Michael Hand's pithy and challenging essay (Hand, 2003) offers a neat, clear and powerful argument against "faith schools". I am in considerable sympathy with Hand's position. However, I think his argument can be strengthened, and weaknesses in it remedied or avoided. In this brief note, I offer some modest suggestions, which are intended as…

This article finds Michael's Hand's argument for the abolition of faith schools to be deficient because key premises of his argument seem false. I argue that the concept of knowledge that Hand employs in arguing that no religious proposition is known to be true is overly strict. I reject Siegel's attempt to amend Hand's argument to make it…

The sociocultural paradigm in educational research, emphasizing the situatedness of learning and the embeddedness of thought in cultural and linguistic practices, has called into question the plausibility of the enterprise of teaching general thinking skills. In this paper I argue that the sociocultural research programme needs an adequate…

This article is an attempt to make an empirical contribution to a more grounded model of thinking about justice. It focuses on the work of one practitioner working in an inner-London local education authority with a remit relating to the achievement of "African-Caribbean" students. In describing the challenges that she faces in the…