ABSTRACT This article reports on a case study investigating the micro-politics of policy enactment in a school in England. The case is sited in the literacy policy of a primary school in challenging circumstances as it joins a Multi-Academy Trust (MAT). Data gathering consisted of interviews with the school headteacher, assistant headteacher, and literacy coordinator. Data were analysed thematically

ABSTRACT This paper is a further exploration of the phenomenon of historic country houses repurposed as private schools. In a previous paper it was shown that 55 English private schools within the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference and the Girls’ Schools Association are partially housed within former country houses. This paper investigates some of the possible motivations for schools choosing

ABSTRACT This paper presents the first empirical evidence on long-run trends in teacher mental health and wellbeing in England. We find that, although there has been a recent rise in mental health problems reported by teachers in England, this is mirrored by workers in other professions – with little evidence of a simultaneous change in levels of personal wellbeing. Our conclusion is therefore that

ABSTRACT Finding a conceptually informed and substantive means of understanding the value of higher education (HE) remains a challenging but crucial issue in the context of continued market-orientated policies. This article offers a way forward and posits that formal approaches to measuring the value of HE can only have currency if engaging in longer-term and sustainable notions of value given that

ABSTRACT Teaching assistants (TAs) in the United Kingdom typically work with students with additional and special needs, including the most challenging and vulnerable pupils, in low paid, precarious roles. However, no research has examined how organisational factors such as job demand, control, and support can influence TAs' wellbeing, despite recent evidence demonstrating the importance of organisational

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to critique the practices of those coordinating provision for children and young people with special educational needs during the Coronavirus pandemic. Whilst many schools are focusing on the practical aspects of getting students and staff back to school, there is a danger that practicalities may obfuscate broader systemic problems. In terms of educating children

ABSTRACT Nancy Fraser describes parity-of-participation in social interaction as an important component of social justice. In this paper, we explore the participatory experiences of primary-school-children who have been labelled ‘lower-attainers’ in mathematics and/or writing. The paper explores justice drawing on the perspective of these pupils, in relation to how they perceive success in their school

ABSTRACT The reinvention of the university as a research-focused institution has transformed the way in which research is defined in practice. It is now widely explained in terms of a narrow set of performative expectations. This paper draws on historical literature to trace the hollowing out of research from a broad, though often sceptical, conception shaped by the liberal education tradition to one

ABSTRACT At all ages, a child who can sustain attention, regulate emotions, inhibit impulsive behaviour, and relate appropriately to adults and peers is able to take advantage of learning opportunities in the classroom, and beyond. This study assesses differences in children’s socio-emotional development according to family background, and whether early gaps in these skills widen across childhood in

(2021). Teacher education research, policy and practice: finding future research directions. Oxford Review of Education: Vol. 47, Teacher education research, policy and practice: future directions, pp. 1-7.

ABSTRACT In many developed countries over the past two decades, there have been new standards, new monitoring systems, new course and fieldwork requirements for teacher candidates, new accreditation criteria, and/or new auditing procedures for colleges and universities that offer initial teacher preparation programmes. However there has also been enormous variation among accountability policies, initiatives

ABSTRACT Increasing the supply of qualified teachers is a priority in many nations as a prerequisite to accomplishing UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by the year 2030. Questions remain however concerning definitions and measurement of the intended global indicators. In this article

ABSTRACT The quest to improve teaching on a wide scale is an enduring challenge globally. Yet demonstrable improvement in teaching quality is both elusive and slow. In this essay, I explore some of the complexities that contribute to the slow pace of change, including: the slippage between teachers and teaching as the object of improvement; the poorly defined concept of good teaching; the difficulty

ABSTRACT Over the last four years, initial teacher education in Wales has been fundamentally reformed. The stimulus for those reforms were concerns about the quality of current provision, but more importantly a recognition by the Welsh Government that if their wider reforms of curriculum and assessment were to succeed, then teachers themselves had a key role to play. Teachers would no longer be simply

ABSTRACT This paper reviews recent policy understandings of research capacity in teacher education in the UK. It then draws on a case study from Wales to suggest a conceptualisation of research capacity-building in teacher education that encompasses individual, organisational and systemic levels while remaining sensitive to the particulars of professional practice in teacher education. We argue that

ABSTRACT This paper examines the connections and disconnections between teacher education policy and research, and considers future opportunities for teacher education research by rethinking the notion of evidence as it is conceptualised in current policy debates. Historically, teacher education was positioned as a training issue, then as a learning issue, and more recently it has been framed as a

