In the United Kingdom, a "good" undergraduate degree is understood to be a "first class" or an "upper second class," which is achieved by three-quarters of students. The need to distinguish oneself from others is ever more important in an increasingly crowded graduate market, although a first-class degree is most…

This article extends the authors' earlier work (Young & Muller 2013) exploring the concept of 'powerful knowledge'. It first examines some of the origins of the concept and goes on to a brief consideration of how sociology, political theory and economics have traditionally represented 'power' and 'knowledge'. Two key senses of power are…

This paper explores the impact of selection by ability in schooling systems on individual lives. It draws on narratives collected with a group of 18 people (accessed through a local U3A group) who were at school in Britain in a period from the 1940s through to the 1960s. This period saw significant changes in society and to schooling following the…

In this paper I consider the notion of 'visible pedagogy' in refining a conceptualization of 'socially-just pedagogy' in the mathematics classroom. I explore reasons why the recent focus on promoting formative assessment and metacognition, embodied in Hattie's 'visible learning', has failed to bring about the fundamental shift in pedagogic…

The research focuses on the complexities associated with contemporary rural primary school leadership. The paper draws on in-depth ethnographic research undertaken in two contrasting English rural primary schools and their surrounding community over a period of three years and in particular the experiences and perspectives of the two head teachers…

In this paper we explore how students can experience the relevance of mathematical modelling activities. In the literature we found that relevance is a connection among several issues (relevance of what? to whom? according to whom? and to what end?). We framed this concept in terms of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), a theory for…

A common charge levelled at English and Welsh citizenship education, whether taught as a separate subject or incorporated into other disciplines, is that it encourages compliance more than it inspires critical thought. There is room within the compulsory citizenship framework, however, for teachers to advance genuinely critical attributes in…

This paper makes a contribution to the developing field of the political economy of educational technology and to an understanding of the significance of digital technologies for home-school relations. The digitalisation of social life is increasing and the impact of digitalisation on home-school relations, parents, and children is…

This article contributes to conceptualisations of public engagement as part of academic practice in higher education. It uses Hannah Arendt's idea of action in the public sphere, which is underpinned by the belief that all have the capacity to contribute to the renewal of the world, and that we are equally different. It argues that public…

Attempts to measure the quality of teaching and learning have resulted in an overreliance on quantitative performance data and the normalisation of a set of reductionist practices in England's further education sector in recent years. Focusing on lesson observation as an illustrative example and drawing on data from a national study, this article…

Drawing upon the work of Foucault and Latour, this article reflects on 25 years of critique of competence-based education and its continuing strength as a way of framing education and training. Using an example from England, it rehearses the argument from Foucault that, despite its student-centred discourse, competence-based education can be…

This article considers the ways in which a group of university-based teacher educators work with school-based mentors (cooperating teachers). Owing to a number of changes in teacher education policy in England, feelings of marginalisation from the teacher educators are presented before exploring how they undertake their work with school mentors.…

Peter Jarvis is a towering figure in the study of adult and lifelong education and a leading and original theorist of learning. This paper sets out his intellectual and professional biography, maps the main contours of his work and introduces fourteen papers by leading scholars devoted to his work. Five broad phases in Jarvis' life are identified:…

The historical origins and development of comprehensive schooling have seldom been analyzed systematically and comparatively. However, there is a rich comparative and historically grounded literature on the development of welfare states, which focuses on many relevant policies, but ignores the education system. In particular, the power resources…

Inspired by scholarly calls to focus more intently on the influence of context on leaders' construction and negotiation of identity, this paper draws on evidence from our Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project in London, New York City and Toronto. Throughout the paper, we strive to illuminate how the city-based context influences how…