It is commonly understood that policy makers make curriculum policy and teachers implement it. Some teachers, however, have been in on the ground floor of curriculum policy development. Driven by events in their life histories and teaching contexts, these teachers develop and teach original course material in their own classrooms. Over time they…

This article examines the participation of "third-sector" organisations in public education in England. These organisations act as a cross-sectoral policy network made up of new kinds of policy experts: mediators and brokers with entrepreneurial careers in ideas. They have sought to make education reform thinkable, intelligible and…

Background: Food allergy affects 1 in 13 children, or 2 children per classroom. Food allergies are the leading cause of anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction that can result in death. In fact, 25% of first-time anaphylactic reactions among children occur in school. To address this, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Office of Student Health and…

In his inaugural Presidential Address, given to the BERA Conference 2013 at the University of Sussex, Ian Menter addresses a number of issues concerning educational policy and the contributions that educational research might make to policy development. As BERA approaches its fortieth anniversary, he also sets out some of the responsibilities that…

The development of standards in early childhood is associated with governments wanting to assert their influence on what young children should know and be able to do before they enter formal schooling. In South Africa the National Early Learning and Development Standards (NELDS), released in 2009, attempts to assert influence in the context of…

This article examines an ongoing university-community relationship that fuses innovative technology delivery, university-outreach research, and social work practice/research education into a unique, collaborative intervention to reduce homelessness. In doing so, we apply a social justice framework to homelessness, arguing that housing is a right…

In universities around the world, plagiarism management is an ongoing issue of quality assurance and risk management. Plagiarism management discourses are often framed by legal concepts of authorial rights, and plagiarism policies outline penalties for infringement. Learning and teaching discourses argue that plagiarism management is, and should…

The agencies responsible for tertiary education quality assurance in Australia and New Zealand have established regulatory regimes that increasingly intersect with tertiary institution policy management. An examination of university meta-policies identified good practices guiding university policy and policy management. Most Australian and half of…

The development of a standards-based assessment policy represented a significant cultural shift in assessment practice at one university. Concurrently, the implementation of a policy framework represented a significant procedural shift in policy development and review. The assessment policy was the first policy scheduled to be reviewed through the…

The landscape of gifted and talented education in England has changed in the past decade when the UK government launched an education programme for "gifted and talented" pupils as part of its Excellence in Cities policy initiative. The policy was initially intended to raise educational achievement of higher ability pupils in secondary…

Education is one of the major linchpins of economic, social and political development of any nation. Recent evidence suggests that higher education can produce both public and private benefits. Thus, the role of the state in making education policy, and funding education is indeed critical, and cannot be left to be determined by market forces…

Background: Recent attention to health of people with intellectual disabilities has used a health disparities framework. Building on historical context, the paper summarizes what is known about health disparities from reports and research and provides direction on what to do to reduce these disparities among adults with intellectual disabilities.…

This article presents the framework of a dynamic approach to quality of life (QOL) enhancement based on the conceptualization and measurement of individual-referenced quality of life. Sections of the article summarize the premises of QOL enhancement, provide the rationale for a dynamic approach to QOL enhancement, discuss six components of QOL…

Recently, critical policy scholars have used the concepts of enactment, context and performativity as an analytic toolkit to illuminate the complex processes of the policy cycle, in particular, the ways in which a multitude of official education reform policies are taken up, challenged and/or resisted by actors in local, situation-specific…

This paper proposes a new perspective for higher education policy research. It introduces the concept of "policy object" to designate the discrete preoccupation(s) of a policy text (e.g. a new governance regime, a quality system, or new degrees) and suggests that actor conceptualisations of the policy object intersect with other elements…