Administering ‘Operation Pied Piper’ – how the London County Council prepared for the evacuation of its schoolchildren 1938–1939

In September 1939, two days before declaring war on Germany, the British government evacuated over half a million children from London to supposedly safer areas in the country. Schoolchildren went there with their teachers and infants with their mothers. Immediately after the event (and ever since) the impact of the evacuation on the children – the hardships of some and the adventures of others – has been extensively researched, as has been the operation’s broader social impact. Meanwhile, the policy ontology of the evacuation’s organisation remains surprisingly under‐researched. This paper explores how the planning for the evacuation developed in a brief period before the outbreak of the Second World War, in order to assess responsibilities for its shape and ultimate execution. At the core of this article is the evaluation of four sets of documents from the archives of the London County Council about the evacuation’s planning stages in the 1930s. Contrary to earlier claims that the administration of the children’s evacuation was not only a success, but also an excellent illustration of co‐ordinated planning and execution, it will be the conclusion here, that not co‐operation and co‐ordination at government and civil service level made London’s evacuation a logistical success, but the relentless drive by the London County Council, who pushed for the evacuation in the face of opposition from central government.     

The power of positional competition and market mechanism: a case study of recent parental choice development in China

This article draws on data collected during a pilot study conducted in two west London schools exploring young people’s understandings of success. It considers ways in which ‘discourses of success’, as part of New Labour’s project of re‐inventing schooling, may shape young people’s subjectivity. The article examines articulations between New Labour policy and aspects of social difference and how these structure new identifications with success. In particular, the article explores how class, gender and ethnicity shape discourses of success and how they are implicated in their distribution. In conclusion, the article indicates how current education policy (particularly in relation to educational success) articulates the ‘public’ domain with dimensions of the ‘private’ self and suggests that understanding this is vital in the pursuit of social justice.     

Recognising desire: a psychosocial approach to understanding education policy implementation and effect

It is argued that in order to understand the ways in which teachers experience their work—including the idiosyncratic ways in which they respond to and implement mandated education policy—it is necessary to take account both of sociological and of psychological issues. The paper draws on original research with practising and beginning teachers, and on theories of social and psychic induction, to illustrate the potential benefits of this bipartisan approach for both teachers and researchers. Recognising the significance of (but somewhat arbitrary distinction between) structure and agency in teachers’ practical and ideological positions, it is suggested that teachers’ responses to local and central policy changes are governed by a mix of pragmatism, social determinism and often hidden desires. It is the often under‐acknowledged strength of desire that may tip teachers into accepting and implementing policies with which they are not ideologically comfortable.     

Restructuring teachers’ work‐lives and knowledge in England and Spain

This article explores the restructuring of education in England and Spain. Against a presumably homogeneous global streamlining of educational systems according to competition‐driven goals, the comparison of teachers’ work‐lives and professional knowledge evidences a variety of experiences under‐represented in discourses on global restructuring. Our argument highlights how in England political reforms have worked their way deep into the working lives of professionals, giving rise to a ‘managerial’ model of professionalism, whereas in Spain reforms are more loosely coupled with teachers’ work, favoring a ‘social service’‐oriented model. However, despite the different professional ideals, teachers uniformly stressed the challenges they face were predominantly due to broader social transformations for which policy reforms provided few if any remedies. Our study emphasizes the variety of educational reforms and teachers’ experiences in the European context and argues further educational change should be bound to the historical trajectory and the concrete needs of the professionals in question.     

Engaging children in lessons: the role of efficient and effective teachers

The training of effective teachers has been one of the main aims of educational systems, in so far as it could be an important tool to improve the education performance of children and, consequently, contribute to their career progression and foster social mobility towards a more meritocratic society. The present study intends to identify these teachers by their ability to engage young students in lessons, which may reflect the capacity of their teaching practices and efficient use of available resources to increase students’ learning. We focus on 4th-grade reading and mathematics teachers in Spain – using TIMSS and PIRLS 2011 data – and we propose a 2-step procedure for this analysis: the 1st step obtains teachers’ efficiency scores, which are later employed in a 2nd step – together with teachers’ practices – to explain children’s engagement in lessons.     

