ABSTRACTThe recent rise in popularity of nurture groups in British schools appears to be aligned with a broader shift towards therapeutic education. With initial origins in attachment theory, nurtu...

This paper critiques what it sees as a tendency on the part of certain social researchers to engage in moralistic critiques of middle-class parents, especially in relation to the choices and actions of such parents within educational quasi-markets. It proceeds to a linked critique of the influence within education of certain aspects of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, with particular reference to the concepts of symbolic violence and the depiction of cultural meanings as arbitrary. It is argued that both these (...) developments involve unhelpful and unjustified forms of reductionism that could have the effect of alienating middle-class support for a range of broadly progressive political endeavours within and beyond education. (shrink)

In this article, the authors draw on two qualitative, longitudinal studies of young people’s transitions to adulthood and how they construct these transitions over time in social, cultural and material terms. The authors focus on the hopes, anxieties and imagined futures of young women. They discuss the individualization thesis, and the contradiction for female individualization between expectations of equality and the reality of inequality between the genders. The debate is moved beyond ‘pitiful girls’ and ‘can-do girls’ by exploring how young (...) women in the UK and Finland anticipate and try to avoid being locked into the lives of adult women. (shrink)

The United Kingdom’s Coalition government has introduced an education policy that is focused on increasing the opportunities to promote and advance social mobility for all children within state education. Raising young people’s aspirations through school-based initiatives is a prominent theme within recent policy texts, which are focused on improving educational outcomes and thus advancing social mobility. This article draws on qualitative data from paired interviews with 32 students in two academies to first investigate if our participants’ aspirations indicate a desire (...) for intragenerational social mobility and second, to explore our participants’ perceptions of the influences of their family background on their aspirations for the future. Analysis of our data highlights the mismatch between our participants’ aspirations for the future and the government’s constructions of what they should aspire to, as articulated in policy texts. By investigating aspirations, as part of a wider project to understand social mobility qualitatively, our data shows the important role of family in shaping our participants’ varied and diverse aspirations that are frequently at variance with government policy. (shrink)

This article investigates the experience of individual learners who have been allocated learning support in the further education system in England. The particular focus is on interviewees' constructions of their emotional and psychic experiences. Through the adoption of a psycho-social perspective, learners' tendency to 'idealise' their learning support workers is understood as a strategy for coping with the anxiety generated by a range of previous experiences. The implications for policy-makers are discussed.

ABSTRACT: This article investigates the experience of individual learners who have been allocated learning support in the further education system in England. The particular focus is on interviewees’ constructions of their emotional and psychic experiences. Through the adoption of a psycho-social perspective, learners’ tendency to ‘idealise’ their learning support workers is understood as a strategy for coping with the anxiety generated by a range of previous experiences. The implications for policy-makers are discussed.

Drawing upon the concept of thirdspace (Soja 1996), this article extends sociocultural theorizations of space in relation to alternative educational programs: programs designed to re-engage youth who have been pushed out of mainstream schools. Snapshots of educational programs, provided by ethnographic research gathered in the United States, Australia, and Canada, foreground the contradictions inherent in these alternative spaces: on one hand, the possibilities obtained for youth through participation, and on the other, the production of these programs through displacement. Alternative educational (...) programs expose the tensions between a democratic ideal of engaging all young people in excellent and equitable public schools and a neo-liberal economic rationality that currently fuels the ?sorting machine? function of compulsory schooling. (shrink)