Comparing and learning from English and American higher education access and completion policies

England and the United States provide a very interesting pairing as countries with many similarities, but also instructive dissimilarities, with respect to their policies for higher education access and success. We focus on five key policy strands: student information provision; outreach from higher education institutions; student financial aid; affirmative action or contextualisation in higher education admissions; and programmes to improve higher education retention and completion. At the end, we draw conclusions on what England and the US can learn from each other. The US would benefit from following England in using Access and Participation Plans to govern university outreach efforts, making more use of income-contingent loans, and expanding the range of information provided to prospective higher education students. Meanwhile, England would benefit from following the US in making greater use of grant aid to students, devoting more policy attention to educational decisions students are making in early secondary school, and expanding its use of contextualised admissions. While we focus on England and the US, we think that the policy recommendations we make carry wider applicability. Many other countries with somewhat similar educational structures, experiences, and challenges could learn useful lessons from the policy experiences of these two countries

Sports coaches as ‘dangerous individuals’ - practice as governmentality

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Sport, Education and Society on 31/03/2014, available online: doi: 10.1080/13573322.2014.899492Recent concern surrounding sports coaches’ interaction with young people has reflected a fundamental change in the way coaches and others regard the role of sports. In this paper, we consider the identification and definition of the contemporary sports coach (whether acting in a professional or volunteer capacity) as, in Foucault’s term, a ‘dangerous individual’. We suggest that the mainstream discourse of child protection and safeguarding, variously interpreted and applied, has contributed to a culture of fear in sports coaching practice. Drawing on data from a recently completed Economic and Social Research Council-funded research project, we argue that contradictions in policy and practice, which serve to privilege a particular discourse, have cast the coach as both predator and protector of young sports performers. This has undermined the role of the coach, led to intergenerational fear, created doubt about coaches’ intentions and promoted their adoption of defensive and protective practices. Utilising the concept of governmentality, we argue that, as a consequence, fundamental trust-based relationships, necessary in healthy athlete−coach engagement, have been displaced by a discourse embodied in sterile delivery and procedure governed by regulation and suspicion

Helping Muslim boys succeed: the case for history education

Recent research suggests that Muslim boys have become the ‘New Folk Devils’ of British education, who are characterised by resistance to formal education, especially at secondary level, and under‐achievement. Since the 1990s, British Muslim boys would appear to have become increasingly alienated from compulsory schooling, especially in the humanities subjects which lack obvious instrumental value. This mixed‐methods study of the performance of 295 secondary school British Muslim boys in their compulsory school history provides evidence which interrupts this narrative of the academic under‐achievement and educational dis‐engagement of Muslim boys, especially in the humanities subjects. When viewed through the prism of a laminated, non‐reductive model of educational success, this indicative sample of British Muslim boys could be considered to have had significant success at a traditional humanities subject such as history intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, instrumentally and civically. This paper therefore proposes that history can provide a vital meaning‐making tool to generate the success of Muslim boys in a variety of significant dimensions both in and out of school. It suggests how history can be more fully and effectively harnessed by teachers, parents and policy‐planners to encourage internal integration and external social engagement in British Muslim pupils

Transracial adoption in Britain: Politics, ideology and reality

Transracial adoptions by white parents are situated at the intersections of family and public policy. Debates on racial integration are juxtaposed with child rights and the private sphere of the family. In Britain, the practices of transracial adoption and 'racial matching' continue to invite fierce debate and discussion. Several factors, including the ongoing disproportionate representation of minority ethnic children in the public care system, the 'unavailability' of suitable minority ethnic adoptive parents, concerns about adoptees' racial/cultural identity and the 'suitability' of white parents to raise racially competent children, form the backdrop for such debates. For the last decade or so, political attention has been focused on permanence for children in care and adoption in particular. Within these wider debates, the allegedly low adoption rates of minority ethnic children, the 'delay' in finding suitable adoptive families, the 'rejection' of suitable white adoptive couples, and 'ethnic matching' are presented as some of the key concerns. Ravinder Barn and Derek Kirton seek to unravel the evidence base around transracial adoption and 'racial matching' in the symbolic representational battle being fought in the 'best interests' of minority ethnic children