Emerging school curricula: Australia and Scotland compared

Education policy across the Anglophone world is notable for the emergence in the last few years of new forms of national curriculum. This new curriculum model is characterised by a number of common features. These include a shift from the detailed specification of knowledge to genericism and a focus on skills/competencies, an emphasis on the centrality of the learner, and an articulation of curriculum as assessable outcomes. Despite these commonalities, the new curricula exhibit idiosyncratic features, formed as global discourses are mediated at the level of national contextualisation of curriculum policy. This article draws upon two case studies – the new Australian Curriculum and Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence – to illustrate how, in these cases, new curriculum policy has emerged

Advice Rejected : A Case Of Official Misjudgement

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Service Integration in Schools : Research and Policy Discourses, Practices and Future Prospects J. Forbes and C. Watson (eds.) Rotterdam: Sense Publishers (2009), pp. 212, Pbk., €45, ISBN 9789087905866

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Re-Shaping the Map of Educational Studies : Lessons from Dewey’s Democracy and Education

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The discourse of community in educational policy

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Narratives of Globalisation and Their Implications for Education

This paper begins by noting the way in which education as a disciplinary field ishighly dependent on concepts that have their origins in other spheres of knowledge.It draws attention to the deployment by international agencies of termsthat can be applied across a range of disciplines and to a growing tendency amongdeveloped countries to conceptualise their educational priorities in similar forms ofdiscourse. However, it is also noted that pressures to converge are, to some extent,offset by local values and traditions which serve to maintain degrees of divergence.The paper then focuses more sharply on the various dimensions of globalisationwhich have implications for education, drawing attention to definitional problemsand to the malleable character of the territory. This is followed by two contrastingsections, one looking at positive narratives of globalisation in education, theother taking a more critical perspective. It is concluded that while globalisation asa concept has some explanatory power, the purposes to which it is put by differentagencies require careful interrogation. Furthermore, the time may come when itsvalue in policy documents diminishes and new discursive forms may emerge. In themeantime, education professionals should seek to develop greater narrative agencyin interpreting the language of globalisation

A systematic review of population-based studies examining outcomes in primary retroperitoneal sarcoma surgery

Retroperitoneal sarcomas (RPS) are rare mesenchymal tumours. Their rarity challenges our ability to understand expected outcomes. The aim of this systematic review was to examine 30-day morbidity and mortality, overall survival rates and prognostic predictors from population-based studies for patients undergoing curative resection for primary RPS. A systematic literature review of EMBASE, MEDLINE, PUBMED and the Cochrane library was performed using PRISMA for population-based studies reporting from nationally registered databases on primary RPS surgical resections in adults. The main outcomes evaluated were 30-day morbidity and mortality and overall survival rates. The use of additional treatment modalities and predictors of overall survival were also examined. Fourteen studies (n = 12 834 patients) reporting from 3 national databases, (Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER), the United States National Cancer Database (US NCDB) and the American College of Surgeons’ National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP)) were analysed. The reported overall 30-day morbidity and mortality were 23% (n = 191/846) and 3% (n = 278/10 181) respectively. Reported use of perioperative radiotherapy was 28%. No study reported loco-regional recurrence rates. Overall reported 5-year survival ranged from 52% to 62%. Independent predictors of overall survival were age of the patient, resection margin, tumour grade and size, histological subtype and receipt of radiotherapy. This review of population-based data demonstrated relatively low 30-day morbidity rates in patients undergoing curative surgical resections for primary RPS. Thirty-day mortality rates were similar to other abdominal tumour groups. There remains a paucity of data reporting recurrence rates, however 5-year survival rates ranged from 52 to 62%

The development of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence: Amnesia and Déjà Vu

Scotland’s new Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) has been widely acknowledged as the most significant educational development in a generation, with the potential to transform learning and teaching in Scottish schools. In common with recent developments elsewhere, CfE seeks to re-engage teachers with processes of curriculum development, to place learning at the heart of the curriculum and to change engrained practices of schooling. This article draws upon well-established curriculum theory (notably the work of both Lawrence Stenhouse and A.V. Kelly) to analyse the new curriculum. We argue that by neglecting to take account of such theory, the curricular offering proposed by CfE is subject to a number of significant structural contradictions which may affect the impact that it ultimately exerts on learning and teaching; in effect, by ignoring the lessons of the past, CfE runs the risk of undermining the potential for real change