The participation of people from ethnic minorities in UK higher education is greater than that of White people. Nevertheless, students from ethnic minorities are less likely to obtain "good" degrees (those awarded with first or upper second-class honours) than are White students. This article discusses some possible causes and…

High-stakes, standardized testing has become the central tool for educational reform and regulation in many industrialized nations in the world, and it has been implemented with particular intensity in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on research on high-stakes testing and its effect on classroom practice and pedagogic discourse…

The notion of a conspiracy creating and maintaining the educational performance gap between Black and White students may seem to most to be far-fetched. However, experience of schools and of the workings of local education authorities points to a continuation if not a deepening of educational inequalities. How can this be understood? Gillborn…

In "British Journal of Sociology of Education" Volume 29 number 3, 2008, Connolly presented what he termed a "critical review" of some of our previous work on the relative attainment of male and female students in UK schools. He proposed three general areas for criticism--our use of attainment gaps, our consideration of…

The National Challenge, whereby all secondary schools had to attain 5 A*--Cs by 2011, was launched in June 2008. In this article, Richard Riddell outlines the main provisions of the National Challenge, which he characterizes as shallow, mechanistic and playing an old "performativity" tune. Although the new benchmark will be achieved by…