In 2019 the Society for Music Analysis commissioned a report to find out if stakeholders in music education agreed that knowledge and/or skills in music literacy had declined for those applying to study music at university in England. The ensuing mixed methods study collected data from a range of stakeholders through interviews (N = 33),…

In this article we develop the notion of 'organising around ideas'. We highlight the ways in which education debate in England has narrowed as traditional spaces for discussion and debate have been closed down. The state now has extraordinary power to shape discourses and frame narratives about the purposes of schooling. Here we argue that we must…

This paper reports on a project in the North of England that looks at the college-to-university decision-making processes of non-traditional students through the conceptual lens of 'Possible Selves', as initially developed by Markus and Nurius (1986) and applied to higher education by Harrison (2018), Henderson (2019) and others. Our data involves…

In recent years, many scholars have drawn a distinction between procedural and programmatic secularism. Procedural secularists seek to build communities wherein 'competing concepts of the good life' are afforded opportunities for expression. Programmatic secularists seek to limit the influence of religion within the public sphere. The 1870…

England's higher education funding system has been reformed many times, leading to a system based on high fees and loans. Undergraduate tuition fees for full-time students were introduced in 1998 and rose to £3,000 a year in 2006, increasing further to £9,000 in 2021. Through a series of in-depth interviews, this report from Professor Claire…

The purpose of this study is to determine the views and approaches of preservice teachers on the comparison of the Turkish education system and the inter-grade transition systems of other countries. In the study using qualitative research methods and techniques, the preservice teachers were asked to present their views and suggestions on the…

This paper uses the work of Pierre Bourdieu to understand the lives of a set of young White working-class men living in a deprived urban locale in the north of England. All participants were classified as NEET (not in education, employment or training) throughout the research and had spent lengthy periods of time outside education and work before…

The purpose of the article is to compare and contrast higher education and research among public relations and journalism students of middle-class and working-class origin. The paper applied Bourdieu's theory of "habitus" to analyze prejudices against the working class, explores whether working-class students express an anti-education…

Education and parenting are popular topics on social media. In China, it is now common practice for parents to discuss and share education-related information in WeChat, a premier Chinese social media app. In order to understand parents' educational aspirations in WeChat and the way parents fulfil their parenting responsibilities, this research…

Across Europe, assumptions are often made within the academic literature and by some social commentators that students have come to understand the purpose of higher education (HE) in increasingly instrumental terms. This is often linked to processes of marketisation and neo-liberalisation across the Global North, in which the value of HE has come…

This paper revisits the liberal studies movement -- an important if under-researched episode in the history of education. It examines the lived experience of a set of former vocational students, the great majority of whom eventually went on to teach in further and higher vocational education. All participants had undertaken a course of liberal…

In this article, we address the questions: How is the purpose of higher education constructed within policy texts from the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), England and Sweden? How does this position students in making the transition from Bachelor to Masters? We do this through analysis of two recent policy documents from each of the EHEA,…

Measures that economise education are typically accompanied by discourses that prime society for change by framing the policy in individualistic and consumeristic terms. This article explores the emergence of 'value for money' (VfM) discourses in the English higher education sector. Using Bourdieu's thinking tools, we explore how VfM is…

From the perspective of a recent graduate, this article offers a critique of non-STEM higher education in England as unfit for purpose. Whilst universities blindly focus on employability, transferable skills and narrow bands of subject knowledge, the economic world around them has collapsed into absurdity. The graduate today is now faced with…

One outcome of England's Code of Practice' (DfE, 1994) was an increase, first, in the number of learning support assistants (LSAs) working in mainstream schools and, second, the establishment of the role of special educational needs co-ordinator (SENCO). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with SENCOs and LSAs to explore: (i) why they chose…