the development of a "democratic feedback model" with students on an education studies programme at a post-1992 university in the UK. Building on work that has explored the dialogic dimensions of assessment and feedback, the research explored the potential for more "democratic" practice in this area. Although much learning and teaching on the programme in question took a collaborative and dialogic approach, assessment and feedback were modelled entirely differently, around the concept of an "expert" marker and "novice" marked. The findings of the research indicate the elements necessary for "democratic feedback", and illustrate the emotional impact of moving from more transmission-based models, grounded in notions of expertise, towards democratic practice. They also highlight the ways in which such work can alert students to the imperfect, messy and human nature of the assessment process. Although the model has limited applicability in its extant form, its constitutive elements might be usefully incorporated within existing practice to promote democratic learning.

This article argues that faith-based schools are a necessary feature of democratic and pluralistic societies and a legitimate expression of human rights as constituted in the European Convention in Human Rights (2000). It further argues that if the rights of parents to have a real choice for faith-based schools (regardless of ability to pay) are to be actualised, then state funding for such schools is required. The article concludes by saying that current arguments that faith-based schools are generative of social or community conflict have no basis in existing empirical research. These arguments, when examined, are not evidence based but rather based upon polemical and prejudiced assertions which give a superficial reading of the causes of community conflict, as in the case of Northern Ireland.

This article argues that comprehensive reorganisation was not a one-off policy reform but a complex, bottom-up campaign for equity and fairness in education, with varied consequences and outcomes. Recent battles over student fees, free schools and academies show that the quest for democratic education does not lead to a permanent achievement but to perpetual struggle with privileged groups who feel themselves threatened by social justice.

In a recent book chapter, Matthew Thompson makes some criticisms of my work, including the interpretive approach to religious education and the research and activity of Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit. Against the background of a discussion of religious education in the public sphere, my response challenges Thompson's account, commenting on his own position in relation to dialogical approaches to religious education. The article rehearses my long held view that the ideal form of religious education in fully state funded schools of a liberal democracy should be "secular" but not "secularist"; there should be no implication of an axiomatic secular humanist interpretation of religions.

This paper engages with a selection of scholarly writing in English that was published in the last decade and written from particular liberal democratic contexts (predominantly the UK, the USA, and Canada). The literature diagnoses the need for a more complex theory of citizenship education and theorises schooling for citizenship in a global orientation. The analysis calls for more explicit attention to the assumptions about the citizen subject student, the "who" of global citizenship education (GCE). Overall, the findings suggest the assumed subject of GCE pedagogy is the autonomous and European citizen of the liberal nation-state who is seen as normative in a mainstream identification as citizen and who must work to encourage a liberal democratic notion of justice on a global scale by "expanding" or "extending" or "adding" their sense of responsibility and obligation to others linearly through the local to national to global community. Thus, this theoretical work contributes a more complex notion of the citizen-subject to accommodate more diversity and to begin to recognise unequal power relations. Ultimately, however, the conceptualisation of global citizen education assumes a particular normative national citizen, and this assumption must be probed and made more explicit. (Contains 13 notes.)

The Coalition Government, building on the foundations laid by its Labour predecessor, aims to dismantle the local authority system and with it what remains of the accountability of schools to local elected government. In this article, a response to Stewart Ranson's in a recent issue of "FORUM," the author examines his claims for the emergence of new forms of participative governance and suggests an alternative approach to taking forward the democratisation of governance in local school systems at neighbourhood and local authority levels in the context of conflicting class interests.

In this paper we critically review recent developments in policies, practices and philosophies pertaining to the mediation between science and the public within the EU and the UK, focusing in particular on the current paradigm of Public Understanding of Science and Technology (PEST) which seeks to depart from the science information-transmission associated with previous paradigms, and enact a deliberative democracy model. We first outline the features of the current crisis in democracy and discuss deliberative democracy as a response to this crisis. We then map out and critically review the broad outlines of recent policy developments in public-science mediation in the EU and UK contexts, focusing on the shift towards the deliberative-democratic model. We conclude with some critical thoughts on the complex interrelationships between democracy, equality, science and informal pedagogies in public-science mediations. We argue that science and democracy operate within distinct value-spheres that are not necessarily consonant with each other. We also problematize the now common dismissal of information-transmission of science as inimical to democratic engagement, and argue for a reassessment of the role and importance of informal science learning for the "lay" public, provided within the framework of a deliberative democracy that is not reducible to consensus building or the mere expression of opinions rooted in social and cultural givens. This, we argue, can be delivered by a model of PEST that is creative and experimental, with both educational and democratic functions.

Those who would defend liberal democracy in today's changing world face a new toleration debate. While we still want to help our children grow up to see the world from other perspectives than their own, we are no longer as sure as we were that we know what toleration means or what it entails. Where education is concerned, it seems the focus is on "tolerance" as an attitude--encouraging people to be tolerant--but where the public debate is concerned, the focus is narrower. It becomes a question of what should "be tolerated" and what the law should allow or proscribe. But however interpreted, the underlying unclarity remains and it inevitably affects educational choices. Must we approve as well as permit? Must we refrain from judgement? Is tolerance something that is due to people themselves or does it include their views and opinions? And how should we respond if it should turn out to be impossible to tolerate one group or view without discriminating against another? In this paper I discuss two particular aspects of the new toleration debate, both of which involve presuppositions about personal and family life and religious and cultural identity. These are: (1) the moral and political issues prompted by the presence of newcomers in societies with different religious and cultural traditions from their own; and (2) a new and combative form of secularism within those societies. (Contains 8 notes.)

This paper explores how civic engagement as an important dimension of public engagement in higher education has been slow to develop in the UK, despite an important history dating from the "civic universities" in the nineteenth century. I specifically consider the development of "service learning" as an important way in which the values and practices of democratic citizenship can be embedded in the curriculum of higher education. Finally, I examine how the decline of the ideal of "public service" in the UK provides some significant barriers to the re-development of the civic university.

Since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was ratified in 1991, children's right to have a voice, and to have their opinions heard, has led many providers and practitioners in the field of early years to seek ways to involve children's perspectives in the evaluation and development of practice. Those who value democracy understand that encouraging young children to actively participate has long term implications for participatory citizenship. Researchers in early childhood have also been sensitised to the challenge of inclusive research, in which our youngest children are viewed as active subjects, rather than objects, in a research process that is set in the context of a democratic encounter. The Centre for Research in Early Childhood in Birmingham, England has a strong ethical commitment to including the voices of children as an integral part of all its research and development work. We operate through an ethos of empowerment of all participants, and aim for participatory research practice which has at its heart an active involvement in promoting the rights of children as citizens with voice and power. This paper will trace a brief history of the children's participatory position in England and explore the struggles and challenges we, as researchers, have faced in making our personal commitment to children's participation a reality. It will draw upon the work of a series of research and development projects we have undertaken over the last fifteen years in which we tried to work alongside children to explore and document their realities of life in early childhood settings. These projects include the Effective Early Learning (EEL) Programme, the Accounting Early for Life Long Learning (AcE) Programme, the Children Crossing Borders Project (Bertram and Pascal 2007) and the Opening Windows (OW) Programme. Through the work of these projects, and with an especial focus on the Children Crossing Borders research, which was the precursor to the OW programme, we explain how we have attempted to provide space for multiple voices in the research process. We share our learning about how better to support and listen to the voices of young children, who are the most often silenced in the production of knowledge and understandings about their lives. From this experience, methodological and epistemological lessons for researchers and practitioners will be identified and further explored.