This paper analyses the fracturing of civic and moral virtue within curricular policies pertaining to Citizenship in England since the late 1990s. A longstanding aim of education and schooling, the teaching of citizenship gained a more secure base in the English curriculum with the introduction of Citizenship as a statutory subject for 11-16 years…

The article considers the intellectual odyssey of the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) during the three phases of his career: as a Jewish intellectual and philosopher in Hungary during the communist revolution of 1919, as an exile in the German Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1933, and as a refugee from Nazi Germany in England from…

This article makes the case for repositioning values and ethics as central to understanding how curriculum knowledge can be educationally powerful. Disciplinary knowledge can help individuals make sense of the present, explore alternative futures and participate in society, making ethical choices about how to live. This, however, depends on…

This article, as coruscating as it is well-grounded, sketches the appallingly unfair state of contemporary education in England. It outlines the historical and contemporary drivers of that unfairness and the consequences that ensue in the lives of young people. It calls for a renewed movement on the left to call out the education system's shocking…

Successive UK governments have adopted failure as a strategy in the reform of public education in England: first, to construct crises in order to blame professionals/parents/children for a failing system; and second, to provide rescue solutions that are designed to fail in order to sustain the change imperative. We describe this as policy…

Purpose: To inform current international debates about educating for wholeness and purpose, this article gives a critical analysis of spiritual development as a goal of state-funded schooling in England and Wales. Design/Approach/Methods: The analysis follows a history of ideas approach. Relevant texts are examined to understand how notions of…

Examining the entanglement of democracy and social justice in education and the relationship to social mobility, this paper critiques the individualising nature of social mobility in policy discourse as inimical to human flourishing and education as a public good. The rhetoric of social mobility which responsibilises individuals for their success,…

Recent critics have suggested that character education (either in and of itself or certain instantiations of it) is overly individualised and, as a result, fails to engage adequately with the political. In this paper, I offer an account of character education which takes issue with such criticisms, and seeks to make clear connections between the…

How should the curriculum for older school students address the transition to sustainable futures? This article seeks to answer this question by reference to the marginalisation of education for sustainability (EfS) in England after 2010; its re-emergence around 2020, prompted largely by students' protests over climate change: and the continuing…

In recent years, investment in youth services has been contingent on the measurement of predefined outcomes as 'proof' of effectiveness. However, this approach to impact measurement has been criticised for distorting practice and reinforcing inequalities. As youth work emerges from a decade of spending cuts, there is an urgent need for new…

Just over a decade on from a spike of interest in Jacques Rancière's writing within educational philosophy and theory, I revisit his interventions on democracy and education to make the case for (re)engaging with Rancière's writing "now" to address important questions about contemporary education policy, the role of schools in democratic…

This article proposes and illustrates a framework for thinking about how the school-to-work transitions of young people not intending to go to university can be made more equitable. This framework seeks to enrich sociological readings of VET by building on the considerable strengths of existing research on ecologies of VET provision and the…

This paper aims to make a conceptual contribution to the role of the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) in regard to global education within state global heritage (multicultural) schools -- using England as a representative example -- in an age characterised by epistemological, historical and cultural securitisation. This paper…

This article explores the context for the accompanying suite of papers on creating and sustaining democratic spaces in education. Prompted by the centenary of Summerhill, the internationally famous democratic school founded in Suffolk, England, in 1921, by A.S. Neill, this collection of papers explores and broadens out the central questions at the…

Since the late 1970s, Britain has moved from a Keynesian welfare state model toward a mode of governance where economic reasoning replaces politics. Education in England has not escaped this shift from government to governance described as neoliberalism. This shift toward a new governing rationality has taken shape within the English education…