International branch campuses (IBCs) are becoming an alternative to domestic higher education institutions. Through interviews with Chinese undergraduates at a British IBC in China, this article examines the choice of a British IBC, using a combined model as the conceptual framework. It finds that the factors both affecting college choice and…

Arriving in the UK after exile from Nazi Germany, Karl Mannheim taught sociology at the London School of Economics and then also at the London Institute of Education, where he was awarded a chair just a year before his untimely death in 1947. In his later writings and teaching, Mannheim argued that the sociology of education could make a crucial…

A prominent feature of the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd has been the renewed call for schools to become antiracist. What can be learnt from past unsuccessful attempts to implement antiracist education? Specific critiques of the antiracist movement made by prominent academics such as Paul Gilroy are worth…

This article explores the origins of researcher development in British universities. Its principal aim is to provide a coherent, and reasonably succinct, account of the evolution and development of researcher development that is as consistent as possible with what is known about the development of the Western university, the history of the…

This article draws on experience both within commercial textbook publishing and on textbook-development projects at the UCL Institute of Education to interrogate the current dynamics of 'neoliberal' edu-business (after Ball, 2012). The author discusses some damaging limitations inherent in publishing coursebooks predicated on what Young and Muller…

This article reviews recent policies for 14-19 learning in Wales and Scotland, and discusses the extent to which these policies have diverged from England following parliamentary devolution in 1999. It distinguishes different types of divergence and suggests that many policy differences have not been about major issues of educational philosophy or…

Here we draw on recent research and on earlier contributions on convergence and divergence across Great Britain to consider possible future trajectories for 14-19 education and training in England. We use a UK-wide lens to reflect on 14-19 strategies in England by showing how common issues can be tackled in different ways in Scotland, Wales and…

This article examines current debates surrounding British higher education funding from a political economy perspective, drawing on "positive" and "institutionalist" political economy. Adopting the lens of political economy enables a critical assessment of the use of terms drawn from economics by many higher education…

The argument of the article is that contemporary research into thesis supervision overlooks important didactical features of the supervisory dialogue because of its focus on general pedagogical categories. Entailing this argument I suggest that the personal dimension should be seen not only as a means to enhanced communication between supervisor…

This essay explores the fluctuations in and short-lived nature of urban school reform through a study of the Education Action Zone (EAZ) programme of Britain's New Labour government. Using the notion of civic capacity as a theoretical framework, the essay looks at this reform from the perspectives of its government proponents, critics outside of…