Engaging with childhood: student placements and the employability agenda.

Employability is a particular organising narrative within the global, neoliberal economic discourse, with increasing relevance across different educational contexts. For universities in the UK, student employability, that is the readiness of students to gain and maintain employment and contribute to the economy, is a significant feature of accountability with employability outcomes increasingly used by students in making their decision of which university to attend. Yet little attention is paid to the organizing power of the employability agenda and to university students’ participation in that agenda apart from focussing on knowledge and skills relevant to gain employment. This is particularly concerning in university programmes that develop professionals who work with children. Placement, gaining knowledge, skills and experience in the places where children and young people are found, is a common aspect of employability being embedded within programme curricula. This article explores the organising power of the employability agenda for children and young people in a context of university placements. Focused on student experiences on placement in primary school settings in the north of England analysis considers students’ engagement with their own learning and the children who are essential to that learning

Who’s listening to whom? The UK House of Lords and evidence-based policy-making on citizenship education

The 2017–2019 House of Lords’ select committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement made a number of bold proposals to reinvigorate citizenship education in the UK. However, the public and academic debate surrounding the Lords’ report and its recommendations has been startlingly muted. To tackle this lacuna, this article analyses a range of ‘policy documents’ alongside the Lords’ report to make three distinct contributions. Firstly, this article is the first detailed analysis of the Lords’ report and what it says about the state of citizenship education after two decades of varying policy narratives and implementation. Secondly, I take the Lords’ report as a ‘window’ onto policy-making under the Conservative and Coalition governments since 2010. I find that the Government approach to citizenship education and affiliated programmes such as the National Citizen Service is out-of-step with the thoughts, experience, and advice of ‘the policy community’. By contrast, the findings presented here highlight the potential for the House of Lords to play an important new role in the policy process. Thirdly, this article is methodologically innovative, insofar as I combine qualitative data collection with computational text analysis that is still rare in policy studies undertaken in both education and political science

The politics of early school leaving: how do the European Union and the Spanish educational authorities ‘frame’ the policy and formulate a ‘theory of change’

This article is an outcome of ABJOVES (Early school leaving in Spain. An analysis of young people's decisions, motivations and educational strategies)The article analyses the interaction between the European Commission and a sample of educational authorities in Spain with regard to the policy against early school leaving. Although this member state scores the highest proportion of early school leavers, apparently it is not adoptin some key recommendations issued by the Commission. In fact, while educational policy studies regret this "resistance", studies on EU policies suggest that the EU and the states normally negotiate the ambition and the evaluation of policies in complex ways. In this vein, the article draws on a method of discourse analysis to observe to what extent these educational authorities 'frame' the policy in the same terms and share a similar rationale or 'theory of change'. In brief, the findings point out that the EU, the Government of Spain and two significant regional governments retrieve a similar 'frame' but do not agree regarding the 'theory of change'