This study explores the perceptions of government officials, teachers, and parents in Scotland regarding the use of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results to evaluate national education performance. International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) such as PISA have been increasingly influencing education policymaking worldwide,…

Pedagogical reforms in sub-Saharan Africa have often been unsuccessful, arguably because they fail to account for the social and cultural context of teachers' choices. Two studies in rural Tanzania examined the pedagogical decisions of teachers taking part in a programme of teacher professional development. Teachers reflected on their own…

Research on the ethics of the home-school partnerships in secondary education is scarce. This paper uses data from three case studies to argue: students have a right to privacy which home-school partnerships can circumvent, parents can be used as a resource to leverage compliance from students which undermines young people's privacy, and…

Three categories of work orientation -- job, career and calling -- have been widely used to characterise how people perceive and behave towards their work. While this typology has been generative, this paper adopts a different perspective (based on Discursive Psychology) by prioritising what and how teachers talk about their work on their own…

In this paper, we deploy data collected through a Q study with educators in south-west England. The mixed methodology involved the two stages of forced choice statement sorting by educator participants and subsequent factor analysis. Through abductive analyses, four views regarding aspirations and young people in peripheral communities are…

Drawing on life history interviews, this paper seeks to explore the lives of a group of eight teachers, all with working experience in England, who self-identify as committed to a more socially just education system. Drawing on Levitas' "Utopia as method," this article examines these teachers' perspectives on and practices around social…

The courts' role in educational disputes is much researched, but while the legal and socio-political implications of judicial decisions are often scrutinised, judges' pedagogical assumptions have generally been overlooked. This paper focuses on educational competency by considering judges' understandings of the pedagogical effect of religious…

The present study examines experiences of mentor teachers and their teacher colleagues following three days of professional development training for early literacy instruction and a literacy software program (ABRA). Four Kenyan teacher-mentors were interviewed and 34 teachers were surveyed. Training included program specific and curriculum…

Performativity is a dominant mode of regulation in many education systems that has caused a significant shift in teaching and teacher professionalism, yet minimal attention has been paid to understanding it in non-Western contexts. This study explores Singaporean teachers' perceptions of teaching within its unique and normalised performative…

This paper shows how the commitment of senior leadership teams to student voice is not necessarily shared by teachers. As part of a wider study, this paper presents qualitative data generated through interviews with school staff in one Irish post-primary school with a strong culture of student voice to illustrate the discrepancy that can exist…

During the last decade, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of Syrian asylum seekers, including forced displaced academics (FDAs), in Turkey. Along with providing essentials, there is the issue of social integration for these people. To efficiently deal with this problem, Turkish authorities have developed both educational…

Parents' and teachers' beliefs and evaluations of young people are important. Using a feminist institutionalist perspective, and drawing on rich data from one in seven nine-year-old children in Ireland, this paper examines mothers' (who make up the overwhelming majority of primary care-givers) and teachers' perceptions of boys' and girls'…

This article seeks to examine the neglected sociomateriality of the classroom and investigates how space, matter and human actors are entangled, interact and take part in the 'space-producing action'. Rather than approaching the classroom as an objective collection of physical units or a stable grid, we see it as something alive, a performance…

Countries regarded as holding high levels of educational autonomy face a different set of constraints to that of countries with low levels of autonomy, these constraints being linked to the marketisation of schools. As schools become decentralised and given greater autonomy, school leaders are steered by a responsibilising framework that includes…

A rising crisis of confidence has been noted amongst teachers of poetry in recent years. Amplified by external factors such as high-stakes testing regimes, performance indicators, standardisation and accountability measures, teachers are increasingly challenged to provide immersive, imaginative and engaging encounters with poetry while developing…