Should we be worried about controversial government plans to do away with parent governors in schools?

The government recently announced a series of changes to the oversight and governance of schools, with the most controversial concerning the ‘academisation’ of all English secondary schools, and what may amount to the abolition of the role of the parent governor. Here, Andrew Wilkins casts his eye over the changes – and in particular the latter, arguing that we now have an opportunity to think seriously about building capacity to harness the creative energy of families and communities as co-producers and co-creators of education services

Academisation and the law of ‘attraction’: An ethnographic study of relays, connective strategies and regulated participation

Combining elements of critical ethnography (Madison 2011) with perspectives borrowed from the field of governmentality research (Lemke 2007; Rose 1999), this chapter examines and evidences the prevalence of specific forms of expert administration considered to be operationally necessary to performing school governance. Furthermore, it considers the effects of these calculative rationalities and technologies, namely the creation of forms of epistemic injustice that include restricting school governance work to the knowledge claims of certain authorities and actors

School choice and constructing the active citizen: Representations and negotiations of active, responsible parenting

A key feature of policy reform and political development in Britain since the 1980s has been the idea that public services are more responsive, flexible and better managed when citizens engage with them as discriminating users or consumers, in education, this approach to reform has been criticised for undermining associations and relations that engender citizenship-based commitments to ideas of public welfarism and a democratic citizenry. This thesis explores diverse sources and types of evidence in order to map the field through which parents are invited to deploy meanings and vocabularies that register a consumerist orientation to school choice, and to illustrate the sets of contrasting and sometimes contradictory discourses enacted by parents in their interpretations and understandings of their role as chooser

New Star Forming Galaxies at z\approx 7 from WFC3 Imaging

The addition of Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has led to a dramatic increase in our ability to study the z>6 Universe. The increase in the near-infrared (NIR) sensitivity of WFC3 over previous instruments has enabled us to reach apparent magnitudes approaching 29 (AB). This allows us to probe the rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) continuum, redshifted into the NIR at $z>6$. Taking advantage of the large optical depths at this redshift, resulting in the Lyman-alpha break, we use a combination of WFC3 imaging and pre-existing Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) imaging to search for z approx 7 over 4 fields. Our analysis reveals 29 new z approx 7 star forming galaxy candidates in addition to 16 pre-existing candidates already discovered in these fields. The improved statistics from our doubling of the robust sample of z-drop candidates confirms the previously observed evolution of the bright end of the luminosity function.Comment: 15 pages, accepted in MNRA

Wireless Competition in Canada: Damn the Torpedoes! The Triumph of Politics over Economics

Last year featured a high stakes battle between two mighty protagonists. On one side, allegedly representing the interests of all Canadians, the federal government. On the other side, Bell, Rogers, and Telus. The issue at stake: What institutions should govern the allocation of resources in the provision of wireless services? Should the outcomes — prices, quality, availability, and other terms of service — be determined by the market? Or should the government intervene? The answer to these questions should depend on the extent of competition and the ability of wireless providers to exercise inefficient market power — raise prices above their long run average cost of providing services. Do Bell, Rogers, and Telus exercise substantial inefficient market power? The accumulated wisdom of market economies is that state intervention inevitably is very costly, given asymmetries of information, uncertainty, and political pressure. At the very least the onus on those demanding and proposing government action is to provide robust evidence of the substantial exercise of inefficient market power. This paper is a contribution to the ongoing debate regarding the existence and extent of market power in the provision of wireless services in Canada. The conventional wisdom that competition in wireless services was insufficient was challenged by our earlier School of Public Policy paper.†† In that study we demonstrated that the Canadian wireless sector was sufficiently competitive. The evidentiary record we developed was not consistent with a robust finding of a substantial exercise of inefficient market power; policy efforts to create and sustain more competition were unlikely to be successful without ongoing subsidization; and to the extent those efforts were successful, they would likely to lead to an inefficient allocation of scarce resources, with the benefits of additional competition less than its costs. The federal government’s standard bearer in this debate has been the Competition Bureau. The Competition Bureau has made submissions and commissioned expert evidence in regulatory proceedings that conclude that there is market power in the provision of wireless services in Canada and there are substantial benefits to enhancing competition. This follow-up paper is a critical assessment of the Competition Bureau’s submissions and the expert evidence on which it is based. We remain unconvinced that market power is a problem in wireless services or that additional competition in wireless services is efficient. As explained at length in this paper, the expert evidence prepared for the Competition Bureau on both points is simply insufficient to warrant regulation and subsidization of competition. The evidence with respect to market power is inconsistent with substantiality and it is not robust. The expert evidence does not address whether entry is efficient. Instead it provides only an estimate of the competitive benefits of a fourth national entrant — not its costs — and it does not assess the financial viability of a fourth national competitor. The assessment of the competitive benefits of entry are unreliable, attributable to both the methodologies used by the expert and the assumptions required to implement its simulation methodology. The lack of fit between outcomes derived from the model and calibrated parameters with observed values indicate that the concerns over the specification and assumptions in implementing the model are well-founded. Its inaccuracies pre-entry cast considerable doubt on its use to accurately forecast the effect of a fourth national entrant. Given the absence of compelling evidence demonstrating the substantial exercise of inefficient market power, the evidence that more than three carriers likely raises concerns regarding financial viability without ongoing subsidization, and the evidence that additional entry is inefficient, one wonders how long the federal government and its agencies will continue the failed policy of attempting to “enhance competition” in wireless markets. What will be the final cost to Canadians of an economically vacuous commitment to the proposition that competition is measured by the number of competitors