The authors investigate the size and stability of departmental effects in English secondary schooling during a period in which extensions to parental choice and annual publication of school performance tables had significantly increased competitive pressures on schools. Their database of nearly 450 English secondary schools enables them to…

Following serious disturbances in some northern cities in England in 2001, concerns about possible rising inter-communal tension have led to a statutory duty to promote community cohesion being placed on schools. Inspectors from the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) are required to make judgements in the leadership and management section…

In this article the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers outlines the reasons why the Union opposes Academies, and gives an overview of the changes in the relationship between local authorities and Academies. The NUT recognises that the change of government presents an opportunity for a change of direction and welcomes reports that…

National rural policy places the local primary school as a key resource within the rural community, yet as a consequence of countywide financial constraints, some small schools are undergoing reorganization, involving amalgamation, federation and school closure. This article considers the complexities involved in the workings of the English rural…

Our focus in this article is on the lessons learned about effective change from international experience with large-scale reform over the last 20 years. The central lesson now evident is that sustained improvement in student outcomes requires a sustained effort to change teaching and learning practices in thousands and thousands of classrooms, and…

The author, a former headteacher and now a county councillor, argues that the structural changes to the education system put in place in the first weeks of the new government in the summer of 2010 will exacerbate the gap between the highest and lowest achieving schools, will destabilise the state-funded education system, will expose it to…

This paper discusses the geography of parental choice in a rural locale and shows how a group of parents negotiated their way through the process of primary school choice. Using ethnographic data collected through interviews and observations with parents and staff from three rural primary schools in England, the research utilises Bourdieu's…

This paper examines regulating discourses "spoken" within the complex multi-sector network of educational policy and provision that has grown from a recent introduction of choice advisers in England. Choice advice documentation from across the network is examined and four discursive themes are identified: equity; parental responsibility;…

It is difficult to make a clear impact statement about charter schools. Much of the available research is equivocal, and many important questions related to the impact of charter schools remain unanswered. Researchers have primarily examined four general topics with respect to the impact of charter schools; (1) Do charter schools raise student…

Previous international work has shown that clustering pupils with similar characteristics in particular schools yields no clear academic benefit, and can be disadvantageous both socially and personally. Understanding how and why this clustering happens, and how it may be reduced, is therefore important for policy. Yet previous work has tended to…

This paper examines assumptions which underpin the promotion of a quasi-market in the English secondary school system in light of research findings on pupil mobility--that is, children joining and leaving schools at non-standard times. It draws principally on research funded by the Nuffield Foundation and reports findings of a study of pupil…

State sector education policy in England aims to deliver raised standards of attainment and equality of educational opportunity by offering fair access to schools for all pupils from any background. During the lifetime of the previous Labour government (May 1997 to April 2010) a key policy tool used to tackle entrenched low levels of academic…

The objective of the research is to explore the rationale for parental choice at the transition point between primary and secondary education in England and Wales. The research is based in a single secondary school that is heavily over-subscribed. The potential cohort for responses to a survey was 205, of which sixteen percent responded. The…

This is a brief response to some of the issues raised by Gorard and Fitz in their paper, "What counts as evidence in the school choice debate?" published in the "British Educational Research Journal" v32, n6, 2006. Gorard and Fitz claim a "basic arithmetic error" (p. 807) in giving equal weighting to all LEAs (Noden,…

The author traces the history of the campaign to stop Islington Green School being closed and turned into an academy specialising in business and financial services. Although the campaign, after a number of successes now looks as if it might fail in its immediate objective, the author argues that the battle was still worth fighting because of the…