In UK higher education, the attainment of ethnic minority students is lower than that of white students, and this remains the case when differences in entry qualifications have been taken into account. The present study investigated whether the under-attainment of ethnic minority students might be due to the nature of the feedback that they…

Most societies today are culturally diverse. Increasingly, minority groups are demanding recognition and self-governing rights to protect their ways of life against that of the majority. These demands represent a serious challenge for the state: how is it to balance between the equally legitimate claims of the many cultures inhabiting its…

Deriving from the authors' respective ethnographic fieldwork (around two decades in each context), this position paper considers experiences of education across two communities: Gypsy/Roma in the UK and Indigenous in Australia. The article brings together understandings across these traditionally nomadic communities, with no shared history or…

Objective: This study examined the relationship between ethnic background and parental views of healthy body size, concerns surrounding overweight and attitudes to perceived causes of overweight in childhood. Method: A self-report questionnaire was designed to explore parental attitudes towards childhood weight. Sampling deliberately…

This paper compares access to full-time undergraduate higher education (HE) by members of less advantaged social classes and ethnic minorities across the four "home countries" of the UK. It uses data on applicants to HE in selected years from 1996 to 2010. In all home countries students from intermediate and working-class backgrounds…

Debate has grown about the legitimacy of Muslim faith schools within the British education system. At the same time, scepticism has developed towards multiculturalism as a normative approach for dealing with diversity. This article argues that it is worth retaining the normative impetus of multiculturalism by returning to its roots in political…

There has been much debate around the extent to which post-structuralist theory can be applied to critical research. In this article, it is argued that aspects of the two approaches can be combined, resulting in productive tensions that point towards a possible new framework for researching race and racism in education in the UK. The article…

In recent years, the success rates of different groups of students in higher education have come under considerable scrutiny, with gender and ethnicity identified as key attributes predicting differential achievement of "good degrees". A review of previous studies highlights the need for research which looks beyond "the deficit…

In February 1992, the National Union of Students of the United Kingdom celebrated its 70th anniversary, however there were those within government that were determined that NUS would not see another decade. This article examines the ideological roots of this hostility to student organisations and examines NUS' response to it and the consequent…

This article explores the complex relationship between an openly gay instructor, homophobia, and heteronormativity in a university classroom. The authors first tabulated the frequency with which the instructor used the lives of heterosexuals and homosexuals as examples of content or as content itself, and then they interviewed 32 students about…

In spite of the relative success of the Widening Participation policy and strategies to increase the numbers of students from Black and Minority and White working-class backgrounds going to university, universities in Britain continue to be White and middle-class-dominated institutions. We found, in our two-year qualitative Higher Education…

Despite entering higher education in good numbers, candidates from some black and minority ethnic groups are concentrated in less prestigious institutions. A similar pattern is evident in candidates' applications, raising important questions about the role of "self-exclusion". Statistical analysis confirms that candidates from some…

"The Wiley Handbook of Home Education" is a comprehensive collection of the latest scholarship in all aspects of home education in the United States and abroad. This book presents the latest findings on academic achievement of home-schooled children, issues of socialization, and legal argumentation about home-schooling and government…

The representational space of teachers and children in schools has changed beyond all recognition. Drawing on the idea that the school is a socio-spatial landscape, a highly significant institutional space with which children engage, we can understand forms of educational inequality as consequences of spatial production. This article contributes…

We consider the relative academic achievement in primary school of second-generation immigrant children in the UK. The education progress of these groups of children is of historical interest and is also relevant to the policy debate today, since ethnic minority students in England continue to have lower levels of achievement in primary school,…