In November 2017, Ofsted published Bold Beginnings, a report on its findings about teaching in the Reception year. Like very many practitioners in the early years, the author of this article believes this report to be of concern, as the recommendations it proposes would be so damaging for the early education of young children. She believes its…

The UK Government's PREVENT strategy to counter radicalisation and extremism has been the subject of criticism. Concerns arise over clarity of purpose, clarity of terminology used and potential human rights impacts. Where the policy engages with schools, one human right potentially engaged is the right of parents to transfer their religious…

This paper is a mainly pragmatic response to utilitarian criticisms of the humanities. It first outlines political, public and practical fronts on which the humanities are under assault, identifying critics and their conspirators. Then, as a part of its defence of the humanities it expounds some of their central strengths. These range from the…

A primary function of schooling is to impart moral discipline, and art education distills this role to its core imperative of mandated pleasure, summarised by Jacques Lacan as the 'will to enjoy'. This manifests in the insistence that, despite producing similar outcomes, students come to recognise themselves as unique and creative. In the…

The film, "I, Daniel Blake", has received critical acclaim for its portrayal of the experiences of those attempting to navigate the bureaucracy of the British welfare state system. In this article, I use the depiction of literacy in the film as a lens through which I examine both the role of literacy in compounding the challenge for…

The purpose of this short article is to offer a critical perspective on Larsen and Harrington's ambitious and stimulating review article. It does so by drawing a distinction between teaching and learning and discussing how progression metaphors for describing the latter can distort the moral purpose of the former. My response to the provocation…

This article offers a critique of Ofsted's Bold Beginnings report based on the author's own experience as an early years practitioner. It draws attention to the growing 'readiness' agenda of the Department for Education (DfE) and to its focus on a primarily transmission-based model of teaching. It reaffirms the necessity of an approach to the…

In recent years restorative practice in schools has been heralded as a new paradigm for thinking about student behaviour. Its premise is to provide solutions to indiscipline, to restore relationships where there has been conflict or harm, and to give pupils a language with which to understand wrongdoing. This article offers a critique of…

In Peter McLaren's words "We need a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism", but what does such a philosophical grounding look like? Need it be shared? The philosophical basis for practice was not shared by Lenin and Bogdanov, for example, and yet both retained the ability to work together in the Bolshevik party. There's a…

It is one sign of the lack of understanding of the value of the humanities, to educational research and inquiry as well as to our world more widely, that such justifications of them as are offered frequently take a crudely instrumental form. The humanities (which in this essay are not distinguished from the arts) are welcomed insofar as they are…

This article is based on the findings of a qualitative exploration of factors influencing confidence levels among adult amateur choral singers. Three focus group interviews, involving 18 singers in total, and 16 individual interviews were carried out. These provided over 40 hours of recorded verbal data, which then underwent a process of…

Low levels of foreign language learning in the United Kingdom have been attributed to a lack of interest and motivation which, it is claimed, is partly fostered by the media. The present study examines 90 UK newspaper articles that contributed to the public debate on the language learning crisis in the UK between February 2010 and February 2012.…

The objectives of this article are to critically analyse the impact of formative and summative assessment in an informal secondary school environment. The informality reflects the work of The Anne Frank Trust UK and their practices in evaluating student progress through a two-week workshop programme. The preference for formative assessment is…

Critical museological perspectives have in recent years opened up new conceptual spaces for emerging forms of art museum practice. This article addresses the theme of changing ideologies and methodologies in art museums by offering an anecdote shaped by art museum practices, then theorizing potential responses from object-based, visitor-centered,…

This mixed methods paper considers whether or not invisible forms of morally resistant collegial leadership are progressively challenging policy and managerial quasi-market instrumentalism in a minority of low trust dysfunctional situations in a stratified United Kingdom (UK) Higher Education system. A theoretical model of stoical critical…