A long tradition of both State and religious interest and support characterised provision for education on the island of Ireland from the 1700s. Following the partition of Ireland in the 1920s, the newly created political entities of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland forged separate and distinct education policy trajectories that largely…

This paper reports a study of permanent secretaries who served at the Department for Education (DfE) from 1975 to 2011. Located within a context of theories that explain how government bureaucracies operate, it focuses on Michael Bichard. Appointed in July 1995 when attempts were being made to open Whitehall to non-career civil servants, he…

One neglected aspect of the Gorbachev perestroika era in Russia [1985-1991] was the remarkable "pedagogy of cooperation" (or pedagogika sotrudnichestva) movement, a renewal of the experimental tradition in education. Central to this was Edward Dneprov, a brilliant and forceful individual whose views and personality substantially shaped…

How can the individual preserve his identity within a crowd? How can he/she counter the threats and the temptations of the mass phenomenon? In the following, these questions are answered, correctly based on two contrasting and complementary situations and approaches: on the one hand, the beginnings of the Soviet Union in the 1920s as manifested in…

This paper examines a period in Scottish educational history when civil servants, not politicians, were in the ascendancy in the initiation of policy. The first three Secretaries of the Scotch/Scottish Education Department (SED) -- Henry Craik (1846-1927), John Struthers (1857-1925) and George Macdonald (1862-1940) -- enjoyed considerable…

This article examines the career of the educationalist, Conservative politician and published writer on education and politics, Rhodes Boyson (1925-2012). As an educationalist, Boyson established Highbury Grove Boys' Comprehensive School in Islington, North London: An inner-city school which was antithetical to the wave of progressivism in the…

This paper reports on part of an on-going interview-based study of the eight permanent secretaries who served at the Department for Education from 1976 to 2012. Following a discussion of the relevance of biography to the study of public sector administrators, it presents a portrait of Sir Tim Lankester. Based on his own account and that of…