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Conservative trends across western schooling contexts are signalling an explicit devaluing of social and moral learning within their official curriculum mandates. These mandates are increasingly privileging the ‘academic rigour’ of traditional subject disciplines. This paper draws on interview and observation data from a case study of a large and highly diverse English secondary school to explore this school’s prioritizing of social and moral learning. Such prioritizing is supported at this school by its ‘Academy’ status—which in the English context allows schools a measure of freedom over curriculum as part of broader government moves to increase school autonomy. The paper’s focus is on how these conservative trends are understood and disrupted to support a critical view of existing curriculum and a desire to modify and re-shape it to support more relevant and connected learning for students. The paper describes particular examples of practice at the school in the areas of Citizenship and Religious Education to illustrate this approach. Engaging with social and moral learning along these lines is argued as productive in working within and against the constraints of current conservative curriculum priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports on the findings of work to develop a Clinical Leadership Competency Framework (CLCF) that will be used by all the regulated clinical professions across the UK. The CLCF was created, with the agreement of the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, from the Medical Leadership Competency Framework (MLCF), which was created and developed and is owned jointly by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. Although the context and scenarios described in the MLCF are particular to doctors, the generic leadership competences were considered potentially applicable to all clinicians in their practitioner roles. The aim of this project was to work with the clinical professions to build leadership awareness and capability across the health service, by assessing the readiness of the clinical professions to embed leadership competences in undergraduate education, postgraduate training and continuing professional development. The work that has been undertaken to date shows that there is widespread recognition that leadership is important, and that the development of clinical leadership is viewed as absolutely critical. It represents a fundamental change in the way we train and educate clinicians. The next step for the CLCF project team is to work with professional bodies, regulators and education establishments to help them to embed the CLCF effectively, and this work is already under way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2012, Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond announced a radical measure that would see every Scottish school student study a Scottish text from a prescribed list. In 2010, Michael Gove announced that ‘Our literature is the best in the world’ and that every pupil should study particular authors. The ‘cultural heritage’ model of English is increasingly dismissed by teachers and students However, it is this ‘cultural heritage’ model which is preserved in the discourse of politicians. This paper explores the role that literary heritage texts play in the discourse of education policy in the context of devolution in twenty-first century Britain and considers the drivers and differences which can be seen in England and Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]