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The Research Excellence Framework is a high-stakes exercise used by the UK government to allocate billions of pounds of quality-related research (QR) funding and used by the media to rank universities and their departments in national league tables. The 2008, 2014 and 2021 assessments were zero-sum games in terms of league table position because the outcomes were captured as Grade Point Averages (GPA) on a ratio scale, unlike the 1996 and 2001 iterations when departments were ranked on a simple seven-point ordinal scale. Although league tables were never part of the assessment itself, they were inevitable in 2008, 2014 and 2021 given the nature of the scoring, and subsequent league table position had a significant effect on investment and disinvestment within universities. This paper uses data from the 2008, 2014 and 2021 assessments to look at the changing competitiveness of different subjects, the size of submissions, and how these are related to QR funding. It finds that competition in the UK research sector is exceptionally tough, but that competitiveness and QR funding are so closely related to submission size that it calls into question the benefit of carrying out any more assessment exercises in their current format.

This paper employs a social identity approach to explore the management of a collective organizational culture in a culturally diverse context. Literature suggests that cultural diversity can be an asset for organizations if managed effectively. This study employs a qualitative case-study design, drawn on data generated for a larger project that utilized 16 interviews, eight team meetings' observations, document analysis and field notes. It instrumentally uses a Department of English as its site due to the prevalence of cultural diversity in such context. The paper explores whether leadership is perceived as effective towards establishing a collective identity in an Omani higher education (HE) domain. The findings suggest that leadership impact is restricted by the central management of the system that translates largely into transactional leadership and hierarchical approaches at the level of the group and largely fails to establish such an inclusive identity. The paper argues that in a globalizing era, Omani HE can only view cultural diversity as an asset that aids its intellectual capital establishment. Hence, it should cater for such a composition and engineer it effectively to achieve better alignment with the requirements of the current market. These findings can be of value to policy makers, researchers and professionals in HE.

The COVID pandemic and the cancellation of state examinations caused unprecedented turmoil in the education systems on both sides of the Irish Sea. As the policy of calculating grades using purpose-built algorithms came undone in the face of a barrage of appeal, protest and legal action, the context in which the policies had been devised collapsed. The British and Irish governments had initially adopted similar approaches to issuing examination grades, but then diverged into different stratagems pre- and post-results, with significantly different outcomes. The Irish examination system emerged relatively unscathed, while the system in England suffered what was probably its greatest policy failure of modern times. This article examines and memorialises how and why this happened, and draws lessons for a future in which school closures and substitute examinations become the 'new normal'.

In this short thought-piece, I attempt to capture the type of freewheeling discussions I had with our late colleague, Mika Seppälä, a research mathematician from Helsinki. Mika, not being a psychometrician or learning scientist, was blissfully free from the design constraints that experts sometimes ingest, unwittingly. I also draw on delightful conversations with the German research mathematician, Heinz-Otto Peitgen, a polyglot whose work includes advances in medical imaging and explorations in fractal geometry for K-12 students. Together, they taught me to reconsider foundational assumptions about learning, how to describe it, and how to grow it. Accordingly, I use this set of papers as a prompt for examining assumptions that numerical precision ensures scientific insight, that linear models best capture growth in learning, and that relaxing a fixation with time (exemplified by the reification of pre- and post-testing) might open up new topologies for describing, predicting, and promoting learning in its myriad manifestations.

The concept of capital has risen in prominence within educational policy and practice in the UK since Ofsted introduced cultural capital into its inspection processes in 2019. At the same time, fractured discourses exist across different types of capital -- one of which concerns capitals that are negative in constitution and/or impact. This paper addresses both through: (1) A systematic literature review of these negativities (in social, economic, and intellectual capital) and a thematic analysis of these papers, leading to the derivation of a definition of negative capital; (2) An evaluation of the merit of negative capital via its compatibility with Bourdieu's concepts of social field, social field homology, habitus, and hysteresis; and (3) The application of negative capital to a range of examples from educational practice and theory, including a challenge to Ofsted's use of cultural capital.

This paper presents findings from a recent study on choice-making among teachers, school leaders and parents in a for-profit British international school in Kuwait. Using a Bourdieusian field analysis, the choice-making of the various stakeholders is investigated to reveal their positionality within the school's social space, to examine the resources they hold and the capitals in which they are willing to invest. We find that choices made by, and within, an international school reveal symbolic violence, and a 'taken-for-granted understanding' that this form of schooling (British- rather than American-style international schooling) is superior. Participants in the study included teachers, parents, graduating class students and school leaders. Teachers and parents were a representative mix of local (both Arab and non-Arab) and expatriate. The study makes an important contribution to the body of knowledge relating to international schools, in its theoretical framework and its inclusion of the wider stakeholder population, which together generate a deeper understanding of professional practice in the international school context.