School improvement is much sought and often claimed. However, it is questionable whether overall achievement in countries such as the USA or England has improved by any significant amount over thirty years. Several school improvement programmes have been claimed as successful, but evaluations, even where they exist, are generally poor: based on…

States commonly employ education policy to build a strong sense of citizenship within young people and to create types of citizens appropriate to the country. In Singapore the government created a policy to build citizenship through both policy statements and social studies in the school curriculum. In the context of a tightly controlled state…

The structural reforms of the education system in France (1959, 1963, and 1975) were part both of a global process of democratisation of education launched after the Second World War and of a larger modernisation project in which knowledge producers (experts, scholars and consultants) played a crucial role. Instead of a national approach or a…

The recent emergence of distributed leadership has been very marked. In England, it has received official endorsement. But the evidence-base which supports this endorsement is weak: there is little evidence of a direct causal relationship between distributed leadership and pupil attainment. What therefore might explain its rise to prominence? Here…

Citizenship as a compulsory subject was added to the National Curriculum in England in 2002 following the 1998 report, "Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools". It was little noticed at the time that the report stressed active citizenship much more strongly than democracy. The underlying presupposition was what…

"Active citizenship" is currently a popular term in citizenship education policy discourse. Despite this policy interest, there is no agreement about the meaning of "active citizenship". This article draws on data from the IEA Civic Education Study to explore how students themselves construct "active citizenship". The results show that students…

We argue that the privatisation of education needs to be understood through an ethical lens, and suggest a broad framework through which privatisation policies and practices might be ethically audited. These policies and practices it is suggested are creating new ethical spaces and new clusters of goals, obligations and dispositions. Whatever the…

Working from Philippe Aries'"Centuries of Childhood," the author argues that nineteenth century demands for the education of children may be reinterpreted as the creation of a means of keeping children in a state of dependence and so maintaining a defense for anxious adults. (Editor)

The item bank (Rasch model) has serious limitations for the national assessment of subject performance: it requires agreement about the scope and organization of each school subject and about the difficulty level of each test item; and items tend to focus on factual knowledge, ignoring other desirable learning outcomes. (SJL)

Interviews were conducted with personnel in 18 primary and secondary Protestant and Roman Catholic schools in Ulster. Attitudes about similarities and differences between the two sets of denominational schools, cultural relations, and the possibilities of integration were assessed. Implications for integrated education in Ulster are discussed.…

The authors examine the legal issues and administrative implications, under British law, of the Tameside case, in which local school authorities resisted the Secretary of State for Education's order to implement the comprehensive schools plan. (SJL)

Three areas in the religious education debate are: the religious developmental stages of the child, the concept of religious experience, and the language of religious education. In a compromise view, religion may be presented objectively, as a controversial issue. (SJL)

The author analyzes different forms of progressive education and discusses the economic, ideological, and political conditions which allowed progressivism to flourish in British schools in the 1960s. (SJL)

The philosophical misconception which seems to underlie permissive educational thought is that, to have opportunity for free individual development, one must have been exposed to no teaching and have learned no techniques. But, in reality, individual development cannot be accomplished until disciplined structures of thought and action are learned.…

The author traces interest in science teaching within the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which leads to the founding of its Section L (the education section) in 1900. Emphasis is given to the debate within the Association on the place of science education within the field of science. (SJL)