After a brief discussion of the concept of love and contemporary attitudes towards it, the article examines previously unpublished findings about children's ways of thinking about love, using evidence drawn from a research project on the developing sexual values of 9 and 10 year-old children. Love features extensively in their discussions and…

This article explores the educative importance of ethos from a broadly philosophical perspective. It is argued that, for a range of reasons, the notion of ethos in the context of education needs to be brought into clearer focus. An analysis is offered of the concept of ethos, with particular reference to the context of classrooms and schools. The…

This article explores the civic republican conception of citizenship underlying the Labour government's programme of civil renewal and the introduction of education for democratic citizenship. It considers the importance of the cultivation of civic virtue through political participation for such developments and it reviews the research into how…

We suggest that there is a need for those who seek to explore issues associated with the implementation of citizenship education in England to clarify its specific nature. This can be done, at least in part, through a process of comparison. To that end we review some of the connections and disjunctions between "character education" and…

Lifelong learning is something which one does for oneself that no one else can do for one: it is a public and personal human activity, rather than private or individualistic. One of the features of the education system is the paucity of a language for learning as process and participative experience. Personalised learning requires a sense of the…

Religious education (RE) has often found itself at the centre of debates about education's role in promoting social cohesion in contemporary multi-religious societies. The paper considers RE's relationship to religious plurality within the broader context of politics of curriculum and debates on pluralism. Drawing upon the recent works on the…

A paradox seems to exist in educational policy and practice in England and Wales. On the one hand, numerous references to promote community are made in the aims and objectives of the National Curriculum, and throughout the curricula. On the other, trends to increase accountability and standardization through competition seem antithetical to ideals…

This paper focuses on the system of banding used in England by the former Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) in order to seek to obtain an intake to secondary schools that was balanced in terms of ability. The first part of the paper provides a brief history of the system of banding, how it was informed by verbal reasoning testing and how it…

This paper examines the concept of professional trust and argues that trust is an essential component of what it means to be a professional. The first part of the paper discusses the nature of trust in general and attempts to establish two main points: that we are all involved in relationships of trust and that all trust involves risk. The second…

This article is concerned with the relationship between assessment information and teacher planning. In the UK, although planning used to be central to characterizations of formative assessment, the most recent government proclamations under the Assessment for Learning banner offer no clear role for teachers making decisions about what to do based…

This article discusses, principally from an English perspective, globalisation, global citizenship and two forms of education relevant to those developments (global education and citizenship education). We describe what citizenship has meant inside one nation state and ask what citizenship means, and could mean, in a globalising world. By…

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…

The common sense notion of learning as the all-pervasive acquisition of new behaviour and knowledge, made vivid by experience, is an incomplete characterisation, because it assumes that the learning of behaviour and the learning of knowledge are indistinguishable, and that acquisition constitutes learning without reference to transfer. A…

Creativity is a popular but heterogeneous word in educational parlance these days. By looking at a selection of recent discourses that refer to creativity to sustain their positions, the paper suggests that two key themes emerge, both with questionable assumptions. Romantic individualists would return us to a naive bygone age of authentic…

This paper reports the use of a systematic review to explore the impact of daily mathematics lessons in England on enhancing pupil confidence and competence in early mathematics. The review process identified 18 key papers. An in-depth analysis of these indicated that there was some evidence that the introduction of daily mathematics lessons, as…