Government interventions to address inequalities in education are common in the United Kingdom and internationally. Whilst there is a tendency for policy discourse to focus on benchmarks and indicators as measures of educational success, the inclusiveness and effectiveness of government interventions in education has been questioned. This paper…

In spite of challenges, initial teacher education in England may yet have a future, but only if policy makers come to recognise that a narrow training model can only achieve so much. Teacher education (as opposed to teacher training) recognises teaching as a 'professional endeavour', with teachers prepared in a way that will enable them to become…

This paper considers varied governmental initiatives in England and their implications for early years education, including: an Office for Standards in Education (2017. "Bold Beginnings: The Reception Curriculum in a Sample of Good and Outstanding Primary Schools." Manchester: Ofsted) report entitled 'Bold beginnings' proposing…

The 'Higher Education Policy Statement and Reform Consultation' was launched in February 2022 with responses required by May 2022. This online consultation included 16 closed questions, which have been analysed quantitatively, and 29 open text boxes, which have been analysed qualitatively and the frequency of themes summarised quantitatively. The…

Background: Understanding teachers' experiences throughout the school closures and reopenings that have characterized large periods of the COVID-19 pandemic provides us with unique insights into what it means to be a teacher during a global public health crisis. Aim and Method: To investigate teachers' narratives of their experiences, we conducted…

This article investigates the work of Henry Morris (1889-1961), in particular his ideas on the Cambridgeshire village colleges. It is now 90 years since the first of these was founded in Sawston in 1930, and the article aims to address the issue of whether Morris's views on education and democracy encapsulated in the village colleges still have…

The proposed creation of a National Education Service (NES) for England offers us the possibility of a decisive break from the market paradigm, where education is seen as a commodity in mainly economic terms and where individual and institutional competition are regarded as the drivers of improvement. Is the advocacy of an NES by the Labour Party…

In seeking to improve student outcomes, governments may choose to exercise direct control over schools, as in many centralised systems, or to provide frameworks for intermediate bodies to engage in improvement activities. One such body is the National College for School Leadership (NCSL), now the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL)…

This paper focuses on British news reports on the Mandarin Excellence Programme carried out in England by educational institutions at various levels. This research systematically examines the ways in which the learning and teaching of Mandarin Chinese is portrayed as important in English secondary schools due to globalisation and economic demands…

This article offers an early assessment of the extent and scope of participation by higher education institutions (HEIs) in Degree Apprenticeship (DA) provision for meeting the broader workforce development objectives of the UK Government. While the take-up of DAs by HEIs and businesses has been undeniably lower than the publicly declared…

In this paper, we aim to advance the understanding of the institutional mechanisms that have shaped the teacher education environment in England over the last forty years. Based on the analyses of policy documents and elite interviews rooted in a neo-institutionalist analytical framework, we argue that the changes from a laissez-faire policy in…

The Diversity in Teacher Education (DiTE) research programme is the first attempt to chronicle the origins, character and effects of different ways of training teachers in England since the influential Modes of Teacher Education project in the 1990s. Informed by DiTE's large-scale quantitative research and its smaller-scale qualitative studies,…

At every stage since the start of the pandemic, decisions across education and care have been informed by the scientific and medical evidence -- both on the risks of COVID-19 infection, transmission and illness, and on the known risks to children and young people not attending school and college -- balancing public health and education…

On May 10th, 2020 the Prime Minister announced a phased return of some children to school in England from June 1st. Schools have been closed to all but vulnerable and keyworker children since March 20th, meaning that most children have been educated at home for a period of 10 weeks, and some year groups are not expected to return to school until…

It could be claimed that the priority of any Government should be to look after the interests of the public it serves. Much of this role includes attempting to actively develop and implement policies and programmes that best contribute to or enhance general standards of living. Addressing health and wellbeing, it follows, is a reasonable vision…