ABSTRACT Transnational education has experienced a phenomenal growth over the past decade. As a dynamic but complex phenomenon, transnational education involves the delivery of curriculum and educational practices developed in one country to students in other countries. Therefore, transnational education is associated with not only benefits but also challenges and tensions of navigating cross-border

ABSTRACT The ethnic separation of the school system in Northern Ireland along Catholic and Protestant community lines limits opportunities for daily cross-community interaction between young people. Recent research has shown that, whilst the deployment pattern of teachers is largely consistent with this divide, a small proportion of teachers has diverted from the community-consistent path and are teaching

ABSTRACT The role of the source of discrimination in relation to minority Muslim youths’ psychosocial well-being has received remarkably little attention in the post-9/11 climate. We have examined one of the aspects of psychosocial well-being that is given prominent attention in the media and public discourse, namely externalising behaviour. The article reports whether perceived discrimination by four

ABSTRACT I analyse trends in teachers’ job quality in Britain, using the framework of the European Foundation for Living and Working Conditions, with data from the British Skills and Employment Survey. The issue of increasing concern is not work hours, which have remained long but stable; rather, teachers are working considerably more intensively than in earlier years. Moreover, their task discretion

ABSTRACT The vocational and academic routes that make up the English education system have different purposes, for different stakeholders, with different outcomes; they can be complementary routes but are not analogous. Consequently, calls for parity of esteem belie the fundamental intention and importance of each. While these calls have persisted for over 70 years, parity between the two routes has

ABSTRACT The introduction of new assessment policy can reverberate throughout all levels of schooling. This paper presents an in-depth investigation into one school’s response in the Junior years of secondary education to the introduction of a new Senior years’ assessment system. The investigation focuses on the educational context of a high-performing school where school leaders decided to prioritise

ABSTRACT This study explored the perceptions of 25 secular teachers employed in American, Australian, and Israeli Jewish religious schools regarding disparities between their secular identity and their school’s religious habitus. It also examined the ways these teachers cope with such disparities. Findings suggest that teachers’ challenges were anchored in their freedom of religion and conscience,

ABSTRACT Wonder-full education recognises experiences of wonder as lying at the heart of learning and education. If we accept the premise that wonder is important for/in education, what should characterise wonder-full education? This paper clarifies what it is like to wonder, how the aims of wonder-full education are best described, and it discusses three dimensions of wonder-full education: the educators

ABSTRACT In his belated reply to my 2006 article ‘Against autonomy as an educational aim’, Christian Wendelborn advances two objections to my argument and proposes two new candidates for an educational aim deserving of the name autonomy. I show here that his objections miss their mark and that neither of his new candidates is appointable.

ABSTRACT Since the 1990s, there have been repeated calls for the systematic use of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to inform educational decision-making. The advent of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) – described as England’s What Works Centre for Education – in 2011 has made this a reality in England: by 2020, over a third of English schools were involved in such trials. Despite much debate

ABSTRACT This article explores the phenomenon of country houses repurposed as private schools. It investigates the population of English schools within the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference and the Girls’ Schools Association and finds that some 55 of these schools are partially housed within former country houses, with 19 in Grade I listed buildings and 17 in Grade II* listed buildings. The

ABSTRACT The past 20 years have seen the steady ‘datafication’ of school systems – i.e. the rendering of key aspects of school practice into data that is digitally collected, processed and circulated. In contrast to assumptions of ‘data-driven’ schools as sites of more efficient and automated forms of data work, this paper examines the extensive human labour that now supports data production within

ABSTRACT The concept of capital has risen in prominence within educational policy and practice in the UK since Ofsted introduced cultural capital into its inspection processes in 2019. At the same time, fractured discourses exist across different types of capital – one of which concerns capitals that are negative in constitution and/or impact. This paper addresses both through: A systematic literature

ABSTRACT A rising crisis of confidence has been noted amongst teachers of poetry in recent years. Amplified by external factors such as high-stakes testing regimes, performance indicators, standardisation and accountability measures, teachers are increasingly challenged to provide immersive, imaginative and engaging encounters with poetry while developing and maintaining their sense of professional

ABSTRACT There has been much discussion in educational policy on the apparent educational benefits for disadvantaged young people of engaging in schools’ extra-curricular activities (ECAs). The evidence suggests strong associations between ECAs and improved educational attainments. Arguments made about the causal processes and underpinning associations tend to revolve around individualised notions

