Getting into Uni in England and Australia: who you know, what you know or knowing the ropes?

Both England and Australia have displayed strong social democratic traditions in their approaches to higher education expansion in the second half of the twentieth century, but are now continuing that expansion as part of a ‘neo-liberal’ reform agenda. This paper traces how the rhetoric of widening participation and equitable access to higher education has remained a key feature of policy discourse in both contexts, albeit with different inflections and effects over time and indeed between the two countries. It also shows how the longstanding relationship between higher education and social and cultural reproduction has endured despite a series of ‘social democratic’ and ‘neo-liberal’ policy initiatives that have ostensibly sought to weaken that link. It concludes that more needs to be done if the rhetoric of equity and social justice is to impact upon the reality of contemporary higher education in these two countries

Education in England – a testbed for network governance?

Since devolution in the late 1990s, education policy in England has diverged further from that in Scotland and also from policy in Wales and Northern Ireland. In this paper we review the roots and trajectory of the English education reforms over the past two decades. Our focus is the schools sector, though we also touch on adjoining reforms to early years and further and higher education. In so doing, we engage with various themes, including marketization, institutional autonomy, and accountability. Changes in governance arrangements for schools have been a defining feature of education reforms since devolution. This has been set against an evolution in national performance indicators that has put government priorities into ever sharper relief. In theorising the changes, we pay particular attention to the suggestion that the English education system now epitomises the concept of ‘network governance’, which has also been applied to education in a global context. We question the extent to which policies have in practice moved beyond the well-established mechanisms of ‘steering at a distance’ and undermined the very notion of an education system in England. We conclude by considering possible futures for education policy and how they may position England in relation to other parts of the UK and the wider world

Charting equity in higher education: drawing the global access map

We know the economic benefit to individuals and to communities of increased levels of Higher Education (HE) participation. We also know that participation in HE has been expanding steadily; we anticipate there will be half a billion students participating in postsecondary education by 2030. But what do existing data tell us about who is accessing HE, and who is currently missing out? Specifically, what do we know about equity in access to high quality HE? Knowing that we are best able to manage what we measure, are institutions, nations, and international organisations capturing HE access data by critical social indicators (such as SES, gender, disability, or geographic remoteness to name but a few)

Comprehensive schooling and social inequality in London: past, present and possible future

London has undergone a dramatic transformation in the last twenty years, both in relation to population growth and increasing disparity of wealth. Moreover, as a large international city with a complex educational history, the capital is sometimes seen as presenting a unique problem for policymakers in terms of contemporary social, political and educational change. However, some of the ongoing problems surrounding education in London could also be attributed to tensions that exist between conflicting aims within any educational transformational process and in any geographical area. For example, the purpose of education has been seen variously over the years: as transmitting knowledge, as providing opportunities for growth, as removing ‘hampering influences’ or ‘broadening horizons’, as developing the capacities of the individual, as giving culture to the individual, or as training future citizens (Russell, 1932:29; Miliband, 2006:16), Urban education provides a territory where these aims are contested more hotly than in other educational arenas; as London is a particularly large urban conurbation, with a particularly diverse population, the effect is exaggerated. Indeed, Grace described the city as “providing the most dramatic context in which conflicts become visible” (Grace, 1984: 34). Another issue is that Parliament itself is based in London and policy makers and media commentators observe (and sometimes experience) London education at first hand. This seems to influence the debate significantly, resulting in a situation in which education policy in England is in many senses London-centric, and therefore essentially urban in nature. Furthermore, London has often been a testing ground for new initiatives, as indeed it is at the present time. A key question now is whether we are in fact gradually moving towards a post-competition era in maintained secondary education

Social trajectories or disrupted identities? : Changing and competing models of teacher professionalism under New Labour

