I grew up on free school meals and now work as a school improvement adviser. In this article, I address discontinuities within my 'support and challenge' role, a role that can be constrained by educational policy enacted within a performative and panoptic culture of fear. Successive governments have concerned themselves with promoting equity…

In 2019 Ofsted introduced cultural capital (CC) into the Early Years Inspection Handbook and defined it as 'essential knowledge' related to 'educated citizenship'. This paper investigates Ofsted's use of CC to critically examine the potential implications for early years work. Due to the feminised nature of early years work, a critical feminist…

The educational policies of 1860s Britain came into being as a result of the interplay between social, economic and political conditions, and the changing discourses of childhood and education that arose from them. While essentialised conceptualisations of 'the child' had existed since the early Enlightenment period, it was not until the…

Past decades have seen increased emphasis on graduate employability as a driver of higher education policy. In the Australian context, employability discourses in the public domain have become inflected with anti-intellectual sentiment, serving to reproduce the perception that the humanities and social sciences are of less value to graduates'…

Higher education should be a social good for everyone and, despite the intentions of university policy on inclusion and diversity with schemes on widening participation, the truth is that for working-class students, university is still a place where they encounter prejudices and feelings of exclusion. This article uses the method of…

A rich literature has argued that so-called aspiration-raising policies tend to individualize structural conditions and thereby reproduce forms of inequality through young people's aspirations. This paper explores how aspiration-raising policy discourses are lived in ways that both accentuate but that might also contest their terms. Drawing on…

Access to education for peasants in the history of Brazilian society has always been denied, with the absence of public policies for peasants, as the result of a political and social process of denial of minority groups. The text address the issue of closure of schools in the countryside as a growing social phenomenon that has been expanding in…

Access to early child education services has been proven to be an efficient tool in fighting educational inequalities. However, while wealthier families are likely to use childcare services, disadvantaged children tend to be left out. Research has explained this effect, known as Mathew Effect, and has studied both the constraints in the…

Theoretically, education supports improving graduates' socioeconomic outcomes and careers by injecting citizenship values and making sure they are employable. Evidence confirms that socioeconomic background influences the level of education achieved which in turn greatly shapes the careers of graduates. Relevant knowledges and competencies are the…

Children's treatment in the school environment has barely changed over many decades. Norms of obedience, discipline and control persist to define their 'place' in hierarchies of schooling. This is in direct contrast with freedoms they enjoy outside of school from, for example, their use of information communication technology, use of time and…

The concept of capital has risen in prominence within educational policy and practice in the UK since Ofsted introduced cultural capital into its inspection processes in 2019. At the same time, fractured discourses exist across different types of capital -- one of which concerns capitals that are negative in constitution and/or impact. This paper…

Global education policy discourse is based on an unshakable belief that more and improved skills will promote economic prosperity, global competitiveness and social inclusion. In England, the Further Education and Skills sector (FES) has emerged as the vehicle to deliver these skills. However, the portrayal of FES as focusing primarily on…

This paper argues that processes of marginalisation experienced by white working-class students provide insight into systemic problems with the English education system. White British students eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) are a low attaining group. This research investigates factors affecting their engagement and achievement. Fieldwork in…

Scrutinising disproportionate media and political attention provided to the ills of the 'white working-class', this article examines the framing of their apparent underachievement in education policy and discourse in early post-Brexit vote England. In a political context dominated by anti-immigration and nationalist rhetoric, this article aims to…

Searching for development paths and suitable educational policies, postcolonial governments often turned to the experiences of other countries and sought to adapt these to their own contexts. Research on such processes has largely neglected the resulting entanglements between postcolonial and European socialist countries, and between different…