This article makes the case that schools have a critical role to play in mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, and that this responsibility should be central to any process of reimagining the role, governance and potential of public education.

This article argues that re-inserting the 'public' back into public education and public school involves the reclamation of the indigenous (i.e. native) language and practices of schools and their communities. It argues that banishing the interloper discourses of neoliberalism can only occur when schools organise themselves around the alternative…

Currently the British educational system can be characterised by its instrumentalisation (of ends) and control (of means), revealing an impoverished vision of community and a lack of care. To (re)imagine public education is to reconsider what this 'public' means and signifies in practice. This article suggests that at the core of a richer and more…

In this article, the author focuses on the statist imaginary associated with the defence of public education. Drawing on work on the idea of the public sphere, anarchist theory and the politics of movement, she argues that in a world characterised by unprecedented and growing levels of mass migration and displacement, a new, non-statist imaginary…

This article highlights the current collapse of adult learning opportunities and the key importance of adult learning to a new public education in a fast-changing world, and makes practical proposals for Labour's National Education Service.

The UK's neoliberal polity is undermining the very public institutions it requires to resolve its most pressing collective predicaments, in education especially, with its essential role of enabling society to learn the virtues and practices of cooperative enquiry necessary for remaking the common good. The author begins by understanding the nature…

This is an argument for a new public education for England, but not for a new public school. The focus should be on aims, not structures. We should ensure that all schools (community schools, private schools, academies and religious schools) are working to realise the same nationally determined aims. The national set of aims should be determined…

Calls to establish public education avoid the fact that public education is provided by the capitalist state whose real purpose is the market-based model of private gain. Public against private education is a false dichotomy; rather, public and private are complementary forms of capitalist regulation. Radical alternatives require a more…

In this article the author remarks on the difference in genesis between the National Health Service (NHS) and comprehensive schools. She argues that we need to develop a clear national understanding of the purpose of schools in society in order to make all-ability schools as popular as the NHS. Finally, she suggests a set of principles upon which…

What does a successful public education system look like? How does it function? How long does it take to create and what are its underpinning beliefs and values? The Canadian province of Alberta is the highest-ranking education system in the English-speaking world. What can it teach us about how to construct a successful public education system?…

Democratic public schooling prepares for and models collective self-governance in a complex society where the people are subject to various forms of governmental power. The common or public school is the main way democratic nations prepare their people for participation, yet in modern versions democracy is contested through school curriculum and…

Over the past two decades there has been substantial expansion of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) provision. This has led to significant expansion of the role of the private sector. Alongside this, there is a substantial evidence base about the importance of highquality, pedagogically appropriate provision, delivered by highly skilled…

The post-war consensus has been dismantled in favour of a culture that rewards and empowers a small acquisitive elite at the expense of the great majority. This culture actively prevents the creation of a society of mutual recognition and respect. But without just such a society there can be no true comprehensive education. Where it exists,…

England's premier league of public schools, educating less than three thousand boys, started life in medieval times as charity schools for the poor. Closely tied to the Church, they found favour as institutions of social mobility. By the turn of the eighteenth century, vandalism and violence were endemic in many; misrule and abuses so common that…

After exploring what we mean by 'public', this article advances the argument that there have been two distinct periods in the post-war English schooling system and argues that the latest one, of markets and managerialism, ushered in on the back of neoliberal economic theories during the 1980s, has internal contradictions if, as both parties…