Persistent youth advocacy for climate action worldwide, and recent policy activity in England, UK focused on climate change and sustainability education (CCSE), provide the context for this study. Drawing on reflections and insights predominantly gathered whilst working as a geography teacher and geography teacher educator in both England and…

Successive UK governments have adopted failure as a strategy in the reform of public education in England: first, to construct crises in order to blame professionals/parents/children for a failing system; and second, to provide rescue solutions that are designed to fail in order to sustain the change imperative. We describe this as policy…

This paper critically evaluates societal reactions to integrating LGBTQ+ content into the Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) curriculum in England and Wales. Utilising Stanley Cohen's theory of moral panics, it examines the roles of media, moral entrepreneurs, authorities, and the public in shaping debates around educational reforms. The paper…

This qualitative research study explores the ways that academic librarians in England undertake and perceive classification and cataloging work to engage in wider decolonization initiatives. The research consisted of semi-structured interviews, and thematic analysis was used to identify key themes. The study found that the participant librarians…

This article details the findings of a qualitative interview study with 30 Religious Education [RE] teachers, working in state-funded, non-faith secondary schools in England. Salient findings included participants' almost unanimous agreement about the role of RE in developing character, virtue literacy, and moral, intellectual and performance…

This paper analyses the fracturing of civic and moral virtue within curricular policies pertaining to Citizenship in England since the late 1990s. A longstanding aim of education and schooling, the teaching of citizenship gained a more secure base in the English curriculum with the introduction of Citizenship as a statutory subject for 11-16 years…

This article draws on moral theory to advance digital citizenship education and explore how adolescents aged 13-16 make decisions when confronted with incivility, such as cyberbullying, on social media. Given the extent to which digital citizenship education may be approached in line with deontological (rules), utilitarian (consequences) and/or…

Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot all studied at Oxford University during the Second World War. One of their wartime tutors was Donald MacKinnon. This paper gives a broad overview of MacKinnon's philosophical outlook as it was developing at this time. Four talks from between 1938 and 1941--'And the Son of Man That…

When Religious Education (RE) in England and Wales transitioned from Christian confessionalism to a multi-faith approach in the latter half of the twentieth century, the subject's moral aims were reasserted. In this article, we explore the moral assumptions of this transformation and map some of their connections to other theological and ethical…

Despite the large and diverse cohorts recruited annually across the globe to university sport programmes, few studies have assessed the value of peer support within sports education settings. Even more surprising is the lack of research to have explored the encounters of peer mentors who help deliver these schemes and the impact it had on their…

This article makes the case for repositioning values and ethics as central to understanding how curriculum knowledge can be educationally powerful. Disciplinary knowledge can help individuals make sense of the present, explore alternative futures and participate in society, making ethical choices about how to live. This, however, depends on…

"Bildung" has a long tradition in continental European education but in England it is less well known and is underused to theorise about education. In this paper the German concept of "Bildung" is applied to pre-service teacher education in England where teacher education has become increasingly dominated by instrumental and…

Antagonism towards diversity, an attitude reflecting low egalitarian ethical values, has been a topic within policing that has received increasing attention in the last decade. Using two-wave data and applying self-determination theory, we investigated how autonomy support versus autonomy frustration, ways of being motivated either through…

Although the area of parental involvement in education is well researched, much less is known about how parents and teachers might work together to cultivate desirable character virtues in their children/pupils. This article considers three potential barriers to parents/teachers forming such partnerships: i) differing views on the importance of…

In the context of a racialized moral panic around serious youth violence, we have seen a resurgence of calls to increase the presence of police in English schools in recent years. As well as a lack of popular and political opposition, there is a dearth of critical academic consideration of the placement of police in schools, and even less from a…