Sharing best practices in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago: patterns of policy implementation and resistance

This article outlines policies from multilateral organisations that advocate sharing best practices between developing nations. The article discusses the degree to which these best practices are implemented by small states as indicated by teachers, academics and policymakers in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. For the purpose of this article, a best practice refers to pedagogy, curriculum or programme that contributes to student achievement. Currently, a number of influential multilateral organisations advocate that developing nations should share their best practices in education with each other. Despite encouragement by multilaterals however, best practices are not shared. At best, foreign ideas are used to legitimise local policies. While these policies are intended to help countries reach their Education for All (EFA) goals, they do not account for the differences between islands and their vulnerability towards larger countries. Attempts to innovate the curriculum by implementing foreign ideas failed due to the forces of tradition. It can thus be concluded that resistance – non‐compliance or opposition – to sharing educational best practices, as well as to the implementation of new curricula, stems from echoes of colonialism and globalisation. Although this study focuses on two islands, there are implications for other developing countries and small states as they fall under the same policy auspices of UNESCO and the Commonwealth Secretariat.     

Gender segregation and labour supply: on ‘choosing’ gender‐atypical jobs

Abstract

Recently it has been argued that women's choices play a significant role in the structure of job segregation. Drawing on a case study of women scientists and engineers, this paper focuses on the preferences and plans of women who entered gender‐atypical jobs in the technical professions. The evidence suggests that the women had to face considerable hostility in their choice of jobs from non‐specialist teachers and careers advisors. However, they withstood opposition with the support of specialist teachers in single‐sex schools and their parents. The findings imply that while women's attitudes to education, training and careers should not be neglected in the study of gender segregation, the social context in which they evolve should be emphasised in a sociological analysis of the labour market.     

Ethos of Ambiguity: Artist Teachers and the Transparency Exclusion Paradox

Addressing changes in conditions for practitioners that can be related to education policy in England and Wales since 2010, this article presents issues faced by teachers of art and design and their responses in practice. The current insistence on transparency in education emerges through policy that audits performativity, in a limiting skills bank. Practitioners in art and design are particularly affected by what I term ‘the transparency‐exclusion paradox’, as they battle to maintain the subject area and are ‘othered’ by the English Baccalaureate and Progress 8. I will discuss an emergent ‘ethos of ambiguity’ among artist‐teachers and contemporary artists, with a theoretical basis informed by Beauvoir and Foucault. Empirical data from research participants will be evidenced, to explore strategies of response in inclusive social practice. This article adds to literature that considers the effects of policy in implementation and it contributes to research on creative expressions of ambiguity in the arts.     

I,Teacher: re‐territorialization of teachers’ multi‐faceted agency in globalized education

Analysis of teachers’ agency as multifarious change, embedded in educational reform in the global era, stands largely unexamined in educational policy. Although the concept of teachers as agents has political implications, beyond this, examining teachers’ agency offers ways of describing and reviewing changes to teachers’ work and relations within evolving education systems. Local systems draw from globally orientated education policies, which continue to influence to the way that local systems redesign education. In the global context, education systems are complex interactions between structure and agency, evidenced as ‘multiplicity undergoing change’. In other words, there is dynamic and dialectic interplay between structure and agency. Teachers’ agency, germane to dynamic interplay, means that teachers are not only engaging in the reproduction of structural change aligning globalization‐driven reforms to their work and practice, but also, in adapting and reacting to new structural conditions, they are transformed through their actions. In this paper, the focus becomes teachers’ agency as a framework for understanding how teachers are redesigned and reassembled to do things differently within restructured education systems. Finally, the discussion considers the possible consequences of teachers work and practice, given teachers’ agency relative to the macro policy of superfigures and the transitional national/global structures.     

Education and Race: the racialisation of class inequalities'?

Throughout most of the 1960s there was considerable optimism among education policy makers that schools could foster equality of opportunity: could mitigate social class disparities in educational achievements. During the 1980s a growing number of local education authorities have produced policy documents which are designed to remedy racism, ‘racial’ inequalities and ‘racial’ disparities in achievements. This article argues that these more recent initiatives mirror very clearly the earlier, class based, definitions of problems, explanatory paradigms and policy recommendations. It suggests that the racialisation of structural inequalities, the politicisation of ‘race’ issues locally and the contradictions generated by four particular crises of legitimacy within education provide the context within which antiracist policies can be understood. It asks what lessons can be learned from the demise and failure of earlier class‐based education policies.     

Teacher education policy in Ireland and the challenges of the twenty‐first century

In line with the principles of the Bologna Process, teacher education systems across Europe are converging along a common path. Taking the Republic of Ireland (Ireland) as a case study, this paper examines the European agenda in relation to teacher education and asks how individual nation states are coping with the demands of greater comparability and compatibility. It suggests that while structurally, teacher education in Ireland has undergone significant reform in order to conform to a wider European agenda, significant gaps remain in existing teacher education policy particularly in relation to continuous professional development which will, if not addressed, impede Ireland’s capacity to adequately prepare teachers for the challenges of the twentieth‐first century.     

