16 research outputs found
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
Beyond compliance: teacher education practice in a performative framework
publication-status: Publishe
Middle attainers and 14-19 progression in England : half-served by New Labour and now overlooked by the Coalition?
In the context of the international problem of âearly school leavingâ, this paper explores the issue of sustained participation in upper secondary education in England. It focuses in particular on the position of middle attainers, who constitute a large proportion of the cohort and whose progress will be vital in realising the Governmentâs goal of âRaising the Participation Ageâ to 18 by 2015. The paper draws on evidence from national research undertaken as part of the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training in England and Wales and analysis of New Labour and Coalition policy between 2000-2012. It uses a three-year local study of 2400 14- and 16-year-olds in an established school/college consortium to illustrate the effects of policy and practice on middle attainers. We argue that this important group of young people was âhalf-servedâ by New Labour, because of its incomplete and contradictory 14-19 reforms, and is now being âoverlookedâ by Coalition policy because of its emphasis on high attainers. We conclude by suggesting a range of measures to support the 14+ participation, progression and transition of middle attainers in the English education and training syste