A response is made to a paper that urges the use of the Rasch model for educational assessment. This paper argues that the model is inadequate and that claims for its efficacy are exaggerated and technically weak.

This paper argues that direct control of the early years literacy curriculum recently exercised by politicians in England has made the boundaries between research, policy and practice increasingly fragile. It describes how policy came to focus most effort on the use of synthetic phonics programmes in the early years. It examines why the…

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…

Even though the existence and importance of inner forms of sign-making are acknowledged in social-semiotic educational research, their contours have, none the less, yet to be charted in a systematic way. This article uses a combination of social-semiotic and pragmatist approaches to bring into focus some characteristics of pupils' inner…

This article responds to that by Hinchliffe and Jolly, published in an earlier issue of this journal, exploring graduate identity and employability. Their article espousedly draws upon the conceptualisation of graduate identity, as formulated by this present author. This article argues that Hinchliffe and Jolly have given insufficient attention to…

Centring on a small-scale capability-based case study of music provision for adults with profound dis/abilities, this paper considers the significance of music and music education in people's lives. It offers a philosophical defence of music's importance in enjoying a truly human life and then, drawing on an overview of the work of dis/abled…

We address the current concerns about teaching-to-the-test and its association with declining dispositions towards further study of mathematics and the consequences for choice of STEM subjects at university. In particular, through a mixed study including a large survey sample of over 1000 students and their teachers, and focussed qualitative case…

This article contributes to the growing social realist literature in the sociology of education. A world systems approach is used to explain the shift to the various forms of localisation, including the emphasis on experience in the curriculum, as a strategy of globalisation that contributes to the decline of universal class consciousness and…

A recent analysis of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) indicates a White British-Black Caribbean achievement gap at age 14 which cannot be accounted for by socio-economic variables or a wide range of contextual factors. This article uses the LSYPE to analyse patterns of entry to the different tiers of national mathematics…

In this paper, the focus is on how a group of Australian educators support student equity through cultural recognition. Young's theorising of justice is drawn on to illuminate the problematic impacts arising from the group's efforts to value students' cultural difference associated, for example, with quantifying justice along distributive lines…

This article begins by outlining the UK Government policy context, offering a brief critique before moving on to summarise recent research into "quality" in the early years. The main body of the article locates the perspectives of early years practitioners within this context, drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded…

This paper introduces a Gini-type index for measuring "attainment equity" in schools; that is to say, how far a school (or group of schools) is from having a "fair" proportion of its examination success attributable to a fair proportion of its student population. Using data from the National Pupil Database, the Index is applied to more than 20,000…

School integration (desegregation) was introduced in Israeli junior high schools in 1968 with the aim of increasing educational equality and decreasing (Jewish) ethnic divides. While never officially abandoned, a "de facto" retreat from this policy has been observed since the early 1990s, despite the voluminous research that revealed its positive,…

English primary schools are considered quasi-collegial institutions within which staff communicate regularly and openly. The activities of staff, however, are bound by institutional norms and conditions and by societal expectations. Wider agendas of governmental control over the curriculum and external controls to ensure accountability and…

This paper develops the concept of graduate identity as a way of deepening the understanding of graduate employability. It does this through presenting research in which over 100 employers in East Anglia were asked to record their perceptions of graduates in respect of their employability. The findings suggest a composite and complex graduate…