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ways in which ‘good teaching’ is constructed through mentors’ written lesson observation feedback during Initial Teacher Education (ITE). Written lesson observation feedback has received little research attention, yet represents a potentially powerful activity for teachers’ development. It is also an important aspect of direct university-school-beginning teacher collaboration

ABSTRACT SCoTENS (the Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South) is a unique network of teacher educators from north and south of the Irish border. Funded by government departments and membership institutions across the island, it is facing a range of potential uncertainties. This study is an attempt to map the values and impacts of a complex boundary object. A framework designed by

ABSTRACT The quality of a child’s early language and communication environment (ELCE) is an important predictor of later educational outcomes. However, less is known about the routes via which these early experiences influence the skills that support academic achievement. Using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (n = 7,120) we investigated relations between ELCE (<2 years)

ABSTRACT This paper examines two research questions: How do teachers refer to historical figures when teaching difficult past events? Which approaches to teaching difficult past events are reflected in teachers’ ways of talking about historical figures? The paper is based on an analysis of lessons by three 11th grade history teachers in Israel on the controversial Altalena Affair. Each teacher assigned

ABSTRACT This paper aims to examine the case for a focus on place-based drivers of inequalities in educational attainment among secondary school students in Scotland. Using desk-based sources, it provides an account of the post-2015 policy episode around improving educational attainment among children from disadvantaged areas. This started with the Scottish Government claiming that its ‘defining mission’

ABSTRACT Improving the learning experiences of student teachers in a school-university partnership has always been an agenda for those involved in initial teacher preparation (ITP) programmes. In the pursuit of this improvement, this paper presents an argument in favour of a cultural approach to understand learning at school placements and university in a school-university partnership. Drawing on data

ABSTRACT Cultures of performative accountability in education have been on the rise globally since the 1980s. Accordingly, teachers have increasingly been encouraged to understand their work in relation to particular forms of ‘evidence’. All evidence, however, is not regarded as equal, and sources of evidence privileged within cultures of performative accountability are typically narrowly rendered

ABSTRACT Countries regarded as holding high levels of educational autonomy face a different set of constraints to that of countries with low levels of autonomy, these constraints being linked to the marketisation of schools. As schools become decentralised and given greater autonomy, school leaders are steered by a responsibilising framework that includes bureaucratic regulation, the discourses and

ABSTRACT I brought together two strands of literature, one investigating the moderate but persistent underachievement of girls in mathematics in most countries, and the other examining the role of self-efficacy and other self-beliefs in predicting behaviour and achievement. I implemented detailed decompositions of the gender mathematics gap, both at the mean and for low and high performing students

ABSTRACT The issue of social justice has been regularly addressed in many published papers in mathematics education research, particularly after 2000, when the discipline took a more explicit socio-political turn. However, there does not appear to be a consensus as to what the term designates and includes. This paper is a systematic review of the empirical studies published from 2000 until the middle

ABSTRACT More than a quarter of all trainees in Germany’s dual vocational training system have the Abitur – the German school-leaving qualification that entitles them to go to university. Some go to university after completing their apprenticeship, but others move straight into full-time employment. There is currently very little reliable empirical data about the reasons for these decisions, particularly

ABSTRACT It is generally agreed that learning about the Holocaust has some impact on students. However, discussions about the nature and magnitude of impact tend to be intuition-based rather than evidence-based. This is exacerbated by studies giving insight into how Holocaust education is related to salient variables rather than studies which demonstrate that teaching and learning about the Holocaust

ABSTRACT In this paper, we discuss the problematic use of the term dyslexia. Noting that there are no unambiguous objective diagnostic criteria for ‘dyslexia’, in part because this term is understood in multiple ways, we discuss its relevance for informing educational assessment, intervention and resourcing. We conclude by highlighting how current approaches to dyslexia diagnosis and remediation typically

(2020). The Problem of Dyslexia: historical perspectives. Oxford Review of Education: Vol. 46, The Problem of Dyslexia: historical perspectives, pp. 409-413.

