This paper is concerned with the role of friendship in the construction of social capital within schools for students in poverty. It undertakes an analysis of friendship through the lens of students who have experienced turbulence. "Turbulence" refers to a type of pupil mobility between schools (not to be confused with social mobility) understood…

This article examines the role of family in vocational education and training (VET) choices, using primary qualitative data collected in the commune of Hung An, Vietnam. The authors demonstrate that, next to issues relating to income, it is family characteristics that are the predominant influence on an individual's choice of the VET track,…

This paper reports on data drawn from a study exploring the educational strategies of 62 Black Caribbean heritage middle-class parents. In this paper, we consider the respective roles of race and class in the shaping of parents' educational strategies, deploying an analysis that focuses on their intersection and seeks to hold both race and class…

This article analyses the "soft power" that the Federal Government of Brazil has gained by designing and implementing a very ambitious Plan for the Development of Education. It draws on fieldwork carried out in the country in 2009 and 2010 in order to conduct a discourse analysis of the strategy deployed by the key political agents. The results…

The International Baccalaureate's (IB) branding and reputation targets academic high achievers aiming for university entrance. This is an empirical examination of the growing popularity of this transnational secondary credential amongst local populations in Australia, focusing on its uptake across the community, and the discourses underpinning its…

This paper explores the leadership cultivation practices of one elite school in Singapore. We point to the links between the habitus of the Singapore state and that of the school showing how different components of the school's leadership curriculum deploy the transnational in order to produce leaders for the nation. In essence, we argue that the…

The objective of this work is to reflect on unequal schooling opportunities in Brazil, focusing on certain characteristics that mark, nowadays, the schooling trajectories of young people from middle- and high-income families. Our previous researches showed that an important part of these families are increasingly investing in international…

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…

This article examines the concept of "White racism" in relation to the experiences of Gypsy and Traveller groups in England. It is based on ethnographic research conducted in two secondary schools during the years 2006-2009. Interviews were carried out with pupils attending the secondary schools, their mothers and members of the Traveller…

The white middle-class parents who chose to send their children to urban comprehensives largely rejected engaging in the usual competitiveness for educational success. Nevertheless the parents in our study still found themselves wittingly or otherwise captured by that same discourse. Their children are high achievers and are regarded as a valuable…

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"…