Since the 1988 Education Reform Act, the teacher’s role in England has changed in many ways, a process which intensified under New Labour after 1997. Conceptions of teacher professionalism have become more structured and formalized, often heavily influenced by government policy objectives. Career paths have become more diverse and specialised. In this article, three post-1997 professional roles are given consideration as examples of these new specialised career paths: Higher Level Teaching Assistants, Teach First trainees and Advanced Skills Teachers. The article goes on to examine such developments within teaching, using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to inform the analysis, as well as Bernstein’s theories of knowledge and identity. The article concludes that there has been considerable specialization and subsequent fragmentation of roles within the teaching profession, as part of workforce remodelling initiatives. However, there is still further scope for developing a greater sense of professional cohesion through social activism initiatives, such as the children's agenda. This may produce more stable professional identities in the future as the role of teachers within the wider children’s workforce is clarified

Taking subject knowledge out and putting it back in again? A journey in the company of Michael Young

This paper begins with an account of the author’s positive experiences as a student of Michael Young at the Institute of Education in the late-1960s and early-1970s, when ‘New Directions’ for the sociology of education were emerging under the leadership of Young and others (Young, 1971). This led to a writing partnership between Young and the author in the mid-1970s that produced two edited books (Whitty &Young, 1976; Young & Whitty, 1977), which sought to move beyond the crude binaries of the so-called ‘new sociology of education’. The chapter then suggests that Young’s subsequent distancing of himself from this work in his insistence on ‘bringing knowledge back in’ (Young, 2008), and more especially his emphasis on ‘powerful knowledge’, may have led him to neglect earlier sociological insights concerning the ‘knowledge of the powerful’. It concludes with a discussion of Young’s somewhat surprising rehabilitation of the work of Bernstein and suggests that, in focusing on the curriculum, Young has sometimes understated the importance of pedagogy in the reproduction or transformation of patterns of educational opportunity

What should an index of school segregation measure?

The article aims to make a methodological contribution to the education segregation literature, providing a critique of previous measures of segregation used in the literature, as well as suggesting an alternative approach to measuring segregation. Specifically, the paper examines Gorard, Fitz and Taylor's finding that social segregation between schools, as measured by free school meals (FSM) entitlement, fell significantly in the years following the 1988 Education Reform Act. Using Annual Schools Census data from 1989 to 2004, the paper challenges the magnitude of their findings, suggesting that the method used by Gorard et al. seriously overstates the size of the fall in segregation. We make the case for a segregation curve approach to measuring segregation, where comparisons of the level of segregation are possible regardless of the percentage FSM eligibility. Using this approach, we develop a new method for describing both the level and the location of school segregation

Valuing initial teacher education at Master's level

The future of Master’s-level work in initial teacher education (ITE) in England seems uncertain. Whilst the coalition government has expressed support for Master’s-level work, its recent White Paper focuses on teaching skills as the dominant form of professional development. This training discourse is in tension with the view of professional learning advocated by ITE courses that offer Master’s credits. Following a survey of the changing perceptions of Master’s-level study during a Post Graduate Certificate in Education course by student teachers in four subject groups, this paper highlights how the process of professional learning can have the most impact on how they value studying at a higher level during their early professional development

Private education and disadvantage: the experiences of assisted place holders

It is now nearly thirty years since Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative administration introduced the Assisted Places Scheme (their first education policy) and over ten years since New Labour abolished it. The Scheme, which was designed to provide a ladder of opportunity for academically able students from poor backgrounds to attend private schools, is of more than historical interest. It can be used to illuminate enduring sociological concerns about the relationship between home and school. This paper draws on retrospective interview data to reveal how the Scheme was experienced by its more disadvantaged beneficiaries. Revisiting classic sociological analyses from the 1960s and 1970s, it unravels the complex interactions between home background, friendship networks and school cultures and shows how these contributed to contrasting experiences of commitment, detachment, estrangement and alienation. These differing modes of engagement with schooling appear to have had lasting effects on our respondents and influenced their subsequent careers and orientations

Measuring impact in education research

However HEFCE deals with the responses to its recent REF Consultation, much of them critical of its proposals on impact, the assessment of impact is clearly going to be a major part of any future compact between academic researchers and their paymasters. However, there remain important unanswered questions about what is meant by impact and how it might be measured or even described in the field of Education. The focus of this article is the assessment of impact in the light of the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) although the importance of demonstrating impact (and hence the issues raised in this article) is relevant in a range of contexts