ABSTRACT We review the evolution of the conceptualisation of dyslexia and along with it the current, 21st century definition of dyslexia. Our starting point is the seminal report by Pringle Morgan in 1896, followed by early 20th century reports by Hinshelwood, and continuing with concepts of brain injury and minimal brain dysfunctions then to the emergence of ‘learning disability’ in the mid-20th century

ABSTRACT T R (‘Tim’) Miles (1923–2008) was one of the most important pioneers of dyslexia research and treatment in the UK. He worked with dyslexics from the time of his appointment to a lectureship at Bangor in 1949 and later, with his wife, established the Dyslexia Centre there. Miles’ professional role and theoretical contribution are reasonably well documented, not least through his own autobiographical

ABSTRACT Beginning in the 1960s, the Isle of Wight studies were among the first to investigate developmental reading problems in representative, population-based samples, using the tools of epidemiology. In this paper, we provide an overview of the contribution of the Isle of Wight studies to research on reading disabilities. We begin with an account of the surveys of primary school children, then

ABSTRACT Dyslexia is a difficulty in learning to decode (read aloud) and to spell. DSM5 classifies dyslexia as one form of neurodevelopmental disorder. Neurodevelopmental disorders are heritable, life-long conditions with early onset. For many years, research on dyslexia proceeded on the basis that it was a specific learning difficulty – specific meaning that the difficulty could not be explained in

ABSTRACT The ‘dyslexia debate’ is resilient. In the media, a key component of the debate is the notion that dyslexia does not exist, popularised by a series of vociferous commentators. For them, dyslexia is an invention of overly-concerned parents, supported by a clique of private educational psychologists willing to offer a diagnosis – for a fee – even where no condition exists. In academic circles

ABSTRACT The Word Blind Centre for Dyslexic Children opened in London in 1963. It was not only the first clinic established in Britain specifically to cater for children diagnosed with dyslexia. It was also intended to provide compelling evidence that a condition called dyslexia actually existed. The results of this work were published in Sandhaya Naidoo’s path-breaking study, Specific Dyslexia, which

ABSTRACT This paper provides the first quantitative analysis on ‘first in family’ (FiF) university graduates in the UK. Using a nationally representative dataset that covers a recent cohort in England, we identify the proportion of FiF young people at age 25 as 18%, comprising nearly two-thirds of university graduates. Comparing groups with no parental higher education we find that ethnic minorities

ABSTRACT Highly selective higher education institutions (HEIs) are simultaneously mandated to enable access for populations which have traditionally been excluded (‘equality’), and to ensure that admitted students have the potential to succeed in higher education (‘excellence’). This article uses original empirical case study data from 2018, from nine highly selective English HEIs, to explore current

ABSTRACT Higher education researchers have paid little attention to postgraduate participation. This issue has become more prominent in England following the introduction of high undergraduate fees. Many predicted that master’s participation would decline consequently, strengthening known inequalities in access by socio-economic background at master’s level. The introduction of master’s loans in 2016/17

ABSTRACT Countries around the world are striving to improve their educational systems with a view to improving their economy and society. In this global competition, national and international test results are of considerable interest. In this paper, we show that national testing in England and the USA have shown little or no improvement over the years. This finding is not isolated; it appears to be

ABSTRACT This paper describes a systematic review of international research evidence identifying the most promising approaches to attracting and retaining teachers in hard-to-staff areas. Only empirical studies that employed a causal or suitable comparative design and had robust measurements of recruitment and retention outcomes were considered. Studies were assessed for strength of evidence taking

ABSTRACT Vocational education and training (VET) can play a transformative role in reducing CO2 emissions and improving the energy efficiency of buildings across Europe. Nearly zero energy building (NZEB) requires an energy literate workforce, with broader and deeper theoretical knowledge, higher technical and precision skills, interdisciplinary understanding, and a wide range of transversal competences

ABSTRACT This paper discusses characteristics of converged play for early childhood education. The characteristics were derived from a four-year study of teachers’ interpretation and use of ‘web-mapping’ as an explicit conceptual tool, designed to mediate teaching practices and learning outcomes according to a definition of pedagogy as the relationship between teaching and learning. Three characteristics

ABSTRACT Michael Hand argues in his article ‘Against autonomy as an educational aim’ that the project of erecting autonomy as an educational aim is wrongheaded. I argue that his argument fails. I discuss two lines of his argument that deal with different senses of autonomy. The first line of argument trades on an ambiguity. As soon as we disambiguate, we can see that this argument is not cogent. The

ABSTRACT Primary school enrolment in Ethiopia has more than doubled over the past two decades. In spite of this impressive achievement, and as in many low- and middle-income countries that have experienced rapid expansion, the Ethiopian education system is characterised by a ‘learning crisis’ in which many children are leaving school without basic numeracy and literacy skills. In this paper, we explore