Assessment has been at centre stage of educational reform in England and Wales in the past 15 years. This article argues that official educational assessment policy is essentially indifferent to the technical, pedagogic, and epistemological issues related to different forms of assessment. Policymakers are primarily concerned with…

This article discusses whether the occupational culture of teachers has changed as a consequence of increased managerialism, using as an exemplar some of the routine planning, assessment and reporting procedures in common use in schools in England. The article examines this claim in the light of developments after the 1988 Education Reform Act,…

The influx of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands during the past 50 years and terrorist events in recent years have led to increased alienation. This case study, conducted at a culturally diverse school with a large Muslim student population, found that its administrators and "social studies" teachers agreed it is important to…

Compares music and science education to argue that students of science in the United Kingdom are given inadequate opportunity to both critically appraise competing theories and imaginatively construct their own. The parallels of the two show ways that music can inform changes to science in the National Curriculum. (CMK)

This study addresses educational reform in Ghana with reference to the junior secondary schooling. The empirical data on junior secondary teachers and pupils used here is taken from a larger case study of the junior secondary school innovation in Ghana. This offers some new perspectives on the realities of Ghanaian junior secondary schooling,…

In this article, the researchers discuss school improvement for social justice in Beirut, Lebanon. They introduce the Lebanese context: its schooling systems, the revised Lebanese National Curriculum, and the issues under investigation: socioeconomic, political, as well as inclusion/exclusion. The data were collected through semi-structured…

The leadership of Qatar has a social and political vision that calls for improving the outcomes of the Qatari K-12 education system. With this vision in mind, the leadership asked RAND to examine Qatar's K-12 education system, to recommend options for building a world-class system, and, subsequently, to develop the chosen option and support its…

I take up recent remarks by Teruhisa Horio about school student disaffection in Japan and see echoes of this in Britain. In that country the traditional school curriculum of discrete largely academic subjects is often taken to be one cause of the problem. I review justifications for it but no sound ones appear to be available. We need to…

In 1997 English became a compulsory subject in Korean elementary schools. The education of English teachers for the elementary level was accelerated. The training curriculum was reformed according to the educational objective to enhance students' oral communication skills in English. Coupled to this change, the introduction of English Teacher…

The purpose of this study was to review national and state level initiatives in curriculum reform to identify whether the move towards greater national consistency in curriculum outcomes confirms the dominance of outcomes-based education or reflects a shift from outcomes-based to standards-based education. Policy documents were examined, and the…

The subject of geography is declining in popularity at secondary school level and recent developments following the "cultural turn" in Higher Education have had little impact in revitalising it. In this paper I explore the question: is there a problem with the school geography curriculum policy? After briefly sketching the history of the…

Includes "On the Common Core of Learning" (Kennedy); "Constitutional Implications of National Curriculum Standards" (Arons); "Arguments against National Performance Standards" (Fulk, Mantzicopoulos, Hirth); and "The Painful Lessons of Introducing the National Curriculum in England" (Foster). (SK)

The National curriculum assessment (NCA) in Wales has evolved from common foundations into a system that is now distinct from that in England. The influence of the political and social milieu of Wales can be seen both in the distinctive features that have been in place from the outset and in the more radical changes introduced since 2002. In this…

The aim of this article is to study the construction of the Spanish education system and its relationship with nationalist education policies. Throughout the 20th century, there has been a great deal of tension between Spanish nationalism and Basque and Catalan nationalism, in particular, over the establishment of a national curriculum that is the…

In 2001, the Greek Government introduced sex and gender relationships education as a thematic unit for interdisciplinary Health Education activities. However, the diffusion of such programmes remains extremely limited. The present paper discusses how sex and relationships issues are presented in contemporary Greek primary school textbooks since…