Recent changes to policy directives now require newly appointed Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs) in UK mainstream schools to be qualified teachers. Training and accreditation through a nationally approved postgraduate award is now mandatory. Concepts drawn from poststructuralist biopolitics and critiques of neoliberal educational…

This paper contributes to conversations about school, post-compulsory and further education policy by reporting findings from a three-year study with disaffected students who have been referred to special "behaviour"schools. Contrary to popular opinion, our research finds that these "ignorant yobs" do value education and know…

Liberal egalitarians are rightly interested in the meaning and scope of educational justice. Much of this work involves developing an account of what the fair allocation of educational resources ought to look like under ideal conditions. However, recent developments in competitive global capitalism, including the protracted nature of the global…

In this paper we illustrate the relationships between Teach For America (TFA) and federal charter school reform to interrogate how policy decisions are shaped by networks of individuals, organizations, and private corporations. We use policy network analysis to create a visual representation of TFA's key role in developing and connecting…

Central to this article is a case study of one particular governmental instrument in Flanders, the educational magazine "Klasse voor Ouders" (Klasse for Parents). This popular magazine aims to provide information for and communication with parents as one of the target groups in the educational field. Despite the claimed formal and…

Recently, critical policy scholars have used the concepts of enactment, context and performativity as an analytic toolkit to illuminate the complex processes of the policy cycle, in particular, the ways in which a multitude of official education reform policies are taken up, challenged and/or resisted by actors in local, situation-specific…

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students' results on national literacy and numeracy tests -- the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) -- in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers' learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores…

Recent UK policy has emphasised both the development of socially mixed communities and the creation of balanced school intakes. In this paper, we use a case study of an area of mixed tenure in eastern England to explore policy in practice and the extent to which mechanisms of segregation impact on both the creation of socially mixed neighbourhoods…

Young people's aspirations remain an enduring focus of education policy interest and concern. Drawing on data from an ongoing five-year study of young people's science and career aspirations (age 10-14), this paper asks what do young people aspire to at age 12/13, and what influences these aspirations? It outlines the main aspirations…

The increasing use of zero tolerance discipline policies in the USA has led to a "discipline gap," in which minoritized students receive harsher and more frequent suspensions and expulsions than their peers from dominant cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Though disciplinary decisions are made by educators at the school level,…

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the socioeconomic status (SES) school segregation in Chile, whose educational system is regarded as an extreme case of a market-oriented education. The study estimated the magnitude and evolution of the SES segregation of schools at both national and local levels, and it studied the relationship between…

"Resilience" has become a popular goal in research, social policy, intervention design and implementation. Reinforced by its conceptual and political slipperiness, resilience has become a key construct in school-based, universal interventions that aim to develop it as part of social and emotional competence or emotional well-being.…

Teach For America (TFA), an organization that places college graduates in urban and rural classrooms for two-year terms of service, is lauded by reformers who see its five-week summer training institute as evidence that teachers have little to learn before entering classrooms. Yet, while boosters see TFA as a radical alternative to traditional…

In its advancement towards an education quasi-market, Catalonia has recently been driving the development of "school educational projects" in all schools (both public and private) as a tool to facilitate school autonomy and family choices. A school educational project is a formal document in which schools identify their pedagogical…

Since 2002, British Columbia's education system has undergone extensive change following amendments to the "BC School Act" ("Bill 34"). This article presents a critical analysis of policy changes to the K-12 education finance system, particularly the expansion of the legal capacity of school districts to create…