Applying to higher education: comparisons of independent and state schools

This paper reports on research into the ways that schools engage in university application processes. Questionnaire and interview data were collected from 1400 Year 13 students from 18 independent and state schools in England and 15 in-depth interviews were carried out with school teacher higher education (HE) advisors. The analysis compares independent and state schools with respect to: the types of higher education institutions (HEIs) that students applied for; the way the HE application process was managed in their schools; and how teacher advisors explained and managed the processes and outcomes for their students. Informed by Bourdieu's relational sociology, our discussion focuses on how schools in the two sectors mobilise different forms of capital in the competitive processes of university application. We also use the notion of doxa to explore how these micro-institutional processes and teacher advice relate to observed differences between state and independent sector students' HE destinations

Preschool attendance: a multilevel analysis of individual and community factors in 21 low and middle-income countries

This paper investigates how preschool attendance is shaped by individual and community factors for 71,806 children from 14,303 communities in 21 low-to middle-income countries using a multilevel analysis. We assess how these mechanisms vary by community and country wealth and the extent to which the variation of preschool uptake can be explained by the characteristics of children living in these communities. We find that of the total variation, 36% was attributable to communities and 12% to countries, with childrens demographic and socioeconomics characteristics explaining 23% of the between community variation. Community wealth and health are crucial determinants; in poor communities with high stunting rates, the chances of preschool attendance are at least halved. Our results suggest that the effect of community on preschool attendance is stronger in poorer countries with greater inequality between communities

Promising practice in school-related gender-based violence(SRGBV) prevention and response programming globally

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Bullying and school attendance: a case study of senior high school students in Ghana

This paper focuses on senior high school students and the ways that bullying affects their school attendance. Selected items from the 2008 Ghana Global School-based Student Health Survey are analysed first to explore the relationships between the duration and type of bullying and school attendance. Second, we investigate whether having emotional problems, in addition to being bullied, incrementally affects the relationship between bullying and school attendance. Third, we explore the mitigating influence of peer friendships on these relationships. In all cases we provide a gender analysis. The results show that bullying is associated with increased absenteeism for both boys and girls. The analysis of reported emotional problems, however, shows distinct gender differences. For boys, increases in emotional problems are not associated with increased absenteeism for those who are bullied. On the other hand, for girls emotional problems were strongly associated with absenteeism and more so for girls who had not reported being bullied. The third strand of our analysis also showed gender differences in which absenteeism associated with bullying was mitigated by the support of friends for boys but not to the same degree for girls, especially those girls who had reported being psychologically bullied. In addition to the threat to school access caused by bullying, the gender dimensions of the latter two sets of findings suggest a school environment in which peer friendship and emotional well-being are intertwined in complex ways. While there is little or no research within the Ghanaian context, supported by research from elsewhere, we suggest that peer friendships for girls may be comprised of more non-physical, social and verbal interaction within which it might be more difficult to pinpoint bullying. That peer interactions might include a mixture of support and bullying could explain why there is a strong influence on girls’ emotional well-being and hence their school attendance

Silencing youth sexuality in Senegal: intersections of medicine and morality

This article reports on recent research funded by international development actors which explored how Senegalese youth acted as ‘active citizens’ and claimed their education and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) rights. Our analysis is framed by a review of contemporary international development discourses that seem to offer fertile possibilities for more plural understandings of sexuality. After describing the research methodology and methods, we draw on post-structural theory to analyse the discourses youth deployed to talk about sex and their sexualities. Rather than a source of pleasure, youth’s talk of sex and sexuality was dominated by discourses of morality and medicine, in ways that sustained a heteronormative gender regime permeated by entrenched hegemonic masculinities. We conclude that rather than the fertile possibilities identified in our opening review, the SRH lens re-inscribed a negative framing of sexuality which was compounded by both family and religious norms

Fracturing the nation: Muslim youth identities in multi-religious states

In this paper, we focus on the production of Muslim youth identities within multi-religious states. Using empirical case study research from Lebanon and Nigeria, we discuss how the historical specificities of state formation have produced internal cleavages within the corresponding nation-states and how these have shifted over time. We also discuss how the agglomeration of different ethnic and religious groups in the formation of these states has produced internal fractures that are constantly revivified by youth in their identity discourses. Our focus in this paper is on the ways that youth identity discourses are constructed at the intersections of religion and nation. Using a comparative analysis across these two country contexts, we explore the ways that youth articulate their own identities with reference to internal others within their nation. More specifically, we examine how religious differences both between Muslims and Christians, and amongst Muslims, intersect with the national imaginaries in complex and contradictory ways. In this way, youth allegiances both shape and threaten the internal cohesion of the nation

Muslim youth as global citizens

Dominant understandings of global or cosmopolitanism citizenship align it with the ‘modern’ and the ‘secular’, in ways that construct religious belongings as irrational, or indeed ‘pre-modern’. Assumptions of superiority embedded in claims to cosmopolitanism are all the more powerful for being constructed as a ‘universal’, in ways that erase and occlude the local social relations and particularities of the spaces and positions from which these very claims emanate. Resisting such understandings, this paper engages with research into Muslim youth identities with respect to nation, religion and gender in four nation-states of the Global South. It explores how Muslim youth’s strong affective commitments to the religious community of the ‘global Ummah’ can be understood as a distinctive form of global, cosmopolitan citizenship, in ways that are similar to, but also sharply differentiated from modern (secular) understandings of cosmopolitanism. We suggest that appeals to any ‘universal’ cosmopolitan project can work to silence local social relations (such as ethnic, gender, religious or class differentiations), and how all claims to cosmopolitanism are intrinsically sutured to youth’s struggles for positioning within their nation. We stress therefore the importance of attending to local social dynamics throughout our analysis of youth identity constructions and their constitutive others, and take this up throughout the following papers of this special edition

The female teacher trainee scholarship scheme: operational research study for UNICEF Girls Education Project Phase 3 (GEP3)

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Guyana education access project: Baseline study

The Guyana Education Access Project (GEAP) is a large and complex five year project which has as its overall goal the provision of good quality secondary education for all children in two regions in Guyana, Corriverton (Region 10) and Linden (Region 6). The detailed project framework sets out the project’s objectives, inputs, activities and outputs. In addition, observable verifiable indicators have been clearly specified for all the projects key objectives. A common failing of donor-funded education projects is that there is insufficient baseline information available that can be drawn upon at the end of the project in order to reach robust conclusions about project impacts in key areas. The GEAP project memorandum clearly stipulates therefore that a comprehensive baseline survey should be undertaken that will not only provide the basis for before- and after-project comparisons, but also can provide a valuable source of information for project monitoring. The main purpose of this report is to: (i) identify a set of indicators which can be used to assess the performance of the project in five impact areas - access, community participation, school and regional management, teacher performance, and student learning. It was agreed that the two other key output areas specified in the project framework, namely improved infrastructure and project replication, should not be included in the baseline study; and (ii) present and, where appropriate, describe the baseline information that was collected and analysed in each of these five impact areas

Education and work: children’s lives in rural sub-Saharan Africa

This paper proposes a dynamic conceptual framework – the edu-workscape – for understanding how rural children in sub-Saharan Africa navigate three key gendered social arenas: the household, school and workplaces. Focusing on school, in particular, the paper highlights the violence, harm and labour that occur there, and argues that learning, work and harm co-exist across all three institutional domains, and in context, and should therefore be considered holistically