The publication of "Trading in Futures" and "When Schools Compete" helped give empirical support to the view that choice policies increased differences between schools. However, dispute about this research and changes in policy mean that our understanding of the impact of school choice policies in New Zealand remains partial. This paper aims to…

This article points to international education in elementary and post-elementary schools as an emerging and promising field of enquiry. It describes the state of art of this new field and sets out the nature of the research. The rapid development of international networks in recent decades; the contribution of international education policies to…

Reproduction theories emphasised the idea that schools reproduce relations of oppression. Later, postmodernism has increased the language of impossibility by analysing all educational actions in terms of power relations. Therefore, educational actions in line with any of those sociological approaches cannot act as tools that schools and…

From the 1830s the colonial government in India became the agency for the promotion of "Western education", that is, education that sought to disseminate modern, Western, rational knowledge through modern institutions and pedagogic processes. This paper examines a historical episode in which certain key categories of modern Western thought were…

The paper focuses on the auditing and accountancy paradigm that has dominated educational measurement of pupil performance for the last 20 years in England. The advocates of this minimum competency paradigm do not take account of the results of its dominance. These results include ignoring the heterogeneous complexity of groups within societies…

This paper enquires into the grounds for convergence of judgements in a situation of blind peer review, where reviewers are asked to assess the standing of scholars in a disciplinary field. The paper first considers traditional accounts of peer review and threats to its reliability and validity. Next it examines the grounds for disciplinary…

Maori language education policy documents reflect an underlying ambivalence about the desired outcomes for non-Maori learners participating in "as-a-subject" Maori language learning. The view of the Maori language as a national language may be in the process of being replaced by a view that identifies the language primarily as a cultural "taonga"…

Neoliberalism has utterly failed as a viable model of economic development, yet the politics of culture associated with neoliberalism is still in force, becoming the new common sense shaping the role of government and education. This "common sense" has become an ideology playing a major role in constructing hegemony as moral and intellectual…

This article takes its point of departure in the current tendency of education policy to become more and more evidence-based. The use of statistics and numbers seems to be a prerequisite for conducting a policy that is both efficient and effective. The kind of knowledge thus produced is regarded as factual and scientific. This article tries to get…

The number of schools offering the programmes of the International Baccalaureate (IB) hit 3000 in July 2010. Since 2004 the IB has aimed for further growth within a "wider access" and "greater impact" paradigm. A "further" 7000 schools are expected to be involved by 2020. However, there is now considerable concern about growth, especially within…

Motivated by very different goals, various interest groups argue that the British government should address problems with citizens' emotional well-being. Concerns about emotional vulnerability and poor emotional well-being amongst growing numbers of children, young people and adults produce ideas and approaches from different branches of…

Given the increasing power of neoliberal and neoconservative agendas in education internationally, critically democratic policies and practices are now even more important. Yet, one of the major problems with critical work in education has been the fact that some of the academic leaders of the "critical pedagogy" movement and of critical and…

The Dialogic Inclusion Contract (DIC) makes it possible to build a dialogue between the international scientific community and the knowledge derived from the experiences of social agents. This article presents the theoretical underpinnings and the process of developing and implementing the DIC. A case study of a primary school in a disadvantaged…

The scientific community has provided a wide range of evidence that family and community involvement in schools benefits not only students' learning but also their surrounding community. The INCLUD-ED project has conducted case studies of successful schools around Europe that have strong community participation. Some of them are engaged in the…

This article explores the contribution of sociological scholarship to understanding and analysing the notions of "special educational needs" and "disability" and the ways in which the two notions have been reconfigured and theorised as "public issues" rather than "personal troubles". Barton's contribution is signified both in terms of his…