For many years, England has been the epitome of high-stakes accountability, often playing leapfrog with the USA. It represents an extreme of centralized surveillance, with schools organized as a quasi-market and supervised through a punitive combination of external inspection, the use of test data to name and shame schools, and ultimately closure…

This article comments on international consequences of performativity cultures and curriculum standardization, focusing particularly on the situation in England. It highlights the divide between youth culture and school learning, and the particular damage for poorer students. It argues the impact of the English performativity regime on teacher…

The National Challenge, whereby all secondary schools had to attain 5 A*--Cs by 2011, was launched in June 2008. In this article, Richard Riddell outlines the main provisions of the National Challenge, which he characterizes as shallow, mechanistic and playing an old "performativity" tune. Although the new benchmark will be achieved by many more…

In this short discussion article I develop some earlier writing on the theme of education, improvement and sustainability (see references). It builds upon my primary criticism of the school improvement movement that it is accustomed to thinking of education as good in and of itself. As David Orr suggests candidly in his essay in the early 1990s,…

This conceptual article discusses the issue of friendship implied by the term "critical friends". Our argument relates to the generalized use of the term "friendship" and the assumptions that it may carry compared with the actuality of the roles played by critical friends. We attempt to build a more precise definition of friendship which we…

The recent focus on pupil involvement in all aspects of education, including the school improvement agenda, has led to an increasing number of pupils being consulted on various aspects of school life and involved in a range of peer support schemes. Accompanying the proliferation of pupil involvement has been the development of training initiatives…

This article argues that the engagement of teachers in collaborative discussions about assessment can provide a fruitful context for valuable professional learning. It is of interest to those who provide Continuous Professional Development (CPD) opportunities for teachers and teachers themselves. It looks particularly at the value of writing…

This article explores some of the core values which underpin student voice work. We are in the very early stages of trying to understand the values that surround student voice and hope to develop these understandings by drawing on the work of various educational theorists. Throughout the article we examine some of the complexities that arise in…