Commitments to inclusive education have been articulated in policy across the UK, in the context of increasingly inclusive rhetoric in education policy globally over recent years. This paper uses a critical policy analysis approach to understand the framing of inclusion within national legislation, policy documents and associated key resources…

In early childhood education (ECE), global policy discourses influence national policy frameworks for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices. Although aspects of these discourses travel across national boundaries via policy borrowing, we argue that consideration is needed of the cultural-historical evolution of country-level systems, their…

Climate change (CC) is the most significant global issue facing humanity, yet research addressing the perspectives of the key players influential in developing and implementing school-based CC curricula at a cross-country national level is scarce. This study examined the perceptions of policymakers, teacher professional development providers and…

In the Anglophone jurisdictions, higher education policy is over-determined by economic policy and subjected to neoliberal regulation based on quasi-market competition between corporatised institutions, regulated by performative comparisons, tuition fees, and outputs imagined as commodities. England installed marketisation in successive policy…

This article starts by reviewing the position that inclusion is a contested and difficult term to define and that there have been no attempts to link the policy challenges of inclusive education with the issues of democratic policymaking. The article then summarises contemporary ideas and practices about deliberative approaches to policymaking and…

Despite the expansion of New Public Management reforms across the globe and complimentary trends of disintermediation, performance and privatisation, local government authorities in England continue to shape local schooling landscapes. In this paper, we document the role of a local government authority in England in an initiative called 'Building…

Internationally, the significance of the relationship between the university environment and the student experience is well-documented. In response, UK university leaders have driven forward policies that focus on estates' expansion and regeneration. The restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity to explore…

This case study from Nottingham Trent University describes how an intra-departmental collaborative team used the lived experience of students to inform academic policy review. Drawing on data from Student 2025, a longitudinal study exploring the complexity of student experiences and identities, the team created authentic student personas called…

In England and Scotland, the History National Curriculum avoids the prescription of specific content; expecting schools instead to devise a curriculum appropriate to their pupils within broad guidance. This means in both countries, teachers apparently have responsibility for constructing a curriculum: selecting content, sequencing learning and…

The roles of early childhood educators in England have been marked, in recent times, by prescriptive occupational standards, surveillance, and responsibilisation. Over the last thirty years, early educators have been discursively positioned through workforce policy in multiple, competing, and everchanging ways. In addition, ideal professional…

This report is focused on the uptake of General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) subjects in England in 2023. Uptake in a GCSE subject is defined as the number or percentage of students at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4) taking the subject. This report was produced using publicly available data from the Department for Education's (DfE). The…

English university admissions increasingly make use of contextual offers, where applicants with certain socio-demographic characteristics can be offered marginally lower entry conditions. This paper presents novel insights on the impact of contextual offer policy on one institutions' patterns of enrolment in 2022/23 via a mixed methods…

In this article, I present a new conceptual framework constructed using sensemaking theory and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to demonstrate layers of policy enactment. The framework reimagines policy enactment as a sociomaterial ethico-political activity by considering the factors that mediate policy enactment and the assemblages facilitating the…

The article is an exploratory study assessing the stance selected higher education institutes (HEIs) have adopted regarding the usage of generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications in academic research. The HEIs are selected based on purposive sampling in order to showcase different stances they have adopted to curb plagiarism and uphold…

Teacher shortages are a global issue. England chose to address this by offering financial incentives (in the form of bursaries and scholarships) to postgraduates in shortage subjects. The impact of these incentives, however, on those training in non-shortage areas remains unclear. A survey of 439 trainee teachers in England (2019-2020) revealed…