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This thesis explores the links between sexuality and academic achievement for girls in secondary education. It investigates primarily how sexual and learner identities are embodied by young women and the implications of this for their educational success or failure, their emotional well-being, their relationships and their imagined adulthoods. I research a range of young women's experiences across the spectrum of educational attainment and draw from a range of self-identified and emergent sexualities and asexual practices. In contrast to much work which explores only the experience of young women's developing heterosexualities, the research presented here focuses particularly on young women who have emergent lesbian, bisexual or trans-gendered identities or who practise culturally marginalised forms of heterosexuality. Although based on a small selection of case studies, it includes the experience of asylum seekers pupils, Traveller pupils and minority ethnic pupils. I argue here that the Cartesian mind/body split as it is enshrined in the standards and school effectiveness agendas has detrimental consequences for both highly achieving pupils and those who are not academically successful as defined within these agendas. The study concludes by suggesting that learning about sexuality and sexual knowledge needs to be more centrally and openly present in schools in order that marginalised sexual identities are able to participate more fully in learning that the complexity of the relationship between sexuality and learning in psychoanalytic accounts is made available to teachers and that more research is undertaken to make visible girls who 'do girl' differently, by adopting non-normative sexualities or through the practice of masculinity.

In September 2010 Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, introduced the Academies Act. This was part of the Conservative educational manifesto to extend the powers of City Academies programme to 'free' more local authority schools. Academisation disrupted the British educational landscape by creating a new hybrid model of education, positioned in the blurred boundaries of traditional local authority maintained schools, and private fee paying schools. Thus began a new language and common sense way of thinking about a culture of academisation and the disarticulation of educational governance. Research into academisation has generated interest in recent years with many studies focussing on the impact of academies policies. This thesis offers a new perspective and insight of academies and academisation as well as contributing an analysis and new understanding into the cultural framing of academisation in the public imagination. Grounded in the theoretical and conceptional works of Stuart Hall, Richard Johnson, and Raymond Williams, I mobilised their understanding and approaches to representation, culture, and ideology as a mean to study the framing which has existed in popular media since 2010. Methodologically, I situated this thesis in a qualitative post-structuralist paradigm, employing thematic analysis as the means to study media representations. The data was collected across from print, online, broadcast, and social media over a ten-year period. Findings suggest that popular media have contributed to the development of political and ideological narratives and mobilised representations of academisation which have support an educational commonsense. These educational commonsenses also mobilised moral panics and played into the imagined fear of audiences in an attempt to reinforce dominant hegemonic narratives. Over the last decade, there have been four distinct periods that political representations of academisation have fed into a wider common sense way of thinking the role of the academies programme in society. In the culture of everyday life, popular media have presented different ways of thinking about what academisation means. Narratives and representations have been normalised as part of the cultural framing which exists.

This thesis is a study of the discourse on disability as it is encountered by disabled teachers within schools. This discourse is researched through three primary strands of data. The first source of data resulted from interviews conducted with teachers with disabilities. Nine teachers were interviewed. I also interviewed head teachers so as to set the analysis of the discourse in the fuller context of practices within schools. Three headteachers were interviewed. The third strand of data used in this thesis consisted of equality legislation and supporting documents. The question under investigation was this: 'how does the discourse on disability within schools constrain, restrict or empower disabled teachers'? The method of analysis used was that of discourse analysis. My theoretical analysis follows the work of Michel Foucault whom I chose because his analysis of the normalising and disciplinary discourses in society offered theories of society that supported the rubric of Disability Studies with a focus of disability in line with the social model of disability. The main conclusions of this thesis are that schools as disciplinary institutions are constrained themselves to operate through normalising and disciplinary discourses. These discourses constrain all teachers. The Equality Act 2010 is premised on the basis of formal equality and, as such, would posit that all teachers in schools are constrained in identical ways. My analysis refutes that view and I argue that the discourses through which teachers are constrained to act constrain disabled teachers more than others because the practices of these discourses posit a non disabled person. However, I show also the ways the teachers interviewed resisted the subjection offered. Foucault's theory of the care of the self, in particular, begins to offer a nuanced way to analyse this resistance. I end the thesis with suggestions for implementing change.

This research explores the contribution of policy techniques, policy process and performativity in the construction of teachers with specific learning differences (SpLDs) as subjects in the English Further Education (FE) sector. The research inquiry moves beyond subjective accounts of how teachers with SpLD navigate through the expectations of what it is to be a teaching professional, and instead appreciates how a set of circumstances created by FE sector policy reform and policy techniques, contributes to the subjectification of teachers with SpLDs. There exists a dearth of research that explores wider policy influences and policy techniques at the micro and meso levels of the FE sector. This research is situated within the interpretivist paradigm, adopting the qualitative technique of semi-structured interviews with fifteen participants from the FE sector. This research explores policy in practice and appreciates a much wider approach to policy, moving beyond just considering policy as text and encapsulating policy as discourse (Ball, 1994) within the analysis. Existing policy in practice research tends to adopt a managerial perspective in understanding the policy process. This research looks at both the micro and meso levels of the FE sector by including policy actors from a range of FE institutions, agencies, organisations and departments. In addition, the inquiry appreciates the hegemonic macro influence of performative discourse. The research concludes with three findings: 1 the cult of the performative teacher; 2 post-panoptic performativity; 3 prove or improve techniques. The teacher with SpLDs as a policy actor is orientated within the same policy environ as all policy actors from the FE sector. This thesis further contributes to the practice of research in terms of the process of data analysis, but also by placing the policy research within the practice of education in the FE sector.

I explore the experiences of children with Special Education Needs and disabilities (SEND) placed in two mainstream primary schools within postcolonial Guyana. It is a qualitative study, which employed situational analysis as posited by Adele Clarke (2005, 2008). I embraced the social model of disability. I also used the poststructuralist lens to understand the discourse, meaning and interpretations of the experiences of children with SEND. Throughout the nine chapters in this thesis, I argue that the placement of children with SEND in the two mainstream primary schools I studied was an unpleasant, marginalising and depersonalising experience for the children. In this study, I make five significant contributions to the literature. First, I provide an understanding of the experiences of children with SEND in the two mainstream primary schools studied. Second, I provide a southern inclusive framework to guide the placement of children with SEND in mainstream schools in Guyana. Third, I give a southern inclusive checker as a tool to support the framework and guide mainstream teachers to self-monitor and regulate their practice. This could initiate more meaningful experiences for all children in an inclusive learning environment. It could also support mainstream teachers in making simple, reasonable adjustments to reduce barriers faced by children which are unique to the mainstream schooling within postcolonial Guyana. Fourth, I provide guidelines for the development of the structures, practices and values within the Guyanese education system. Finally, I offer an analysis of the northern social model of disability frameworks from a southern perspective and explain the challenges and opportunities within these frameworks if they are to be used extensively in Guyana.