At the 2016 Commission in Birmingham, I reported on a Quality Music Education Framework that Dr Emily Wilson and I had developed for the Victorian Department of Education, which was to become a framework for the delivery of "quality" music education across the State of Victoria for the school years, Foundation to Year 10. In this address…

Do GCSE and A-level questions that purport to be about consequences actually reward reasoning about historical consequences at all? Molly-Ann Navey concluded that they do not and that they fail to encourage the kind of argument that academic historians engage in when reaching judgements about consequences. Navey decided that it was important to…

'School league tables' summarising the performance of secondary schools in England have been published annually since 1992. Although now a firmly established feature of the educational landscape, they have attracted criticism from those who point to their unintended negative consequences. These include 'teaching to the test', entering pupils for…

This article reflects on the epistemological steamrolling that the 2021 Ofsted Curriculum Research Review (OCRR) accomplishes: in part, by the positioning of the problem and solution through highly selective cherry-picking (omitting key causal factors); in part, through the discursive move of acknowledging complexity before offering simple and…

This paper presents an argument for aesthetic knowledge in the arts and more specifically, for an aesthetic model of literature to be central in the curriculum. I argue that there are important distinctions to be made between the everyday experiences unique to us as individuals, and the universality of human experience. In the English Literature…

In the high-stakes accountability English educational system, decisions made by government and agencies about curriculum, pedagogy and assessment drive school planning and actions. This paper analyses the drivers for the recent change to French German and Spanish GCSEs and highlights particular areas of the new specification which may damage the…

This article examines the ideologies present in Colombian official policy for English language teaching (ELT) and traces the links between governmental planning for state-funded schools and school pedagogical practices. Building on analysis of interviews with policy agents, policymakers' pronouncements, documents and classroom observations, the…

In this paper, I theorize fantasies of idealization at work in narratives of educational research. I take as an example one of the very first psychoanalytically oriented studies in the field: Marion Milner's, "The Human Problem in Schools," published in 1938. Evidence is drawn from Milner's published book as well as from the historical…

This paper examines the relationship between the English Language and Literature-in-English in secondary schools in Nigeria. The purpose is to explore and expose the interdependence of the two subjects in enhancing English language competence. Apart from the educational advantages, it is also in the opinion of the writer that language is not only…

Disparities emanating from South Africa's apartheid history still pose a number of challenges to the country, especially in education. Since the transition to democracy in 1994, the prescribed government school curriculum has undergone several revisions in an endeavour to set standards and provide instruction of a high quality. On the language…

In spring 2009, the Center on Education Policy (CEP) continued its research on the impact of test-based federal and state accountability policies by conducting case studies of six high schools in six different districts within Washington State. The purpose was to learn more about the curricular and instructional changes that administrators and…

The Center on Education Policy (CEP) has been studying state high school exit examinations since 2002. This is the sixth annual report on our comprehensive study of exit exams. The information comes from several sources: our survey of states that have mandatory exit exams, interviews with state officials, media reports, state Web sites, and case…