This paper returns to a long-standing theme in education research, the ways in which 'contextual factors impact on what schools do, as well as directly on what pupils achieve' (Lupton, 2004, 4). Drawing on a project designed to explore the early effects of reforms to national examinations, the curriculum for 14-16 year olds and school…

Purpose: In the present paper we describe how civic and citizenship education takes place in Italy, trying to identify strengths and weaknesses, with the aims both of understanding the situation and of identifying possible measures for improvement. Methods: The methodology implies an analysis of the official guidelines by the Ministry in this…

The objective of this study is to evaluate the primary school second stage Turkish Education Curriculum effectuated in 2006 and the secondary school Turkish Education Curriculum effectuated in 2015 comparatively in terms of critical thinking. Of qualitative research designs, document analysis approach and content analysis were adopted for the…

Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland outlines a policy vision of a more progressive, integrated and holistic form of education; a commitment which contains an obligation for health and well-being (HWB) to be a responsibility of all teachers. A critical policy analysis approach was utilized in order to review school-level progress in different…

This article takes up the opportunity offered by the United Nations' "Strategic Development Goals" to examine provisions for the selection, recruitment, training and professional development of secondary English teachers in Bangladesh. Qualified and trained teachers are considered as essential to effect the changes in English teaching…

The National Literacy Trust's Premier League Reading Stars programme (PLRS) is a reading intervention for children aged 8 to 13 that captures the motivational power of football to inspire children and young people to read more and to improve their literacy skills. PLRS is delivered by teachers and librarians. The programme delivers statutory…

This paper presents the findings of a longitudinal study on the effectiveness of an innovative one-year pre-service Graduate Diploma of Teaching (secondary) for teachers of Technology. The timing of this study is significant. Over a decade of review and adjustment to the Technology curriculum, leading to the new learning area of Technology in the…

A new national curriculum has recently been implemented across Australia. This paper reports on a case study of a regional Western Australia government school as they re-wrote and taught the phase one learning areas: maths, English, science and HASS. Results showed what it is like to work in an environment where continual change is not only…

The authors discuss findings from the project "Political Literacy in Japan and England". They do so to follow up on work published in this journal in 2011. The now completed project involved two schools in England and three schools in Japan, and had the aim of exploring what teachers would do in each country when asked to use the same…

Back in 1992, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded grants to five curriculum development teams and charged them with the task of starting over. Five years later, each of the development teams had produced an innovative and "integrated" curriculum. All represented notable departures from the commonly encountered, calculus-driven high…

Over the last 20 years policy makers have introduced a number of measures intended to improve the quality of education provided by state secondary schools in England. The survey reported here, undertaken at the request of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), offers an insight into geography education in such schools with particular…