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The main objective of this paper is to examine the role of students' aspirations and expectations in affecting school achievement among 7th and 8th grade students in Qatar's schools. The study draws on data collected in Qatari schools from a randomly selected sample of 841 students and their parents. The findings indicate that students' educational aspirations have a stronger effect on students' school performance when compared to students' educational expectations, even when controlling for demographic factors, school attitude, and parental expectations. This finding directly contributes to the debate in the literature about the relative importance of aspirations and expectations, while also confirming what other studies have suggested- that the meaning and the way in which both aspirations and expectations operate is contextually relative. Context plays a significant role here, and consequently, leaves the debate over what matters more, aspirations or expectations, widely open.

European/UNESCO interculturalism (IC) emerged as a critique of multiculturalism (MC) (complicated by the fact that there is an alternative interculturalism, not discussed here). I suggest that this relationship has gone through three phases. "Phase one" begins in the 1990s with a general dissatisfaction with MC from many political and intellectual sources. "Phase two," roughly from about the middle of the last decade, is when IC scholars, mainly sociologists, though also in cultural studies, policy studies, migration studies, geography as well as education emerge in significant numbers. The engagement with multiculturalism is limited and serves the purpose of clearing the ground in order to get on with a new research approach and then getting on with it. "Phase three" is the political theory justification of IC. I argue that these three phases have not established a pro-diversity 'ism' which can replace MC. While I hope we may move on to a "phase four," where MC and IC are seen to be complementary, I here re-state what I think are the key concepts of MC. I hope it will be evident that firstly, that these concepts are not out of date or redundant; and secondly, therefore, that IC is wrong to abandon them.

This study compares the educational attainment of Muslim and Christian White-British boys and girls at the following junctions: Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, GCSE, getting into universities and achieving a place at a Russell Group university. The study utilises the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England waves 1-6 with linked data from the National Pupil Database. The analysis shows that once we take previous school performance into account, Muslim students seem to be performing as well as the majority group, even in attending Russell group universities. Muslim girls seem to now be outperforming Muslim boys, especially in relation to their school performance. Furthermore, parental expectations and students' own expectations play an important role in determining the attainment of students. The study concludes that the higher achievement of young Muslims may be strongly correlated with their own unusually high expectations of going to university; but a primary source of the latter is likely to be the parents' unusually high expectations, the messages they receive and the discipline in place in relation to schoolwork at home and their relationship with their parents and their parents' norms.

The issue of working out a viable relationship between accepting and/or living with diversity on the one hand and fostering integration on the other has occupied public debates, political agendas, and social sciences for decades. Our point of departure is that the contemporary European context provides distinct challenges. We need to understand how postmigrant integration is shaped and conditioned by the European public space understood as a geographical space; a composite of legally and institutionally constituted entities; covering nations, regions, and cities mainly within but also beyond the EU; and a site of interaction, and public expression of contestation and cooperation. In so doing, we have to contend with the fact that such important perspectives for handling diversity as multiculturalism, interculturalism, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism occupy distinct roles within the European public space whose governance is multi-levelled yet not reducible to a single tiered system. The European public space is more encompassing than the EU even while that level of governance has some important regulative functions upon member states and to some extent even on non-EU states such as Norway and the UK, especially in what we refer to as the outer circle. While the national level is the most powerful normatively and by most other measures on the inclusion of difference (our inner circle), municipalities also contribute to the constitution of this space. We explore the logics of our four 'isms' and of the tiers of governance and their interaction with each other, both the isms in tensions and syntheses with each other and differentially in relation to the levels of governance. This is an exercise that has not been done before. Our purpose is to suggest a new normativity that might feasibly achieve a broader degree of support and success than any of the isms have achieved alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses whether multiculturalism, interculturalism and cosmopolitanism find themselves in tension or, rather, coexist in UK politics. This is done through the analysis of recent policy and civil society documents, complemented with semi-structured interviews with race equality organizations. Results suggest a complementary relationship between these normative perspectives, with interculturalism and multiculturalism jointly shaping the central government's policy as well as the discourse of civil society organizations. As for cosmopolitanism, it manifests itself primarily in civil society's support for a more humane system for asylum seekers, as well as in the endorsement of EU intervention in the governance of cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]