This paper is a discussion of the challenges to equity faced by the education and training systems of the 28 EU countries (at time of writing), based on secondary sources and official reports by individual countries. The data are descriptive and simply summarised for this paper. The systems of all countries are fairly similar, modelled on those…

This research note shows that secondary school segregation by poverty in England has recently started declining again. By comparing the long-term pattern of school compositions with an economic indicator, it is possible to link this decline to the recession, but only if a further, and contentious, assumption is made about what happened in the…

This paper reconsiders long-term, national or socially contextualized trends in a number of important education areas commonly addressed by policy interventions. These include widening participation, teacher training, school performance, the use of targets, and student assessment. In each case, it is very difficult to sustain an argument that…

How developed countries train, recruit and retain their schoolteachers is an area of considerable interest in education today. In this paper we consider how the US is addressing the issue of teacher quality by holding schools and school districts accountable for ensuring that all teachers of core subjects are "highly qualified" by the…

Describes a recurring error in standard analyses of educational performance, the "politician's error," that results from using percentage point differences as though they were percentages. This simple oversight results in the misinterpretation of trends over time, with implications for both policy and research. (SLD)

Focuses on two general groups of methods that can be used to calculate achievement gaps between groups of students. States that the methods produce radically different results. Considers both of these methods and related problems in the calculation of achievement gaps in solving the contradiction between the two methods. Includes references. (CMK)

There is growing interest in the possibilities of combining research approaches in education and social sciences, as dissatisfaction mounts with the limitations of traditional mono-method studies and with the schism between quantitative and qualitative methods. This book argues the case for combining multiple research methods, and provides…