'Enterprise' has increasingly become part of the United Kingdom's political grammar and efforts to develop entrepreneurial traits and activities in young people have been a key strand of this policy focus. As the 2008 economic recession saw a curtailed youth labour market, enterprise emerged as an appealing policy 'solution' to youth unemployment.…

Successive governments have pledged to enhance the quality of apprenticeship in Britain so as to achieve "parity of esteem" with academic study. Yet, at the same time, the discourse of the academic-vocational divide has dominated the academic, policy-maker and practitioner debates. This paper draws on two recent studies designed to…

This paper reports on findings from a three-year ethnographic study of 24 young people in northern England who were classified as not in education, employment or training (NEET), or at risk of becoming so. Drawing on conceptions of opportunity structure and educational marginality, the paper discusses the processes leading to young people becoming…

Four drama programmes for at-risk youth run by a community theatre formed the basis for a 9-month participant observation and interview study. This paper focuses on the concept of roles, using this as a lens to explore participants' experiences, and to suggest ways in which taking part in the programmes enabled young people to "be Other"…

Recent policy statements have urged greater use of research to guide teaching, with some commentators calling for a "revolution" in evidence-based practice. Scholarly literature suggests that research can influence policy and practice in "instrumental," "conceptual" or "strategic" ways. This paper analyses…

This article explores the place of discourse about religions in education by comparing two very different schools. It initially outlines some of the current debates around religious discourse, notably in dialogue. A theoretical frame for analysing religious discourse in schools is proposed, combining a theorisation of three levels of dialogue with…

The lived experiences of young people are becoming increasingly marginalised within the narrowly defined curricula of neoliberal contexts. Many young people are also cast within the media according to deficit discourses of youth, which contributes to the fragmentation of communities and the limitation of interaction between generations. This…

Numbers of people with dementia are projected to grow to 682 million globally by 2050. However, despite this escalation, the widely-promoted positive vision of lifelong learning throughout all ages does not extend to people with dementia. Constructions of learning for those with dementia are predominantly limited to the management of symptoms. The…

This article reports some of the findings of a longitudinal ethnographic research study on the intercultural transition experiences of 50 engineering students in a China-U.K. articulation program. It focuses on the interaction between these students and the U.K.-based cohort, mainly home students. The findings indicate that lack of suitable…

Objectives: Modeling the processes involved in complex social interventions is important in social work practice, as it facilitates their implementation and translation into different contexts. This article reports the process of developing and modeling the connecting people intervention (CPI), a model of practice that supports people with mental…

This article explores young mothers' experiences of turbulent pathways in and out of education and work in Northern England. Data are drawn from an ethnography conducted between 2010 and 2013 that incorporated participant observation, life-story maps, photographs and interviews carried out in young mothers' homes, parenting classes and…

This paper is derived from a wider small-scale study of digital literacy practice that explores the ways in which a multilingual seven-year-old child, Bablu, interacts with his grandmother during Internet activities connected to Qur'anic literacy. The study aims to reveal how intergenerational learning support was given to Bablu by his…

The presence of technology in foreign education dates back to the 1960's. After over 50 years of research and practice, we are now moving towards discussion of identifying the end goal of integration that became known as normalisation (Bax, 2003). The majority of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) approaches and normalisation research is…

This article reports on a study of apprentices in England and Germany designed to explore young people's learner identities over time and in relation to particular learning environments. The research adopts a multi-method ethnographic approach, combining biographical interviews with multi-site participant observation. The article problematises the…

Recent debates within UK rural studies have stressed the shifting interplay of economic, social, political and cultural forces, with a concomitant blurring as to what constitutes rural living, rural spaces and even rural occupations. This article situates the rural school within this social, cultural and political landscape and attends to the…