Opportunity and justice: building a valuable and sustaining educational experience for disenfranchised and disengaged youth

Building a valuable and sustainable educational experience for disenfranchised and disengaged youth remains a challenge for secondary schools. This article examines successful schools located in areas of deprivation through the lens of Rawlsianism, particularly those ideas stated in A Theory of Justice (1971). Case studies from 16 schools located in England and Wales are examined for characteristics identified by heads, teachers and pupils which support their overcoming low performance, poverty and social disadvantage. The article reports both the 15-year quantitative outcomes of the schools on national performance measures and qualitative findings on strategies used by the schools and students to reach comparatively higher levels of success than students at more privileged schools reach. Central to these characteristics is the schools' ability to offer adequate basic rights or opportunities to all pupils. These schools were able to diminish social and economic inequalities for the least-advantaged students without diminishing these same opportunities for all students

Vocational teachers in the face of major educational reform: Individual ways of negotiating professional identities.

This paper examines how vocational teachers negotiate their professional identity in the context of a major externally imposed curriculum reform. The focus is on the teachers' orientations towards the reform in its initial stage. Sixteen Finnish vocational teachers were interviewed using open-ended narrative interviews. The data were analysed in accordance with data-driven qualitative analysis methods. From the teachers' accounts, three main orientations towards the reform were identified: a resistant orientation, an inconsistent orientation and an approving orientation, each based on the teachers' individual self-positioning towards the reform. Each orientation is illustrated using two narratives. The findings demonstrated that the teachers' orientations were shaped by their individual backgrounds, including their actual sense of their professional selves, their prior working experiences and their expectations of their professional future. In addition, the teachers' orientations were shaped by their social affordances, and first and foremost by the practices and traditions of the vocational study programmes.peerReviewe