This article outlines the main assessment traditions in four countries -- England, France, Germany and the United States -- in order to explore the prospects for the integration of summative and formative functions of assessment during compulsory schooling. In England, teachers' judgments do feed into national assessments, at 7, 11, 14 and 16, but…

This review discusses the main research findings and conclusions of the Transforming Learning Culture in FE Project, which is part of the Economic and Social Research Council's Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). This review seeks to address some of the key issues arising from the TLC-FE Project that have a direct bearing on improving…

From his very earliest days in office, Tony Blair believed that if he was to achieve his broader educational reforms then the teaching profession itself needed modernising--it had to become a "21st century profession". This paper charts the background to this aspiration and the complex range of interrelated policies used to achieve that…

We examine the contemporary relationship between headship and leadership in England. This speaks to the current globalizing agenda promoting generic leadership within a modernizing agenda of restructuring and reculturing in public education. Thinking based on several research studies is used to stimulate perspectives on a range of complex tensions…

There is growing concern that almost 20 years after the 1988 Education Act, top-down, large-scale reform has stalled. The policy mix of choice, competition, markets, regulation, accountability and leadership seems not to have closed the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged areas and individuals, while most variations in school performance can…

In this essay David Bridges argues that since most families choose to realize their responsibility for the major part of their children's education through state schools, then the way in which the state constructs parents' relation with these schools is one of its primary levers on parenting itself. Bridges then examines the way in which…

In this article we introduce and explain a funding framework for advancing an equity agenda at the community college. The need for the framework is premised on (a) Dowd's observation that the traditional community college commitment to student access no longer suffices as an adequate strategy to achieve greater equity in society and (b) the…

In the context of gender being a barrier to accessing leadership, this paper presents a comparison of the views of men and women headteachers (principals) of secondary schools in England in the 1990s and in 2004. The same survey instrument was used on both occasions. The perceptions of the headteachers show change in some areas and no change in…

Measures of school performance based on pupil attainment are becoming more sophisticated, with DfES piloting "contextualized value-added" measures. However, most such measures are based on simple sums of residuals about "expected" values, but it is clear from national data that distributions of performance are not symmetrical…

The establishment of the General Teaching Council for England (GTC) in 2000 created a professional and regulatory body for teaching in England. Acting in the public interest, GTC is responsible for contributing to improving the standards of teaching and the quality of learning, and for maintaining and improving standards of professional conduct…

The present paper examines efforts by government and government agencies in England to prescribe and control the knowledge base of a teaching profession that has, under successive New Labour administrations since 1997, been subjected to "modernisation". A theoretical framework drawn from aspects of the work of Basil Bernstein, and of Rob…

Suggests that the origins of the business management syndrome'' in popular education are to be found in two distinct yet not unrelated developments of the 19th century -- the success and consequent prestige of the early factory system, and the growing acceptance in the English speaking world of utilitarian ethical theory as it related to the…

Since its election in 1997 the Labour government's policy has sought to promote a "new professionalism" amongst teachers. First mooted at the time when new performance management arrangements were introduced, the discourse of new professionalism has now become closely associated with the "workforce remodeling" agenda in which…

This article investigates the costs and benefits of the increased use of modular or unitized qualification designs through a case study of the GCE A-level science curriculum in England. Following a brief review of the development of modular A-levels, the various proposed advantages of modularity--short-term goals and regular feedback, flexibility…