This paper draws on research conducted in four publicly funded secondary schools in the South-East of England that explored the higher education decision-making of prospective first-generation university entrants accessing school-based widening participation interventions. It begins by introducing an "ecology of intersecting influences"…

Educational professionals are not ordinary everyday critics using experiential expertise to comment on practice. Instead, they are critical researchers who are concerned with debates about the purposes of education, social justice and equity, and how research is vital to understanding and explaining change. Using the reflexive views of six…

This paper examines Forest School's potential to support gender equality among primary school-aged children. Using a rights-based perspective, an observational study - including children's drawings - explored children's constructions of gender in Forest School and classroom sessions. The study found that although children generally appeared…

This paper draws on research conducted in four state schools with sixth forms to problematise two flagship 'disadvantage' policy agendas in the English context: the Pupil Premium (focusing on the narrowing of attainment gaps) and widening participation (focusing on fairer university access). While such 'priority' policies necessarily incorporate…

This article recalls the key concept of due regard in the Equality Act 2010 and outlines how it was increasingly ignored by the Department for Education (DfE) in England in the following decade. Further, it speculates that if the concept of due regard had been observed more rigorously across all government departments, the COVID-19 pandemic would…

This study, undertaken in a predominantly monolingual area of England, examines pre-service teachers' (N = 293) suggestions of how they could reflect linguistic diversity in primary classrooms (ages 4-11). Trialling a mixed method approach where open-text data are "quanticised," a combination of content analysis and statistical analysis…

This paper reflects on the first five years of the Changing University Cultures (CHUCL) collective, which conducted equality and diversity projects in four English universities between 2015 and 2020. We explore how CHUCL has been used in the service of institutional polishing (Ahmed, S. 2012. "On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in…

In recent years school-to-school collaboration in the English context has been promoted by a myriad of policy initiatives. Many of these initiatives have been directed at structural reforms seeking to facilitate a 'self-improving system' in which schools support one another to raise standards of teaching and learning and address educational…

Education can be viewed as having both social and individual purpose, and our experience of it can be shaped by both a selective mindset and a comprehensive idea. The comprehensive idea is an expression of values of equality and solidarity which I argue is as relevant post-sixteen as pre-sixteen. England's college sector is vital but often…

"Schooling and Social Change in England since 1760" offers a powerful critique of the situation of British education today and shows the historical processes that have helped generate the crisis confronting policymakers and practitioners at the present time. The book identifies the key phases of economic and social change since 1760 and…

Why do inequalities in schooling persist, even in relatively egalitarian school systems? This article examines within school sorting as an explanation. We use classroom data on friendship networks in 480 European secondary schools and contrast comprehensive (England, Sweden) and tracked systems (Germany, Netherlands). Our question is to what…

This article draws on case studies from abroad to illustrate what to avoid and what to promote in the quest for a socially just educational system. It first looks at the range of goals different countries have pursued in relation to education. It then focuses more closely on policies in a range of European countries, that have inhibited or enabled…

It seems uncontentious that policy development should be informed by evidence, and that researchers should be engaged to assess available evidence. In this paper, we tell the story of a Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) about school exclusion, a task intended to inform a 'root and branch' policy review. Drawing on Carol Bacchi's 'What's the…

This study discusses the impact of neoliberalism on legal education in England and Wales and the challenges and opportunities it presents. Neoliberalism is characterised by a focus on economic efficiency, competition, and individual responsibility, which can result in the commodification of education. The adoption of neoliberal policies in legal…

We draw upon Appadurai's 'scapes' and Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT) to interrogate historical and spatial flows in relation to specific testing technologies. We reveal how testing systems, conceptualised as actor-networks, rearticulate colonial legacies of inequality which are intensified by new and emerging technologies. ANT helps trace…