Teacher evaluation and teachers' professional learning are too often confined to separate areas of research and professional practice. Rather than approach evaluation and enquiry as distinct or irreconcilable, this paper applies the ideas of Stenhouse to explore new possibilities for the reappropriation of mandated appraisal in ways that support…

Variability in education systems is a given. Variability has at once positive and negative implications for the main goal of education which is accelerating learning across diverse contexts and for all learners. In this article, we explain and employ a tight-loose framing to understand the scope for variability within an education system. A…

In this paper, we interrogate and justify the design of a local project that used collaborative design research in a secondary school in England. As authors, we represent teachers and teacher educators engaged in design research, whereby we acknowledge the difficulties implicit to university and school collaborations within a performative culture.…

Current curriculum reform in Wales provides an opportunity for teachers to have greater freedom to develop pedagogical approaches that meet the needs of their pupils. The "Successful Futures" report recommends that teachers should have a greater autonomy in choosing how to deliver the curriculum, and ensuring it is done so in a manner…

This paper focuses on the implications of the transformative student-centred curriculum being developed in Wales for tackling educational inequalities. Informed by long-standing debates within the sociology of education about the role of school knowledge in social and cultural reproduction, our research outlines some of the challenges that those…

This paper provides a detailed account of the Queensland education system's engagement with reforming curriculum, pedagogies and assessment. In so doing, it responds to the University College London's Institute of Education report on "high-performing" jurisdictions, of which Queensland, Australia, was identified as one. In this report,…

This is an era of significant government involvement in schools in England, despite consistent rhetoric from the Department of Education to the contrary. In such a period, signs can be detected of the juncture between a postmodern identity and post-professional status, two models of teacher professionalism supposed in Hargreaves' work on the…

The last two decades have seen unprecedented interest in science curricula, with many governments seeing improvements in the performance of their school students in science as key to future economic prosperity. We present the results of an analysis of the curriculum documents for primary and secondary science in Australia (New South Wales and…

The study aims to gain a better understanding of the national large-scale curriculum process in terms of the used implementation strategies, the function of the reform, and the curriculum coherence perceived by the stakeholders accountable in constructing the national core curriculum in Finland. A large body of school reform literature has shown…