Comparative and international studies of education that focus on policy borrowing and transfer must be expanded to account for aspects of what Terence Halliday and Bruce Carruthers call "global norm-making." Such an approach examines how global policies are refracted within divergent but interrelated sociopolitical and economic contexts,…

Policy in relation to early years education is developing apace and is likely to be a significant issue in the 2015 election. This articles critiques current government thinking with its emphasis on "school readiness". The article argues that the emotional and learning needs of young children are being neglected by a system that sees…

Lesson observation has been widely debated in education circles in recent times. From politicians to practitioners, everyone seems to have a view on it. Surprisingly, however, very little empirical research has been done on this important area of practice. With this in mind, this article explores some of the findings from a national research…

Over the past four years, the UK coalition government has made significant progress in transforming the state education system. This transformation has its roots in a longer-term restructuring of education. This article argues that, in order to counter this attack, we need to build a movement around an alternative vision of education. Further, it…

The past 30 years have seen a series of major shifts in English education. Central to these changes has been the growth of data systems which now measure and control the work of teachers to a huge degree. This form of data-led surveillance was predicted in the work of Gilles Deleuze, a totalising process where data become more important than the…

This article looks at how time might be viewed differently in the classroom, drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in order to frame the exploration. It asks how teachers might become more attuned to difference, uncertainty and possibility in their classrooms and questions the wisdom of viewing the learning process in linear ways. The…

This article describes how one local teachers' union branch has developed an active and imaginative campaign as it has challenged both national education policy and also the very specific attacks on schools in the community. By connecting local and national issues, and by linking struggles on pay and pensions to wider questions of policy, the…

Education is in challenging times, largely due to economic cutbacks on the one hand and growing demands on teachers to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population on the other. Given these constraints, teachers' desire and self-confidence to initiate and use their own imaginations to meet the diverse needs of their students…

Lesson observations involving judgements of teaching quality are a regular feature of classroom life. Such observations and judgements are made by senior and middle managers in schools and also, very significantly, by Ofsted inspectors as a major component of their judgement on the quality of teaching in a school. Using the example of Ofsted…

Social media, such as Twitter and blogs, has opened up new possibilities for teachers to communicate. In the face of increasingly centralised policy agendas, social media has created spaces for teachers to talk to each other, share with each other and learn from each other. This article explores how teachers are creating their own spaces by using…

Public school teachers in the USA are working in an era of intense interference from neoliberal reform policies. Corporate-driven forces are working to dismantle unions, narrow curricula, replace neighborhood schools with charter schools, tie student test scores to teacher evaluations and replace university-prepared career teachers with…

This article describes an initiative led by two classroom teachers from the Netherlands to put teachers back at the centre of the educational process. The article argues that the educational system has become inverted, with those who are most influential (teachers) having the least opportunity to influence. The challenge is to "flip the…

The paper reports on a study of partners of USA university president/chancellors, a rarely researched population in scholarly literature. Interviews with 24 male and female presidential partners of state supported colleges and universities provided insight into a privileged yet perplexing position, rarely seen by the public. The study draws on the…

Contextualized in China's social change of the past half-century, this article conceptualizes the two aspects of China's rural-urban divide in educational inequality--the household registration system ("hukou") assigns people to a hierarchy, and the rural-urban schooling system institutionalizes unequal resource distribution…

This paper investigates institutional policies and academic practices of student assessment in four Portuguese higher education institutions (HEIs) in the wake of European policy developments driven by the Bologna Process. Specifically, it examines the correspondence between European policy recommendations related to student assessment (promotion…