Successive UK governments have adopted failure as a strategy in the reform of public education in England: first, to construct crises in order to blame professionals/parents/children for a failing system; and second, to provide rescue solutions that are designed to fail in order to sustain the change imperative. We describe this as policy…

This article analyses the transformation of Robert College, the first American college founded abroad, from 1923 to 1970. Based on a careful investigation of Robert College archives and personal accounts of the College staff, it contends that the school's missionary character acquired a new identity after the foundation of Republican Turkey.…

Brian Simon (1915-2002) was a leading advocate of comprehensive education in the second half of the twentieth century in Britain. In the 1980s, in the face of the ideological offensive from the New Right, he firmly stood by Marxist ideals and resolutely resisted policies of the right-wing leading to the 1988 Education Reform Act. Despite this…

Set against the background of mid-nineteenth century concerns about an erosion in the denomination's standing and influence, this article highlights the differing responses to the matter from parties within the Church of England, which determined their degree of sympathy with proposals for an education act. Specifically, we point out that the…

Thirty years after the demise of the Soviet bloc, there still persists a rhetoric of differentiation and a discursive polarisation between the Western and the non-Western educational thinking and practices. This rhetoric overshadows a potential similarity, or homogeneity, between the dominant and several marginalised contexts. Regional, local and…

This article examines the 1988 Dawkins reforms to Australian higher education and the creation of a unified national system. The article is based on two propositions. The first is that as historians we should examine educational reforms in a changing society not only for what they propose, but with a look backwards to understand their place within…

The main aim of this article is to use the case study of comprehensivisation to examine the role of party activists as policy entrepreneurs and public intellectuals during the period 1950-1965. The intention is to widen the traditional notion of the public intellectual in order to better evaluate policy-making processes within the Labour Party. It…

Using the case study of Anglesey and its pioneering comprehensive scheme, this paper aims to re-examine education reforms and interventions by central government c.1918-1950. This is undertaken in a bid to reveal the significance of such reforms for the way in which comprehensive secondary education was able to evolve at the local level.…

This article re-visits contestation and critique over the nationwide introduction of comprehensive secondary schools in post-war England. In so doing, it considers the contribution of scholar-activist Caroline Benn (1926--2000) and a network of progressive educators who were challenging ideas about fixed ability or potential and aspiring to build…

On the occasion of its sesquicentenary, which coincides with an extended period of school closures imposed due to the effects of a global virus pandemic, this paper analyses the Elementary Education Act of 1870, and in particular in relation to its implications for compulsory attendance at school. It did not introduce compulsory schooling but…

This study examines the emergence and evolution of madrasa as a specific organizational form of higher learning from a comparative-historical perspective. The article begins by discussing how the madrasa emerged and which factors contributed to its rise and spread among the Islamicate political regimes during the Middle Ages and afterwards. Then,…

Until recently teacher education in England has always contained a 'philosophical' element -- to do with what education is for in the light of human nature. The paper traces its history since 1839, through inspirational approaches -- based first on religion and later on psychology -- to the critical approach of R S Peters and his colleagues in the…

In the study of the construction of curricular knowledge in Portugal between 1970 and 2009, we argue that the practice of the established curriculum guidelines has a close relationship with the personal dimension of its actors. Therefore, it is not possible to separate the life history of each actor from the curricular policy measures they…

This article attempts to reconstruct the life and work of Roger Noel Armfelt with a particular emphasis on his role in watching the development and implementation of educational legislation relating to secondary education. Armfelt focussed on observing practice and steering secondary education reform in local communities during the 1920s and…

This paper revisits the abolition of the colleges of education in England and Wales, specialist providers of teacher training which were effectively eradicated in the years after Margaret Thatcher's 1972 White Paper "Education: A Framework for Expansion." Its central argument is that the way in which change was enacted thereafter…