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This paper draws on the first, completed phase of a research project on inspection as governing in three European inspection systems. The data presented here draw attention to the rather under-researched associational activities of European inspectorates and their developing practices of policy learning and exchange, and highlight their significance as contributing to an emergent European Education Policy Space (EEPS). The paper is framed by original approaches to inspection that locate it as a set of governing practices, connected to changing governing forms and the growth of networks of relationships and flows of data across Europe. Comparisons are drawn between the relationships with Europe of inspectorates in Scotland, Sweden and England, drawing on Jacobsson's conceptualisation of regulative, inquisitive and meditative governance as a framing device.

Professor Sir Godfrey Thomson is one of the key foundational actors in the history of the educational sciences in the UK. At a time when educational studies and the study of educational psychology were very closely linked, in the decades of the mid-twentieth century, Thomson was a crucial figure in education research. He is known for his work on intelligence, factorial analysis and the validation and production of intelligence tests (the Moray House tests). However, he viewed himself as a teacher in his work as a professor at the University of Edinburgh and as director of Moray House teachers' college. He managed closely an ambitious plan to develop an advanced school of education, combining the university department of education, teacher training and a demonstration school, and supervised and taught on many of its courses. This paper is based on a unique resource, an audio recording of Thomson teaching in the early 1950s. It considers the distinctiveness and the research value of this audio source in relation to complementary oral and documentary sources. (Contains 2 figures and 43 footnotes.)

Here we reprint, and provide background and a commentary on, a recently-rediscovered lecture by Godfrey H. Thomson entitled, "Intelligence and civilisation." It was delivered at the University of Manchester, UK, on 23rd October, 1936, printed in 1937 in the short-lived "Journal of the University of Manchester" and as a pamphlet in Edinburgh. It was one in the series of lectures supported by the industrialist and philanthropist Ludwig Mond. The lecture is unusually valuable in that it places the theory, testing and practical application of intelligence against the background of the rise of fascism and its threat to civilisation. The lecture is a candid and accessible "confession and contemplation"; the frank thoughts of a person committed to, but critical of, intelligence testing and theory, but convinced of the power and place of intelligence differences in people's lives and in civilisation. It comes at an important time for Thomson, with regard to three of his major achievements: his Moray House Test series, the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 (and the Northumbrian testing exercise that preceded it), and the preparation of his book "The Factorial Analysis of Human Ability." The understanding of the lecture is enhanced by recently-discovered archive materials on Thomson and his circle. ([Thomson, G.H. (1937a). "Intelligence and civilisation: A Ludwig Mond lecture delivered at the University of Manchester on October 23rd, 1936." "Journal of the University of Manchester," 1, 18-38], from the Ludwig Mond lecture). (Contains 3 figures.)

The field of education research has grown enormously in England over the last 25 years--in size, complexity, forms of production and purpose. It has been shaped by governmental, market and production changes, and it appears to be moving outside the university sector as well. The British Educational Research Association is trying to map the field and to make sense of its development. This article begins with a search for relevant data about the key elements in the field--personnel, institutions, output, etc.--and tries to draw conclusions about the next steps in the inquiry. (Contains 6 figures, 12 tables and 9 notes.)

Discussions of four periods in the history of the United Kingdom's teacher education policy highlight context-based teacher quality. The article examines how policymakers define teacher quality in policy changes or management action. It views teacher quality as the way changes in teacher recruitment, training, and work are managed. (SM)

Through a study of a privately funded and ambitious inquiry into the education system of the United States, the relations between the development of comparative education as an activity and the governing of education systems in the early 20th century can be illuminated. The relations and interests of early comparativists were mobilized and enhanced by private funding and significant numbers of public actors in education were involved in comparative inquiry. The 1903 Mosely Commission was a philanthropic intervention to reengineer the patchwork of English education, and an attempt to modernize it and influence its government on a large scale. Its innovation was in its methods of influence as well as its scientific reports. The Commission was a hybrid, transnational institution, using comparison to modernize the government of education, mainly involving policy actors and finally, claimed neither by the history or comparative study of education. Consequently, its significance has been lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Forty years ago, sociology, psychology, philosophy and history had a secure position in the academic study of education in the UK but that is no longer the case. The policy context that has increasingly come to influence our teaching and the funding of our research, with its pressure on the production of knowledge which stresses use value, has, we argue, increasingly marginalised the potential of disciplinary contributions to the study of education. In this introductory paper to this special issue, we begin by examining competing definitions of what a discipline actually is and then chart the rise and fall of the influence of the different disciplines in education over the last 40 years. Following Barnet (1990), we do that through examining both their 'sociological' undermining (changes in their mechanisms and sites of production) and their 'epistemological' undermining with the growing public and self doubt about their contribution. The result, we suggest, is that now we have a large number of professionals working together but, when compared with other social science disciplines, lacking in intellectual autonomy and coherence. But, we ask, does that matter? Do sociology, psychology, philosophy and history—and indeed the whole range of disciplinary based perspectives—economics, geography—have anything to offer research, scholarship and university teaching in education now and in the future? We suggest that this is the challenge that the disciplines of education now face in the UK and it is the challenge we posed to the contributors to this special issue of the Oxford Review of Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]