This article examines the case of academic drift, as an example of a theory developed and applied within higher education research. It traces the origins and meaning of the term, reviews its application by higher education researchers, and discusses the issues it raises and the critiques it has attracted. It concludes that academic drift is at the…

English education has recently experienced radical policy reform in the areas of school autonomy and accountability. The key focus of this paper is on how schools might best navigate through these policy moves. It highlights how these moves have constructed schools, teachers and students in problematic ways but also how they are offering…

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the constructs of school leadership that have gained primacy over the past 20 years. In doing so, I discuss how structures limit the role of the leader in school organisations has been overlooked, particularly ignoring the resource dependency of schools and the external control of resources they…

This article revisits the three decades following the end of World War Two--a time when, following the 1944 Education Act, local education authorities (LEAs) were the key agencies responsible for running the education system across England. For the first time, there was a statutory requirement for LEAs to secure adequate facilities for further…

This article draws on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century teaching manuals, reports of Her Majesty's Inspectors, history textbooks ("readers"), other administrators' and teachers' accounts, policy documents and pupils' reminiscences to refute common and generalised assessments of the period (often by those…

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in England, launched in 1964, highlights contested issues of knowledge production in relation to the disciplines in modern universities. It constitutes a fascinating example of the social formation of configurations of knowledge that can be subjected to historical…

This article has a dual purpose. The first is to pay tribute to the work of Richard Selleck and Geoffrey Sherington; the second to argue that historians of education can make substantial contributions to current and future educational policy and practice by identifying what Ravitch has called "time-tested truths". The nature and purpose…

Significant challenges confront many Westernised institutions of higher education. Financial pressures, the increasing commodification of higher education and the insistent demands of the global marketplace, have changed the configuration of academe. One of the immediate consequences has been that the role of the professoriate has altered through…

In order to explore education at the first two Pan-Pacific Women's Conferences, this article builds on Campbell and Sherington's account of education in Oceania and on empirical research undertaken by Selleck and others, along with relevant primary source material. It traces elements of empire as they played out in inter-war women's…

This paper endorses Dick Selleck and Geoffrey Sherington's view that public policy-making is characterised by both fluidity and contestability. In April 1988, the report of a Taskforce headed by Brian Picot recommended major reforms in New Zealand's public education system. Even today, however, there is controversy regarding the major…

This article explores the connections between official contemporary identity formation and colonial pasts. Using the case studies of India and Ireland the article explores how different traditions of theorisation are powerful in these formations. India and Ireland were two colonial domains that had many linkages outside the ambit of the British.…

When Geoffrey Sherington and I set out on our project on the Australian Public University, which culminated in "Sydney: The Making of a Public University" (2012), we wanted to move away from the emphasis of conventional institutional history on chancellors, vice-chancellors and governing councils in order to explore the university as a…

A reanalysis of colonial education is necessary in order to highlight its multifaceted and hybrid nature in specific colonial contexts. Although in general, colonial education served the socio-political needs of the colonial machinery, the colonial government's hegemonic authority over the school curriculum did not operate as a totalising…

William Taylor's 1969 chapter provides a springboard to reflect on how what he termed administrator training has developed since the 1960s. Responding also to Baron's insistence in the same volume that education be viewed as political, the article adopts a critical perspective, focusing on leader preparation programmes and exploring how…

"Educational administration and the social sciences", the landmark text coedited by Baron and Taylor in 1969, represented the study of educational administration as an applied interdisciplinary field. George Baron's own academic career reveals the struggles involved in the construction of this new field and the resistance and…