This review essay draws on Nancy Fraser's work as featured in "Adding insult to injury: Nancy Fraser debates her critics" to explore issues of schooling and social justice. The review focuses on the applicability and usefulness of Fraser's three-dimensional model for understanding matters of justice in education. It begins with an overview of the…

In the context of market-based childcare provision, governments in many industrialised countries use regulation to ensure quality standards and practices. Limited research, however, has investigated parents' perceptions of childcare quality and whether what parents value as contributors to quality resonates with regulatory frameworks. This article…

Drawing on ESRC-funded research this paper considers some characteristics of the policy process in schools using the construction of behaviour policy in four English secondary schools as a case in point. It argues that behavior policy, like other policies, is enacted in particular and distinct institutional contexts with their own histories; that…

The paper contributes to the debate on the implementation of policy reforms developing a typology for implementation based on the initial agreement on means and goals at the time of reform design. It is argued that the volume and nature of knowledge gathering and stakeholder involvement required to gain approval of a policy and avoid the…

While the need for humanising education is pressing in neoliberal societies, the conditions for its possibility in formal institutions have become particularly cramped. A constellation of factors--the strength of neoliberal ideologies, the corporatisation of universities, the conflation of human freedom with consumer satisfaction and a wider…

This paper uses Bourdieu's concept of field to analyse findings from an ethnographic study of Entry to Employment (E2E) programmes in England. Entry to Employment is a work-based learning programme which aims to re-engage young people with "barriers to learning" inhibiting access to further education, training or employment. The paper examines…

This article provides a synoptic account of historically changing conceptions and practices of social justice in Australian higher education policy. It maps the changes in this policy arena, beginning with the period following the Second World War and concluding with an analysis of the most recent policy proposals of the Bradley Review.…

In the context of international consensus that the knowledge economy requires more highly educated people, the Australian federal, state and territory governments agreed on a set of policies and targets for lifting the minimum level of educational attainment of young people, which are analysed in Part 1 of this paper. This "Compact with young…

This project is based on research conducted with 12 schools in New South Wales, Australia. It examines how each school incorporates Aboriginal perspectives in its Kindergarten to Year 6 program with a view to identifying quality practice. As we interviewed teachers in these schools, it became clear that there is considerable confusion over the…

In this article I explore the political event of the Tanzanian government's interdiction of a prominent educational civil society organization in order to theorize the emerging policy heterarchy in Tanzania. In the context of the ensuing public debate about the interdiction, I ask two questions: (1) what tensions are emerging from the…

In this article we explore ways in which pro-market discourses have been interpreted in policy initiatives in Argentina since the 1970s. Our argument is that even though pro-market discourses have guided reforms in many aspects of public policies in Argentina, the arena of education has overall been resistant to taking them up. The first part of…

In Myanmar schools, rote learning is the norm. International aid and education organisations based in the country have been trying to promote the child centred approach (CCA) as a much more progressive form of teaching and learning. The CCA is being rolled out principally through monastic school networks aided by international and national…

As a meta-concept, "globalization" has the tendency to create master categories such as an emergent global/izing education policy. This paper critiques the thinking and assumptions that underpin a global education policy. The paper proposes that "global assemblage" is a more helpful conceptual thinking about the way education policy works in…

Similar to many other countries, an educational reform anchored in a managerial discourse was proposed in Israel in 2004 by the Dovrat Committee, encouraged by the "inter-state education gap" social problem that economist Dan Ben-David formulated on the basis of international examinations, such as PISA and TIMMS. Through a neo-Weberian approach…

On 11 and 12 October 2010, the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education held its second annual "Student Equity in Higher Education National Conference" in Melbourne, Australia. The conference theme was "Aspiration, Mobility, Voice". During the conference the three keynote speakers--Gareth Parry (University of Sheffield, UK), Jane…