Multidisciplinary research institutes provide universities with an important vehicle to conduct research across traditional disciplines, and this can be an attractive capability for external funding bodies. However, there can be particular challenges, including managing different reporting lines, the need for effective research coordination, and…

When an editor sanctions a set of authors to expound on what they believe is blighting the world of education, who can be sure of what they are likely to suggest? Not surprisingly, in the present instance the authors of the six papers in this collection have seized on the freedom they have been granted and have outlined a range of afflictions. The…

Governments around the world have adopted school self-evaluation as an essential corollary to the local management of schools. Typically this has been accompanied by prescribed frameworks, indicators and scoring systems, tending to promote a form of ritual self-inspection rather than an ongoing and dynamic process of self-evaluation. It is argued…

The turn to cosmopolitanism in educational research on citizenship education is indicative of a wider discourse of cosmopolitanism evident throughout social and cultural policy. This discourse represents a more "light-hearted" use of the term than the philosophical tradition offers. This discourse should not be dismissed, however, but,…

The emergence of "managerialism" in the governance and direction of UK higher education (HE) institutions has been led by government demands for greater accountability in the quality and cost of universities. There is emerging anecdotal evidence indicating that the estimation performance of HE spreadsheets and regression models are poor.…

Risk-based regulation is a relatively new mode of governance. Not only does it offer a way of controlling institutions from the outside but it also provides the possibility of making an organisation's achievements visible/visualisable. This paper comments on a list of possible risks that higher education institutions have to face. In a second…

In the United Kingdom, the higher education landscape has undergone a transformation since the late 1980s as seen in the "massification" of higher education and the "quality revolution". These changes have resulted in an increased sense of accountability, to principle stakeholders: the government, the taxpayer and students…

This paper examines the role of social class and prior achievement composition effects on pupils' progress and the judgements made about school performance. It finds that there are small but significant compositional effects on pupil progress raising questions about how pupils can best be allocated to schools. Comparisons between the official…

Universities put considerable resources into developing learning and teaching plans. In this paper, we examine the purpose of these plans in the context of legislative requirements, public accountability and the quality agenda. We analyse a sample of Australian university learning and teaching plans using a framework we have developed based on…

Background: Teacher education in Scotland has developed its own trajectory for many years and this distinctiveness appears to have increased since the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Teachers' pay and conditions were addressed in 2001 by the agreement "A teaching profession for the 21st century." This agreement led to a…

In discussing the relationship between curriculum and assessment it is commonly argued that assessment should be aligned to curriculum or, alternatively, that they should be congruent with each other. This article explores that relationship in five educational contexts in the UK and in Europe, ranging across school education, workplace learning,…

This paper provides a co-director's and co-author's review of and commentary on research carried out with Maurice Galton over the past decade. Its principal focus is the burden that recent education policies and ascent of a deleterious culture of performativity have inflicted on teachers' professional and domestic lives. It reports on four studies…

In this article the author seeks to look at the policy on Academies from a broader perspective, briefly touching on issues of democracy, autonomy, governance and accountability and arguing that the policy must be considered holistically. Individuals should focus not on an Academy or Academies in isolation but on their relationship with the rest of…

The focus of this article is recent work by the Assessment Reform Group (ARG) on the role of teachers' judgements in the summative use of assessment. A brief overview of the early work of the ARG is followed by discussion of the desirable properties of assessment for summative uses. The work of the ARG's Assessment Systems for the Future project…

Governments in many countries exert pressures on universities to be more accountable for the results they manage to achieve with the resources available to them. A recently added twist, ironically within the context of falling government investment and rising student demand, is that governments are intruding into areas which have long been…