How policy impacts on practice and how practice does not impact on policy

Our project attempts to understand how the Learning and Skills Sector functions. It traces how education and training policy percolates down through many levels in the English system and how these levels interact, or fail to interact. Our first focus is upon how policy impacts upon the interests of three groups of learners: unemployed people in adult and community learning centres, adult employees in work-based learning and younger learners on Level 1 and Level 2 courses in further education. Our next focus is upon how professionals in these three settings struggle to cope with two sets of pressures upon them: those exerted by government and a broader set of professional, institutional and local factors. We describe in particular how managers and tutors mediate national policy and translate it (and sometimes mistranslate it) into local plans and practices. Finally we criticise the new government model of public service reform for failing to harness the knowledge, good will and energy of staff working in the sector, and for ignoring what constitutes the main finding of our research: the central importance of the relationship between tutor and students

Exploring ways of promoting an equality discourse using non-text/creative approaches for learning in the everyday lives of adult literacy learners

The chapter looks at the relationship between literacy, equality and creativity and the relavance of these concepts for literacy practice. Drawing on the experience of an action research project ,it looks at how learners can develop their literacies through improving their understand of inequalities using non- text methods of delivery

Family learning and the socio-spatial practice of 'supportive' power

Family learning has been an important mode of education deployed by governments in the United Kingdom over the past 20 years, and is positioned at the nexus of various social policy areas whose focus stretch beyond education. Drawing on qualitative research exploring mothers' participation in seven different family learning programmes across West London, this paper looks at how this type of education is mobilised; that is, how mothers are 'encouraged' to participate and benefit from this type of programme. Framed by a neo-liberal policy climate and Foucauldian writings on governmentality and surveillance, we explore how participating mothers are carefully 'targeted' for this type of learning through their children and through school/ nursery spaces, and how programmes themselves then operate as a supportive social space aimed at facilitating social networks, friendship and personal development linked to positions of gender, ethnicity, class and migrant status. It is the socio-spatial workings of 'supportive' power and power relations that enable family learning to be mobilised that ensures its popularity as a social policy initiative.The British Academy (small research grant SG42092)

Early childhood policy and practice in England: twenty years of change

This article offers a chronological account and critical appraisal of changes to early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in England over the past 20 years. It describes the policy initiatives, educational interventions and research programmes introduced by successive governments that have effected significant changes to ECEC since 1990. The article covers four key areas: policies designed to reduce social inequality; the professionalisation of the children’s workforce, and changing status of adults employed in pre-school education and care settings; changes to early years pedagogy and the early years curriculum; and finally how major research programmes such as the Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) project and the Millennium Cohort Study have informed our understanding of the effects of social disadvantage and the characteristics of ‘high-quality’ pre-school provision that can alleviate this. There is now persuasive evidence that investment in state-maintained early education is highly cost effective, particularly for disadvantaged children. The current government, however, is shifting the burden of funding for professional training and high-quality integrated services for children and families from the state to the private and voluntary sectors. Time will tell if this is a backward step or movement in the right direction