This paper examines the impact of gender on white middle-class parents' anxiety about choosing inner-city comprehensives and their children's subsequent experiences within school, particularly in relation to social mixing. Drawing on interview data from an ESRC funded study of white middle-class parents whose children attend inner-city…

This article assesses the period following the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) and reflects on the main continuities and discontinuities in policy emphases since that Act. It begins by outlining education policy under the Conservatives from 1979. In this, it shows how the Conservative's simultaneous pursuit of marketization and centralization in…

This paper focuses on the long established diversity in the English education system--independent schools, grammar schools and religious schools--and in so doing explores tensions between education policy, politics and social justice. It explores the differential access to these different types of school, their social composition and implications…

The study of leadership in schools today tends to be dominated by a paradigm obsessed with the recent, the relevant, and the principal. Drawing on past and recent reviews of the literature on middle leaders in secondary schools in the UK, eight key criticisms of the field are identified and a case made for an inclusive view to knowledge in which a…

New evidence is provided about the degree of social segregation in England's secondary schools, employing a cross-national perspective. Analysis is based on data for 27 industrialised countries from the 2000 and 2003 rounds of the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA). We allow for sampling variation in the estimates. England is…

The transfer to secondary education can be an anxious time and planning ahead can help. This article offers practical advice about what to consider, when to start planning and discusses many of the issues involved in the transition to later schooling. Written from the perspective of the English school system, many of the issues and principles are…

Purpose: This paper explores how school leaders seek to promote social justice agendas within the context of multi-ethnic schools in England. Design/methodology/approach: The paper draws on data from five case-study secondary schools in England. Qualitative data was derived from interviewing principals in each institution together with interviews…

This article explores a framework for an ethics of choice in urban education. It outlines the educational ambitions and ambivalences of a group of middle class families in one locality. The research on which we draw involved interviews with 28 middle class parents in the London Borough of Hackney and is part of a comparative study of urban middle…

This paper focuses on school choice and the extent to which admissions to publicly-funded secondary schools in England address issues of equity and social justice. It argues that schools with responsibility for their own admissions are more likely than others to act in their own self interest by "selecting in" or "creaming"…

This article has two chief purposes. It presents a substantive reappraisal of a decade of school choice research in the UK. This reappraisal is used as a case study illustrating the elasticity of the notion of social science "evidence", when wielded by academics in an area where strong ideological preconceptions struggle with the lack of…

The paper aims to make a methodological contribution to the education segregation literature, providing a critique of previous measures of segregation used in the literature, as well as suggesting an alternative approach to measuring school segregation. It also provides new empirical evidence on changes in the extent of socio-economic segregation…

Public-private partnerships in education exist in various forms around the world, in both developed and developing countries. Despite this, and despite the importance of human capital for economic growth, systematic analysis has been limited and scattered, with most scholarly attention going to initiatives in the United States. This volume helps…

Explores the diverse roles that British children play in choosing a secondary school in England, based on interviews with parents drawn from contrasting socioeconomic areas. Some families actively "play the market;" others are relatively passive. Although the child's voice was more influential with "passive" families and played…

A study of 643 British Year 11 students showed that 448 intended to stay at their school and 109 intended to change. Both parents and students were involved in decisions. Movers predominantly favored further education over advanced-level pathways. The costs of moving or staying in terms of relationships and institutional ambiance differed.…

The issue of social segregation in schools has seen a recent resurgence of interest--in the US, UK and internationally--as the debate rages on about whether policies that expand families' freedom to choose amongst schools encourage divergence or convergence in the types of pupil different schools admit. Most attention has been focussed on…