This study explores the perceptions of government officials, teachers, and parents in Scotland regarding the use of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results to evaluate national education performance. International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) such as PISA have been increasingly influencing education policymaking worldwide,…

From 2020, the long-standing debate regarding the English national curriculum's capacity to discuss issues of ethnicity and race escalated. The history subject curriculum particularly is seen as excluding ethnic minorities from an 'Island Story' often depicting a White Anglocentric identity disassociated with the wider world. In 2021, the…

It is generally agreed that learning about the Holocaust has some impact on students. However, discussions about the nature and magnitude of impact tend to be intuition-based rather than evidence-based. This is exacerbated by studies giving insight into how Holocaust education is related to salient variables rather than studies which demonstrate…

This article focuses on Chilean students from vulnerable school contexts facing a standard national curriculum. It offers insights into students' voices, while uncovering what they want to learn and the drivers behind this decision. Semi-structured interviews revealed the power of the school socialisation process; for the majority of students,…

For many students, school is a place that makes no sense; a place where students' interests are not reflected in the curriculum. Using mixed methods research, we developed an instrument that identifies student interests. This instrument was applied in a pilot study that considered 10th-grade students from three schools in Santiago, Chile. We…

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is making it a requirement of all schools within the Emirates (both public and private) to follow a programme of moral education (MEP), at all ages from grades 1 to 13, which is designed centrally. Explicitly secular and humanist in its approach, this is a remarkable development in a country where Islam is the…

Inherent in most school curricula is some sort of curriculum hierarchy--that is, an assumption that some school subjects are more valuable than others. This paper examines the epistemological assumptions that underpin one such curriculum hierarchy, which I refer to as "the traditional curriculum hierarchy". It is a pervasive and…

Curriculum for Excellence, Scotland's 3--18 curriculum, has been described as 'the most significant curricular change in Scotland for a generation' (McAra, Broadley & McLauchlan, 2013, p. 223). The purpose of the curriculum is 'encapsulated' in four capacities in order that learners become i) successful learners, ii) confident individuals,…

This paper provides insights into non-Indigenous teachers' efforts to engage proactively and productively with students to enhance their learning in a predominantly Indigenous community in northern Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon notions of "funds of knowledge", forms of capital as part of community cultural wealth, Critical Race…

The Foundation Phase is a Welsh Government flagship policy of early years education (for 3-7 year-old children) in Wales. Marking a radical departure from the more formal, competency-based approach associated with the previous Key Stage 1 National Curriculum, it advocates a developmental, experiential, play-based approach to teaching and learning.…

The current longitudinal study examines the similarities and differences between primary and secondary foreign language curricula and pedagogy along with the development of motivation for language learning and second language proficiency. Data from 26 English learners of French (aged 10-11) were collected across three times points over a 12-month…

This paper explores questions of relevance to Ethiopian primary education policy. It examines (i) the match/mismatch between government-prescribed pedagogy and actual student learning practices and (ii) the relationship between those practices and school, class and teacher level factors. The paper employs evidence from government documents on…

Concerns about new teachers' capacity to address diversity in their classrooms are growing in many parts of the West, and there is some consensus that one aspect of the problem is the narrow range of cultural and social backgrounds from which teacher candidates are drawn. Yet a minority of socially aware teachers, from all backgrounds, continue to…

The wider context of this article is the assumption in the social sciences regarding the existence of a dichotomy between truth and objectivity on one hand and constructivism, subjectivism and relativism on the other. The school subject of geography serves as an appropriate focus for examining this assumption. There are three issues facing the…

This article, which is based on research funded by the Nuffield Foundation, examines the responses of higher education institutions (HEIs) to the recent reform of advanced level qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, known as "Curriculum 2000". The research, undertaken in late 2002 and early 2003 following the…