The outcomes of national assessments in many countries provide "qualifications" or "credentials" that may be used to define the levels of students' knowledge and skills, for their own use and that of employers, higher education institutions and others. Qualification users, such as students, parents and teachers, arguably…

This paper explores the media coverage of UK national examination results. Utilising the findings from a previous Economic and Social Research Council-funded investigation into the media coverage of the release of General Certificate of Secondary Education and Advanced-level General Certificate of Education results, the paper builds on the…

This paper scrutinises citizenship education in Turkey from the foundation of the Turkish Republic (1923) to the present and explores the extent to which it encourages inclusive or exclusive concepts of national identity and citizenship. In Turkey, where there are citizens belonging to ethnic and religious minorities, civic education plays a…

This paper investigates the impact of three different approaches to establishing School Self Evaluation (SSE) mechanisms upon student achievement. Using group randomisation, four groups of schools were created. Different types of support were provided to the first three groups of schools in order to help them establish SSE mechanisms, whereas no…

This article looks at the impact of Philippe Aries's classic "L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime", published in 1960. His well-known idea of the emergence of "Le sentiment de l'enfance" caused a lively debate among historians and social scientists resulting in fundamental contributions to our knowledge about the early phase of the…

This article seeks to shed light on the dilemma facing history education in regions beset by a protracted, and as yet unresolved ethno-political conflict. The article will examine this issue by means of a unique test case that observes a dramatic war event in Israeli textbooks. The event in question is the Six-Day War of 1967 and the study of its…

In this paper, I examine ethnic inequalities in educational attainment in England and Wales. I focus on the two main educational transitions in England and Wales: the transition at age 16, from compulsory to post-compulsory education, and the transition at age 18, from school to university. I take into account the distinction made by Boudon (1974)…

Drawing on a qualitative study of 32 UK student teachers, this paper asks what constitutes the vocational culture of teaching by exploring contradictory discourses of care and authority as they are presented to, and interpreted by, trainee teachers along their journey to becoming newly qualified teachers. Introducing the concept of "vocational…

We report a small-scale study investigating the perceptions of postgraduate students who are non-native speakers of English and those of academic staff with regard to those students. Previous research has focused only on the former and identified a number of linguistic and cultural challenges these students face in adapting to Anglophone…

The paper presents findings from a large-scale mixed methods study of young people's uses of new technologies at home to address a number of key conceptual issues in understanding the home as context for learning. First it is argued that young people's engagement with new technologies is fundamentally bound up with their own identity. It then goes…

The main objective of the paper is to present an outline for an approach studying young people as learners across contexts, presented here as a "learning lives approach". For youth, the two most time-consuming aspects of their daily lives are schooling and media use. In research, we tend to study these as two separate worlds. The challenge is to…

Rhetoric about young people's "ownership" of future socio-technical change is a familiar part of much educational and political discourse. This does not, however, translate in practice into a meaningful dialogue with young people about the sorts of futures they might wish to see emerge. This paper argues that a number of social and technological…

In both schools and homes, information and communication technologies (ICT) are widely seen as enhancing learning, this hope fuelling their rapid diffusion and adoption throughout developed societies. But they are not yet so embedded in the social practices of everyday life as to be taken for granted, with schools proving slower to change their…

This report draws on 53 focus group interviews conducted with students aged 13 and 15 in both representative and innovating UK secondary schools. The schedule for these discussions covered a wide range of issues relating to the use of Web 2.0 services both in and out of school. These young people were often deeply engaged with this technology and…

This paper considers the contribution of sociological theory to the academic study of young people, education and digital technology. First it discusses the shortcomings of the technological and socially determinist views of technology and education that prevail in current academic and policy discussions. Against this background the paper outlines…