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…

Parenting has come to play a pivotal role in breaking intergenerational disadvantage and increasing children's life chances and social mobility through practices such as parental support with their learning and education. Using a UK representative sample from the Millennium Cohort Study, the present study examined the unique and cumulative…

Competence as a measure of "fitness to practice" and its evaluation through mechanisms of personal performance review, has led to the introduction of systems in a number of professions which link appraisal to the maintenance of professional registration (variously referred to as re-validation, re-certification, re-accreditation, etc.).…

Students from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds are often underrepresented in public educational programmes for the gifted and talented (G&T), a phenomenon that has concerned educators for the last two decades. Ethiopian-Israeli minority students (EIMS) are a good example of this phenomenon, as more than 95% of the vast resources allocated…

Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper exposes the neoliberal ideology of the knowledge-based economy embedded within university policies, specifically those that regulate faculty hiring, promotion, and remuneration in two national contexts: Turkey and Mexico. The paper follows four stages of CDA: (1) focus upon a social wrong in its…

This article explores policy development for under-fives and its implementation in nursery schools in the first two decades of the twentieth century and draws parallels with current policy initiatives such as Sure Start and the "Troubled Families" programme. It interrogates how discourse on British racial health shaped policy and…

This paper tackles what is arguably one of the most pressing and intractable educational issues confronting western democracies--the disengagement and disconnection from schooling of alarming numbers of young people. The paper looks at the policy response in Victoria, Australia, and through ethnographic interviews with a small number of young…

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…

A lack of esteem for teachers and the teaching profession is a central tenet underpinning policy reforms put forward by the 2010 UK Government White Paper "The Importance of Teaching". This article argues that the policy problem and solutions presented in the White Paper lack awareness of the historical and social positioning of…

This paper uses Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach to analyze the emergence of civil society within global educational governance. The purpose is to understand the intersection of historical structures with global actors and spaces that have accompanied the globalization of education. Based on findings from a study on the impact in…

Understanding how teachers make sense of education policy is important. We argue that an exploration of teacher reactions to policy requires an engagement with theory focused on the formation of "the subject" since this form of theorisation addresses the creation of a seemingly coherent identity and attitude while acknowledging variation…

Despite profound changes to the higher education sector in the UK over recent years, which have tended to emphasise the role of prospective students as active choosers within a marketplace and encourage higher education institutions (HEIs) to place more emphasis on student engagement and representation as a means of improving the quality of the…

Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of "good governance" (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation…

In recent years, education and family policy in the UK has sought to incorporate the views of children and young people through an active participation agenda, in the fulfilment of children's rights under the obligations of the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child. Drawing on empirical evidence, this paper suggests that this aspiration…

This paper is an attempt to think aloud about the current policy proposals in circulation in England that address pre-service teacher education. Rather than dealing with details of policy and points of specificity in practice, the focus of this paper is with how propositions are justified and the overall ways in which meanings are being managed; a…