Recent educational reforms in England have sought to reshape public education by extending central government control of curriculum and assessment, while replacing local government control of schools with a quasi-private system of academies and multi academy trusts. In this paper, we resist reading this as the latest iteration of the debate…

In the light of the government's recent White Paper, we outline the history of the academisation programme, positioning it as part of the neo-liberal privatisation drive which has been sustained since the 1988 Education Reform Act under governments of all stripes. We contest central claims made for the supposed benefits of academisation, and call…

This paper attempts to work on a number of different levels. Firstly, it comprises my personal reflections on a career in sociology of education. These reflections are entwined with a history of the discipline that emphasises themes of power, politics and pragmatism. This subjective, and inevitably partial, account is combined with an examination…

This paper explores how girls' education developed in Norway and Prussia (and later North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW) during the first and second wave of women's political mobilisation. It analyses how organisations and activists of the women's movement were included in different cross-interest coalitions in education politics. The cases are…

We describe the alumni engagement efforts by Teach For America (TFA) in Detroit as a case study of the specific ways that the organization works to influence its alumni's involvement in educational politics and disposition towards particular types of educational reform. During the 2019-20 school year, TFA Detroit facilitated a series of…

This book presents the theoretical basis and practical steps involved in using Statement Archaeology, an innovative method that enhances understandings of policy development, exemplifying its use in relation to one curriculum subject, Religious Education. The book is the first of its kind to fully describe the theoretical foundations of Statement…

In the teeth of the coronavirus crisis the British HE system has been thrown into chaos and the severe limitations of the market model have been cruelly exposed. After thirty years of expansion and increasing neoliberalization, the contradictions of the marketized system have been realized by the virus, pushing the entire sector to the edge of…

Technology education was introduced as a successor to various forms of craft or technical education in some parts of the world in the 1980s. In South Africa (SA) the implementation of technology education was in more than one sense unique. Not only was it a new subject within the South African educational context, but it coincided with the dawn of…

This study examines the historical role that institutions of higher education, particularly the University of Prishtina (UP), played in the political and national emancipation of Albanians in Kosovo during the 1960s and 1970s. Having evolved from a series of institutions of higher education into a university in its own right in the 1970s, the UP…

Music education institutions have played a prominent role in mediating national identity in the Republic of Turkey since its founding in 1923. Initially tasked with suppressing Ottoman heritage, their nature and status changed with the ascendance of political Islam, when interest in Turkey's Ottoman past grew and the Western aesthetics of the…

Highlighting the relationship between the racial slavery in the formation of U.S. colleges and universities and the archive of Black student revolt, this dissertation examines one of the longest and most violent Black student strikes in the history of postsecondary education--the San Francisco State College strike in 1968-1969. Rather than…

This article traces the development of the wartime Japanese curriculum, which was deliberately designed to implement 'Japanese' approaches to science, and its relation to the previously dominant educational approach, learning by doing. It examines the work of Shiono Naomichi (1898-1969), who served as the curriculum and textbook revision director…

State-mandated curriculum policy documents have an important political function. Governments use them to make ideological statements about the role of schools and how the next generation of citizens are to be shaped. Beginning from this premise, we use a frame analysis methodology to examine how citizenship in the Province of Ontario, Canada is…

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…

This article sets out to demonstrate the considerable extent to which the New Zealand school system has become saturated by private interests, and to explain this development over time. It is the first such overview of the privatisation of schooling in the New Zealand context. The analysis illustrates that the rise of private actors has involved…