This article seeks to contribute to the growing scholarship on elite schooling through an ethnographic study into the distinct micro-practices of the formation and reproduction of privilege taking place within an elite boys' school in England. The article focuses on the significance of the teacher-student hierarchy as a prism through which to view…

This article demonstrates how Bourdieu's field theory can be used to systematise ethnographic insights, establishing and validating connections between the micro-level of participants' experiences and macro-level contexts, whilst complementing and facilitating the reflexivity that has long been part of ethnographic traditions. Combining an…

A common charge levelled at English and Welsh citizenship education, whether taught as a separate subject or incorporated into other disciplines, is that it encourages compliance more than it inspires critical thought. There is room within the compulsory citizenship framework, however, for teachers to advance genuinely critical attributes in…

This paper examines how the English educational state has consistently acted to support private schooling in areas where fee-paying schools would be otherwise financially unviable. Educational data on private school participation since the 2008 financial crisis reveals the stark regional divides between London and the South-East of England and the…

This paper draws on Gramsci's concept of hegemony to locate the Newbolt Report, published in 1921, within a context of the weakening political authority of Britain's ruling class. One indication of this is the fact that in 1917 200,000 workers were involved in strikes in 48 British towns. The moral and cultural dimensions of the problems facing…

The field of early childhood education is increasingly dominated by a strongly positivistic and regulatory discourse, the story of quality and high returns, which has spread from its local origins in the favourable environment provided by a global regime of neoliberalism. But though dominant, this is not the only discourse in early childhood…

This paper connects Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, dispositions and capital with a psychosocial analysis of how Winnicott's psychoanalysis and Honneth's recognition theory can be of importance in understanding how and why non-traditional students remain in higher education. Understanding power relations in an interdisciplinary way makes…

This paper uses Raymond Boudon's model of educational expansion to examine the relationship between education and social mobility, paying particular attention to post-compulsory education--an important site of social differentiation in England. The paper shows how Boudon focuses explicitly on the consequences of educational expansion, and argues…

This article considers the implications of the Troops to Teaching (TtT) programme, to be introduced in England in autumn 2013, for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and race equality. TtT will fast-track ex-armed service members to teach in schools, without necessarily the requirement of a university degree. Employing theories of white supremacy,…

In common with a number of recent studies of religious change that have taken a gendered approach, this article takes older women as its focus and considers the role the emotions play in religious change, adopting Riis and Woodhead's new conceptual framework of religious emotion. Emotions, they argue, are not merely private, personal and…

Official discourse in the United Kingdom and many other OECD countries emphasises education and training as a vehicle for social inclusion and economic growth. Accordingly, those who do not participate are seen to be at risk of long-term exclusion. However, interventions aimed at re-engaging young people not in education, employment or training…

The paper arises from my PhD thesis on the learner biographies of retail and motor vehicle maintenance apprentices in Germany and England which explores the interrelationship of social structures and individual agency in identity formation over time and in particular learning environments. The paper reports initial findings, focusing largely on…

This study examined the literacy practices of children ages 5-11 as they engaged in out-of-school use of virtual worlds. The purpose of the study was to explore the nature, purpose, and role of literacy in children's use of a virtual world. In this article, I reflect on how children's use of literacy practices in the virtual world constructed and…

This paper examines the stratification of the curriculum according to parents' education, gender, ethnicity and school sector in England, focusing on year 10 subject choices. Using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, we analyse both year 10 subject choices and the factors that may motivate these choices, such as liked and disliked…

A sample of 72 Ss, of whom half were cognitively complex and half cognitively simple, made predictions about unknown relations in four-person social structures. Structures differed in the number of relations given. Cognitively simple Ss tended to make predictions based on consideration of fewer relations in the social structure. (Author)