"Trojan Horse" has become journalistic shorthand for an apparent attempt by a small group in East Birmingham to secure control of local non-faith schools and impose policies and practices in keeping with the very conservative (Salafist and Wahhabi) version of Islam which they hold. In this article, Pat Yarker gives an account of two…

Policy pursued by Education Secretary Michael Gove promises to bring about the first national teachers' strike for a generation. This article reviews the nature and effect of Gove's intensification of academisation, and outlines ways in which edu-business is involved.

The flip-side of teaching-as-delivery is assessment-as-ventriloquism. Required to describe pupils and their progress through the language of Level Descriptors and exam grade criteria, any teacher risks losing her voice. This article notes the hierarchising and normalising intention of currently authorised versions of assessment, and looks for a…

This article considers how pervasive remains the idea of fixed innate ability in relation to state education, and criticises on ethical and other grounds the language of ability as currently heard.

At the end of July 2011 "The Guardian" reported on the recently opened Crown Woods College in Eltham, South-East London. The College had been rebuilt on the site of the previous Crown Woods School with 50 million pounds of funding via the Building Schools for the Future project. Its nine buildings include four "mini-schools", one of which is a…

This article restates the needs for a comprehensive system of education to be intolerant of "ability"-thinking, and wonders why so few government ministers are prepared to reveal the type of school to which they send their children.

This article reports on current campaigning against the British government's policy of opening hundreds of Academy schools.

In this article the author considers some aspects of the egregious error or "howler". What effects does the "howler" have as a social practice? What questions are raised when a teacher shares beyond his or her own school a student's mistake for the amusement of others?

This article, which draws heavily on the Sutherland Inquiry report into the delivery of National Curriculum testing in 2008, outlines important aspects of the failure that year to report test-scores on time, considers the extent to which ministers might have been held more accountable and reviews the state of the long struggle to replace the…

The government's plans for students in KS2 and KS3 to be "tested when ready" mark an attempt further to embed instrumentalist views of education. "Testing-when-ready" is seen as an intensification of the harmful regime of testing, targets and League Tables which Mansell (2007) labels "hyper-accountability". Highlighting aspects of Mansell's book…

Nicholas Serota calls Room 13 "the most important model for artistic teaching in school that we have in the UK." This article describes and considers aspects of the Room 13 initiative. Begun more than a decade ago in Scotland and now spreading internationally, Room 13 treats pupils as artists and business-people. By working alongside adult…

The content of many school lessons is increasingly determined by the requirement to "cover" what is laid down in England's National Curriculum. In this situation transmission or "delivery" models of teaching all too often become the norm. This article records aspects of a very different kind of teaching and learning, and presents some responses to…

This article presents extracts from interviews with 14 teachers of English. It indicates some of the tensions which result for such teachers from having to prepare Year 9 students for the "national" tests in English toward the end of Key Stage 3. These are high-stakes tests: they supply the means to compile school "league tables" and the material…

In this paper the author discusses the involvement of private corporations in administering educational exams. Specifically described are the company, Pearson Plc, a multi-national publishing and media conglomerate, and owner of Edexcel, one of England's three remaining "unitary awarding bodies." The intensification of the involvement of…

The introduction of Workforce Remodelling poses profound questions about 21st century teacher professionalism. Here Patrick Yarker explores, not only the dangers and duplicity of one particular "reform." These moving, insightful reflections of a gifted, courageous teacher expose the personal and professional dilemmas that will always face those…