While the literature on professional learning communities (PLCs) has proliferated, much of it derived from and contextualised in Anglo-American settings, the concept and practice of PLCs in Asian contexts of strong hierarchies have largely been ignored. Based on literature and documentary analysis, this paper investigates the systemic…

This paper provides a critique of recent Bourdieusian research into the higher education (HE) choice process. Specifically, Ball et al. (2002) maintain that class-related differences in students' psycho-social dispositions in Years 12 and 13, the "landscape of choice", shape their intentions or "decisions" to participate in HE and their selection…

This paper focuses on eight teachers nominated as effective in teaching reading to 11-13-year-old students. Data consisted of interviews and unstructured and structured observations of the guided reading lessons. The qualitative data and their analysis explored the research participants' views to give more detail and filter the quantitative…

Many English schools have a homework policy which prescribes how much homework should be set for each pupil each week, irrespective of whether it can be made meaningful. Research recommends "Assessment for Learning" (AfL) as supportive of students' learning, but teachers can find it difficult to incorporate AfL techniques into their practice. This…

The Specialist Schools Programme in England was predicated on the idea that designating a school with an identity centred around one subject specialism and providing additional funding for its development would raise standards in that specialism and across the school as a whole, as well as spreading excellence to other schools. This paper presents…

Relatively little is known about veteran teachers' professional lives and especially of veteran teachers who have failed to secure promoted teaching positions. This is a weakness in our understanding of teachers' lives given the social and policy changes which have taken place in teaching over recent decades. Through a series of 10 semi-structured…

In this article we discuss data produced about learning practices and learner identities during the past 12 years of upper-secondary school development in Sweden based on ethnographic fieldwork that has examined these issues with respect to two sets of pupils from these schools: one successful, one unsuccessful. Two things are considered in…

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL, the teaching of another curriculum subject through a foreign language), although more widespread in Europe, is still relatively innovative in England. Since the government's decision to remove the requirement for all pupils to learn a foreign language at Key Stage 4 (ages 14-16) the numbers of pupils…

This paper examines the influence of gender, educational attainment and family-related variables on the academic aspirations of students aged. Using data from the Academic Achievement Assessment in Andalusia (Spain) during 2006/2007 and from a questionnaire answered by 3963 students and 3842 families, we obtained information about students' test…

Schools' use of digital technology has so far proved to be a peripheral feature of the Conservative-Liberal education agenda. Through a series of reductions to previously extensive bureaucratic and funding structures, the Coalition administration has presided over a swift but sustained withdrawal of state support for digital technology use in…

Beginning with an analysis of the manifesto commitments of the two Coalition partners the author proceeds to set their subsequent policies as they are understood by June 2011 in the context of successive new "frameworks" for UK higher education since the Robbins Report of 1963. This analysis is developed in relation to: the relative positioning of…

This paper seeks to draw out the continuities and ruptures in current English education policy. In particular it considers the relationship between Coalition policy rhetoric and that of the Labour Party. Although the paper is concerned with the British and more specifically English context, it examines a range of questions that move beyond that…

Like the rest of the United Kingdom, Wales is facing a new challenge from the implementation of the Coalition Government's cuts. The Welsh Assembly Government [WAG, renamed Welsh Government (WG), in May 2011] budget was reduced by 1.8 billion British Pounds over the next four years. WAG responded by introducing its own revised austerity budget…

Shortly after taking power following the May 2010 UK general election, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government published its education white paper, "The Importance of Teaching". In this, certain features for primary school pedagogy can be discerned. Using the lens of the "position call", this article examines the discourses implicated in the…

Free schools are new state-funded but privately-run schools set up under the academies legislation. Free schools represent the most overtly market-oriented policy within the Conservative-led Coalition government's school reform programme in England and have provoked intense controversy, centering on issues of pupil attainment, social equality,…