Since coming to power in 1997, New Labour has adopted area-based initiatives (ABIs) as a key strategy to combat economic, social and (especially) educational disadvantage. This paper briefly outlines the history of ABIs within the UK and explores the discontinuities and continuities between recent initiatives and their earlier counterparts. It…

This paper presents an argument around the need to rethink the issue of early school leaving from the vantage point of students and teachers, and the conditions and pathways that need to be constructed and brought into existence within schooling, if such conditions do not already exist. The attempt is to move discussions outside of the…

A prominent thesis of British philosophy of education in the 1960s was that the pursuit of different forms of knowledge is central to education. The fact that the thesis is difficult to justify philosophically raises questions about its historical provenance. The idea of such a curriculum can be traced back through the history of the middle-class…

This paper examines the legislative framework developed in New Zealand over the last 15 years to facilitate greater parental choice in education. The discussion is set within the context of changes to admission practices in a number of education systems to advance the privatisation agenda, and outlines the resurgence of interest in the development…

Inspection and performance data show that the schools identified as least effective in England (in special measures) are more likely to sustain the improvement they make after inspection than those that are relatively more effective, although still causing concern (identified as having serious weaknesses). We compare the progress of these two…

This paper is based on a talk given at the conference of the Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning, September 2004. There is consistent evidence that parents' education predicts children's educational outcomes, alongside other distal family characteristics such as family income, parents' occupations and residence location. A…

Education forms a unique dimension of social status with qualities that make it especially important to health. Educational attainment marks social status at the beginning of adulthood, functioning as the main bridge between the status of one generation and the next, and also as the main avenue of upward mobility. It precedes the other achieved…

This paper reviews theory and research pertaining to the acquisition of identity capital and social capital, and applies it to the changing nature of learning in late-modern societies, where the ability to undertake individualized life courses is becoming an increasingly important divide in the fortunes of the young as they make their way to…

The paper investigates the relationship between mother's education and her parenting using data from the child supplement of the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS). By considering data across generations, our dataset allows us to estimate the size of the bias in the relationship between education and parenting from failing to account for…

We use quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the links between participation in adult learning and self-efficacy, particularly for the subgroup of adults who had low levels of achievement at school. We focus on self-efficacy because it translates into a range of wider benefits and because it may afford protection from depression and…

Although adult education leads to a moderation of racist or authoritarian attitudes amongst the general population, little is known concerning the impact of adult education on individuals with extremist racist-authoritarian views. In this paper we group individuals from the NCDS (National Child Development Study) into various racist-authoritarian…

The aims of this article are twofold: (a) to review an extensive body of research that focuses almost exclusively on racial problems Black students face at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) and (b) to provide insights into how Black students manage to productively navigate racist college and university environments. Hardly anything has been…

Students and educators are constrained from finding meaning in the current educational system as a result of the tension between educators' pedagogical practices and systemic constraints, such as high-stakes standardized tests and district-mandated instructional curriculum. Such restrictive educational policies limit educators from developing…

In this article, the author explores poverty as an outside-of-school factor and its influence on the inside-of-school experiences and outcome of students. He considers the interconnected space of learning, instructional practices, and poverty. In particular, he uses critical race theory as an analytic tool to unpack, shed light on, problematize,…

In this article, the authors examine the literature on parental involvement highlighting the equity issues that it raises in educational practice. They begin with a brief historical overview of approaches to parent involvement and the ways in which "neodeficit" discourses on parents permeate current education reform efforts. Next, they address how…