The paper outlines the history of the different uses of 'quality' in higher education. Emphasis is given to the United Kingdom, but consideration is also given to a range of international contexts. Three different uses of 'academic quality' are identified (the state-driven, sector-derived, and the traditional academic uses) and their relationship…

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the concepts of bullying and banter within both sport research and media reporting. However, at present, research has not explored reports of bullying and banter within the UK sport media This is a potential omission, as the media may provide important conceptual information about bullying…

Amidst ongoing global debate about reproductive rights, questions have emerged about the role of language in reinforcing stigma around termination. Amongst some 'pro-choice' groups, the use of "pro-life" is discouraged, and "anti-abortion" is recommended. In UK official documents, "termination of pregnancy" is…

Implementation of any inclusive policy is dependent on longstanding conceptions, beliefs, and public discourses on schooling, learning, and including children in mainstream schooling. The adoption of inclusive education in education policies in France and the United Kingdom requires discursive support to reshape the meaning and content of…

This research explores the experiences of Beth, a university student in the UK, as she comes to be labelled as 'dyslexic', and as she has her diagnosis taken away. Through use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and discourse analysis, the research seeks to understand how Beth made sense of these experiences, and to explore the…

This article examines the discourses around climate change in the UK press from 2003 to 2019. Our main goal is to investigate how the media discourse developed during a period of significant world events, whilst also exploring the change in the UK public's perception of the problem. We combine the novel technique of Usage Fluctuation Analysis…

Experts in different fields have claimed that the UK has experienced a process of growing economic inequality since the 1970s. Following Fairclough's dialectal-relational approach, this paper presents a detailed, systematic analysis of the representation of homeless people and homelessness in "The Guardian" and "Daily Mail"…

In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework is a mechanism used for ranking the quality of research in higher education institutions. While there has been analysis of the entire Research Excellence Framework, and of the Education unit of assessment more generally, analysis of how research on initial teacher education featured in the Research…

This paper critiques recent developments in educational discourse through an analysis of two UK Government White Papers and three specific problems. We argue that the latter herald forms of 'biocreep'. Echoing the analysis of such phenomena in the work of Michel Foucault, this gradual extension of 'biopolitics' into the field of education is a…

This qualitative study aims to investigate novice undergraduate mathematics students' first encounter with the First Isomorphism Theorem, which is, more often than not, the pinnacle of a typical introductory course in Group Theory. Several studies have reported on the challenges that this mathematical result poses to inexperienced mathematicians,…

Inspired by neo-institutional theory, we explore whether the semantics of diversity appears to be global and universal through computer-assisted content analysis of 2378 publications. Diversity discourses are dominant, but only in the USA and Canada, UK and Ireland and Europe, not being present in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.…

This article reflects on findings from a qualitative evaluation of the Narnian Virtues Character Education English Curriculum (NV) in the context of critical engagement with the field of character education. We recognise many people argue for or against character education based on ideological positions. This article will reflect on how those…

This article analyses the smartphone application TeacherTapp that is used to collect and disseminate information on teachers' views on education and their classroom practices. The research takes as its object of analysis the use of TeacherTapp in England and Flanders. We analyze what TeacherTapp is, how it relates to a given localized community in…

This comparative study examines the way the news media in the United Kingdom and Thailand discursively portrayed the platform OnlyFans and its content creators. Two specialized corpora of news articles about the platform published between January 2016 and July 2022 in both countries formed the data. Using the approaches of Cross-linguistic…

Abstract In this paper, we present the findings from our critical analysis of the health discourses evident with physical education (PE) curricula in each UK home nation--England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. We carried out a critical discourse analysis of those curriculum documents that talk directly to PE teachers about how to organise,…