This paper examines three recent accounts of what has allegedly gone wrong with the school curriculum in England in recent years and their prescriptions for remedying these ills--all three accounts sharing strong proposals to reinstate "knowledge" at the heart of the curriculum. These analyses, despite some significant similarities, come…

This article investigates the perceptions of English headteachers and Hong Kong principals on the kinds of pressures that they believed affected the way they did their job, and in particular the degree to which they felt their governments were affecting their leadership role. The research utilised semi-structured interviews to generate written…

High stakes testing has been long established in the English school system. In this article, we seek to demonstrate how testing has become pivotal to securing the neo-liberal restructuring of schools, that commenced during the Thatcher era, and is reaching a critical point at the current time. Central to this project has been the need to assert…

National and transnational qualifications frameworks are an increasingly present feature of the education and training landscape. The United Kingdom can be regarded as one of the pioneers of qualifications frameworks, with partial frameworks appearing from the mid-1980s onwards. However, approaches in England if not in the whole of the UK have…

This article posits a connection between the influence of communitarianism on New Labour's ideology and the content of citizenship education in England and Wales. We first describe and problematize communitarianism, drawing on both UK and US thinkers, and then relate our findings to literature on citizenship education. We conclude by suggesting…

This article aims to contribute to the discussion surrounding Manuela du Bois-Reymond's important "trendsetter learner" thesis and, in so doing, to join the wider debate about post-compulsory learning cultures. The article outlines the trendsetter learner thesis and then considers recent criticisms that it has attracted. While the author…

This paper explores the work of teacher education in England and Scotland. It seeks to locate this work within conflicting sociocultural views of professional practice and academic work. Drawing on an activity theory framework that integrates the analysis of these seemingly contradictory discourses with a study of teacher educators' practical…

Over the last 40 years child protection systems in all Advanced Western Societies have been subject to high profile criticisms and regular major reviews. In many respects the Munro Review of Child Protection (2011) in England, is very different to those which have gone before. This paper summarises the main findings and recommendations of The…

Recent policy in England has advocated the introduction of fast-track degrees to provide an alternative, shorter route to a bachelor's degree. It has been argued that this will widen participation in higher education and increase labour market flexibility by providing an option in which undergraduates spend one fewer years out of the labour…

This article argues that the nation's commitment to young people involves proper concern for their physical health, their psychological health, and their spiritual health. In this context the notion of spiritual health is clarified by a critique of John Fisher's model of spiritual health. Fisher developed a relational model of spiritual health,…

This article presents the scope and range of Christian involvement in establishing the field of education in England as a distinct area for scholarship between 1930 and 1960. It advocates greater study of the range of various denominational positions held in the period. This paper also illustrates the public debates of the time by focusing on the…

Approaches to teaching and learning are increasingly influenced by the introduction of new technologies and innovative use of space. Recognising the need to keep up to date many institutions has created technology-rich, flexible spaces. Studies so far have concentrated on how students use such facilities; however, their availability also strongly…

This paper provides a critical review of the changes to the role of practical work in the science curriculum in England over the last forty years. The science curriculum over this period appears to place an emphasis on an approach to practical enquiry that suggests school students can act like "real" scientists. This paper provides a…

Whether it was thought of positively or negatively, Italy is a popular topic of discussion in Elizabethan literature. Some Elizabethan writers mimic Italian writers and incorporate Italian ideas into their own works, while other writers alter Italian literary conventions and openly attack Italian morals. This range of positive and negative…

The authors review "White middle class identities and urban schooling," by D. Reay, G. Crozier and D. James. This book focuses on the perspectives of white middle-class parents who make "against"-the-grain school choices for their children in urban England. It provides key insights into the dynamics of class practising that are…