This paper empirically re(dis)covers a moment of conjuncture within Leicester when an opportunity opened up through multicultural/anti-racist education for schools and colleges to develop their ‘multicultural capital’. It does this through the thematic analysis of the key proximate document Report of the Working Party on Multicultural Education as well as drawing on interview data provided by two important agents who helped to implement Leicester’s/Leicestershire’s moment of multicultural education. This moment generated a symbolic, ideational, and conceptual shift within Leicester’s education provision (...) toward a more culturally inclusive position that began to recognise the cultural capital of non-white students. However, this moment was to be lost in the ‘neoliberal epoch’. It is argued in this paper that neoliberal education policy/practice has become an enabling mechanism for renascent colonial ideology. By re(dis)covering this vision for the official recognition of non-white cultural capital, this paper demonstrates the possibilities for alternative directions within Leicester’s schools and colleges that can challenge neoliberal and colonial conceptions of education. It suggests that there are still spaces and structures that can be re(dis)covered in order for this vision to be enabled. (shrink)

For academics and students, Education Management in Managerialist Times offers a critical guide to existing educational management texts and makes a strong case for redefining educational management along more socially and politically informed lines. The book also offers practitioners alternative management strategies intended to contest, rather than support, managerialism, while being realistic about the context within which those who lead and manage schools currently have to work.

The last three decades have been marked by significant expansion of music education within higher education, the outcomes of which can be seen in the increased numbers of students studying music and in the diversity of activity and purpose within music courses. This article interrogates the relationship between stylistic diversity and music provision, specifically in relation to teaching and assessment, and considers music styles as examples of ‘communities of practice’ into which students may be inducted through formal and informal means.

The aim of this article is to reclaim social class as a central concern within education, not in the traditional sense as a dimension of educational stratification, but as a powerful and vital aspect of both learner and wider social identities. Drawing on historical and present evidence, a case is made that social inequalities arising from social class have never been adequately addressed within schooling. Recent qualitative research is used to indicate some of the ways in which class is lived (...) in classrooms. The article also raises concerns about the ability of the education system to positively address social class in the classroom when contemporary initial teacher training rarely engages with it as a relevant concern within schooling. (shrink)

This paper presents selected findings from a historical analysis of change in the discursive construction of social identity in UK education policy discourse from 1972–2005. My chief argument is that through its linguistic forms of self-identification the government construes educational roles, relations and responsibilities not only for itself, but also for other educational actors and wider society. More specifically, I argue that New Labour's distinctive mode of self-representation is an important element in its hegemonic project, textually manufacturing consent over its (...) policy decisions, and helping to articulate its self-styled ‘enabling’ model of governance. As evidence for these claims I discuss two prominent trends in New Labour's education policy rhetoric, which I characterise as ‘personalisation’ and ‘managerialisation’. Respectively, these relate to the discursive representation of social identity and social action. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: We draw on empirical data and theorising that focuses on the relationship between the state, public policy and knowledge in the construction and configuration of school leadership under New Labour from 1997. Specifically we show how a school leadership policy network comprises people in different locations who operate as policy entrepreneurs in shaping policy.

UK universities have gone through drastic changes driven by the marketization of higher education. From the perspective of critical discourse analysis, Fairclough hypothesizes that university discourse will be colonized by business discourse. While a number of studies have been conducted, to my knowledge no study has compared university discourse and business discourse both synchronically and diachronically. This article compares how employer organizations are discursively constructed synchronically and diachronically in 240 academic and business job advertisements. The analytical frameworks are transitivity analysis (...) and modality. The results indicate that academic job advertisements have changed from not mentioning organizations to discursively constructing organizations in a promotional manner like business job advertisements. In addition, universities reframe themselves as businesses, entrepreneurs and service providers. This article contends that universities should be selective in adopting business discourse and maintain their identity as educational institutions. (shrink)

In this paper I reflect on the findings of a number of loosely related research projects undertaken with colleagues over the last ten years. Their common theme is equity, in formal education and beyond, in wider family and social settings, and with inequity expressed as the stratification of a variety of educational outcomes. The projects are based on a standard mixture of pre-existing records, official documents, large-scale surveys, observations, interviews and focus groups. The numeric data were largely used to create (...) biographical models of educational experiences, and the in-depth data were used to try to explain individual decisions and disparities at each stage of the model. Data have been collected for England and Wales, in five other countries of the European Union and for Japan. A meta-view of these various findings suggests that national school intakes tend to be at least moderately segregated by prior attainment and socio-economic factors, and that learning outcomes as assessed by formal means, such as examinations, are heavily stratified by these same factors. There is no convincing evidence that compulsory schooling does very much to overcome the initial disparity in the resources and attainment of school intakes. On the other hand, there are indications that the nature of a national school system and the social experiences of young people in schools can begin to equalise educational outcomes as more widely envisaged, including learning to trust and willingness to help others, aspirations, and attitudes to continuing in education and training. The cost-free implications of the argument in this paper, if accepted, are that everything possible should be done to make school intakes comprehensive, and that explicit consideration, by teachers and leaders, of the applied principles of equity could reduce potentially harmful misunderstandings in educational contexts. (shrink)

This paper is based on case-study research in four English secondary schools. It explores the pressure placed on English and mathematics departments because of their results being reported in annual performance tables. It examines how English and maths departments enact policies of achievement, the additional power and extra resources the pressure to achieve brings and the possibility of resistance.

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the representation of the notion of employability and the job-seeking ‘reality’. It is part of a wider research project that looks closely into the careers services sector within Higher Education Institutions in the United Kingdom. The chosen methodology, that is corpus-based critical discourse analysis, combined qualitative and quantitative methods and tools for the analysis of 2.6 million words deriving from 58 university websites, and more specifically the careers services sections. The analysis brings to light some (...) problematic, common-sense ideas that are being disseminated by these services and encourages the denaturalisation of the careers services’ discourse. It shows that the language used by careers services reproduces and promotes neoliberal ideology. In addition, it argues that the notion of employability could be interpreted as a pseudo-solution to the social problem of (youth) unemployment and fierce competition in the graduate job market. (shrink)