This paper focuses on a context where interdisciplinarity intersects with interprofessionality: the work of children's services professionals who address the needs of children identified as vulnerable. It draws on evidence and perspectives from two disciplines--educational studies and health care--to consider the issues and challenges posed by…

Background: The paper compares and contrasts the policy context of teacher training for vocational educators (VETT) in Scotland and England and locates this in its European setting. It explores the wider socio-economic context, one that emphasises lifelong learning, competitiveness and social justice. Purpose: In particular, it addresses the UK…

The English education system has been radically transformed over the last two decades. Throughout this period, the New Right and New Labour government policies have embraced the rhetoric of empowering schools to become self-managing institutions. In the course of this transformation, school leadership and management have become exceptionally…

Debates about governance, across the public sector, including education, continue to generate a substantial literature. The intention of this article is to engage with these debates by reviewing the articles in this special edition. In this review article, we first consider the wider context of the articles by revisiting some of the central…

"Accelerated Leadership Development" captures and communicates the lessons learned from successful fast-track leadership programmes in the private and public sector, and provides a model which schools can follow and customize as they plan their own leadership development strategies. As large numbers of headteachers and other senior staff…

This report summarises the findings of research commissioned by Universities UK into the role and contribution of higher education in the UK's creative economy. The research gathered evidence from existing data and research as well as case study analysis and contributions from industry, higher education and public sector partners. The findings…

The paper draws on data and theorising from the Knowledge Production in Educational Leadership (KPEL) Project where we have investigated New Labour's education policy and investment in headteachers as school leaders in England. New Labour took up office in May 1997 with a modernisation agenda and the leadership of schools is central to this…

UK Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) are seen as critical to policymakers' aspirations to develop an education and training (E&T) system that is both "demand-driven" and "employer-led" and where employers "play their part" in national upskilling. However, the concept of employer leadership remains deeply problematic…

Since their incorporation in 1993, further education (FE) colleges in England have been responsible for their own staffing and, faced with funding constraints as well as recruitment and retention targets, some have introduced a new category of staff referred to here as "learning support workers" (LSWs). Though their employment conditions…

The paper explores the changing forms of governance currently being applied to the English further education sector--changes that emphasise the importance of locality. The paper sets the sector within its socio-economic and policy context, examining current policy changes that intend to alter the way in which the sector is managed. It relates…

The purpose of this paper is to identify common patterns in central authorities' steering of universities and the institutional power in neo-liberal higher education regimes. The paper examines the regulatory mechanisms of England and Japan through Foucault's idea of "governmentality" and utilises the concept of autonomy to identify the…

Further education (FE) has traditionally been a rather unspectacular activity. Lacking the visibility of schools or the prestige of universities, for the vast majority of its existence FE has had a relatively low profile on the margins of English education. Over recent years this situation has altered significantly and further education has…

This article explores the ways in which the neo-liberal impetus toward the privatization of state schooling signalled in the Education Reform Act 1988 (ERA) has become embedded in the English school system. Four main points are made. First, that ERA itself was of huge strategic rather than substantive importance as far as privatization is…

In this paper, I will consider the lessons that can be learnt about literacy policy and its role in large-scale education reform programmes, with particular reference to policy-making in England since the election of New Labour in 1997. New Labour's promise to the electorate in 1997 was that state-funded education could be fixed and turned into a…

This article looks at one of the dominant themes of English education over the past twenty years. It examines the various ways in which privatisation has affected schools and schooling since the early 1980s. It may no longer be possible to indulge in a blanket defence of the public sector; but we do at least have to recognise that privatisation in…