In recent years the taught masters course has become an even more important component of the curriculum portfolio for universities in the UK and elsewhere. In the spring of 2021, the Student Assessment and Classification Working Group (SACWG) surveyed a small number of English and Welsh universities to compare assessment regulations for taught…

This report is focused on the uptake of General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) subjects in England in 2023. Uptake in a GCSE subject is defined as the number or percentage of students at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4) taking the subject. This report was produced using publicly available data from the Department for Education's (DfE). The…

Going to university is a key route to enhancing life opportunities for young people and for promoting social mobility. Despite the action of widening participation programs, substantial sociodemographic inequalities in participation persist. Few studies have focused on the role that school attended may play in exacerbating or mitigating these…

Turnover in middle management can be very expensive for a school, not just financially, but also in terms of providing continuity of leadership, sustainability of management practices, and quality student experiences. Therefore, a rigorous understanding of why middle managers in schools are thinking of leaving post can provide senior leaders an…

In England, the Studio Schools model, focused on developing employability skills in young people, represents a disruptive attempt at educational innovation. Through a documentary analysis of foundational documents, interviews with the model's architects and case studies of five Studio Schools, we map the tensions between theoretical…

In this paper, we draw on a conceptual framework of five key categories of risk to Early Leaving (EL) to analyse and compare 'Structural Factors' (SF) and 'Institutional Factors' (IF) of risk in a region in England and in Portugal. We draw on data from an EU-funded project, which explored risks and support strategies to EL across five European…

This paper focuses on the Colleges of Advanced Technology (CATs), specialist providers of advance science and technology which existed in England and Wales for ten years after the 1956 White Paper Technical Education. Its central argument is that recasting the CATs as broader-based universities following the 1963 Robbins Report was a significant…

This research updates analysis from 2016 which examines the social composition of top performing comprehensives in England compared to all schools nationally. The aim of this research is to assess whether the top performing comprehensives are representative of their local areas in terms of the socio-economic background of their students. The 'top'…

University rankings envision a level playing field between competing universities, particularly in higher education (HE) systems regulated along market lines. Drawing on social stratification theory, we argue that rankings exacerbate, rather than alleviate, resource inequalities between universities with historically consolidated reputations…

This article examines how specialist music secondary schools in England present themselves on their websites and social media platforms. We consider visual communication codes and how such patterns reflect cultural distinctions and social boundaries. Multimodal critical discourse analysis is used to demonstrate how the choice of semiotic resources…

This report looks at the provision of GCSE subjects in England in 2023. Provision in a subject is defined as the number or percentage of schools with at least one student taking the subject. It could be argued that this may not cover all the 'provision', since schools might offer to provide a subject but none of their students wants to study it.…

Access to higher education is a global concern due to its dual role in transforming individual lives and value for global economic systems. However, pre-entry interventions to improve access often make comparatively little impact on who attends certain types of universities. Drawing upon a study that examined policy and practice relating to access…

The primary objective of this research is to ascertain the manner in which higher education institutions offering open and distance education incorporate the concept of openness into their vision, mission, core values, and tactics. This study employs a descriptive research design to ascertain the current state of affairs. The research methodology…

In the course of the institutionalisation of modern school systems, the originally confessional schooling sector was largely transformed into a system regulated by public law, a process which is interpreted as secularisation. In a historical-comparative analysis, the secularisation paths of the classical educational nations England and France are…

Concern that children are not engaging in enough physical activity (PA) to bring about health benefits is a crisis globally. This paper aims to examine primary school-based PA initiatives from within an English context. A qualitative inquiry was adopted and underpinned by the socio-ecological model. The study was presented through a realist case…