‘Learning Careers’ or ‘Assessment Careers’? The Impact of Assessment Systems on Learning

Two increasingly important strands in current educational thinking are reflected in growing interest amongst researchers, policy‐makers and qualification designers in formative assessment strategies that motivate learners and enhance their educational attainment. In addition, a body of research suggests that learners develop ‘learning careers’ from primary education, through the National Curriculum into post‐compulsory education and beyond. This article engages with this work in order to highlight some key factors in ‘learning careers’, particularly in relation to the impact of formative assessment practices. It aims to relate findings from research on formative assessment in primary and further education, carried out by the authors, to studies which use Bourdieu's notions of ‘habitus’, ‘field’, ‘cultural capital’ and ‘social capital’ to explore learning careers and learning identities in different sectors of education. The article evaluates whether the concept of ‘assessment careers’ illuminates a specific strand within young people's ‘learning careers’. In particular, it asks whether the concept might offer more precise insights about how practices produced by different assessment systems, particularly those purporting to promote formative assessment, affect learners' identities and dispositions for learning.     

The significance of materiality in shaping institutional habitus: exploring dynamics preceding school effects

This article examines the objective possibilities of Swedish schools to offer an equal and functional pedagogical practice for students’ acquisition of knowledge and skills. The data consist of policy documents, observations, and interviews with students, teachers, and head teachers in three educational settings distinguished by different social demographics. The focus allows for a comparative understanding of how tangible objects generate formations of schools as a relational phenomenon depending on geographic location and social background of students. The article indicates that the impact of materiality lies in its preceding power. It shapes the condition of institutions visualised in architecture, buildings, and the quality of and design of facilities and artefacts. From this material root emanates schools’ values, appeal, social status, and pedagogical organisations – school effects – that empower or weaken the school’s attraction and self-confidence. Different materialities influence each school’s institutional habitus, producing school effects with unequal educational outcomes.     

Primary schools and network governance: A policy analysis of reception baseline assessment

Primary school reception baseline assessment was designed to produce a single ‘baseline’ data figure on the basis of which young children's progress across primary school could be measured and accounted for. This paper suggests that within the context of punitive performativity, head teachers might be considered ‘irresponsible’ if not engaging with the new accountability measure in its voluntary year. Using DfE‐accredited baseline assessment providers blurred the distinctions between not‐for‐profit social enterprises, digital policy innovation labs, edu‐business, and the state. It is argued that through a process of networked governance, these cross‐sectoral organisations successfully enticed some primary schools with the ‘moral economy’ of using baseline assessment. It is argued that baseline's simplistic reductionism allowed for the economisation of early years education assessment and for its commercialisation of comparison. This paper reports on a sample of five head teachers, taken from a much larger study that used a mixed‐methods approach involving a nationwide survey (n=1131) and in‐depth interviews with reception staff and head teachers in five geographically disparate primary schools. Baseline assessment was ‘withdrawn’ by the DfE in April 2016, quite possibly because of campaigns by early years organisations, the government's own report showing that the three separate baseline datasets were incompatible, and national research funded by the teachers’ unions, a small part of which is reported upon here.     

Profession, “performance”, and policy: teachers,examinations, and the state in England and Wales, 1846–1862

Abstract

When historians discuss the impact of examinations on elementary education in mid-Victorian England and Wales they typically focus on the Revised Code of 1862. The Revised Code is famous for instituting a policy of “payment-by-results” for teachers in state-supported voluntary schools. “Payment-by-results” made government grants to schools – and, by extension, for teachers’ salaries – contingent upon student attendance and pass rates in reading, writing and arithmetic. As this article emphasises, however, “payment-by-results” was not the first, or even the most significant, instance in which competitive examination was used by the state as an instrument for establishing the pedagogical fitness and salaries of teachers. Less often explored by historians is the formative role that state-mandated competitive examinations for teachers played in developing a professionally aspirant body of schoolteachers and, consequently, the schoolteachers’ later role in developing competitive examination as a broad-scale national accreditation apparatus. But while the use of competitive examinations came to shape modern British academic and professional life in fundamental ways, the strengthening effects that they had for certain occupations and institutions, such as physicians, civil servants and middle-class secondary schools, were in fact ultimately denied to state teachers and the elementary education sector generally. With the introduction of “payment-by-results” in 1862, competitive examinations were converted into an instrument that weakened rather than strengthened teachers’ professional identity and policy influence. This article explains how the nineteenth-century English state structured examinations and examination results to manipulate the professional status of teachers in order to suit state priorities during different stages of national development. This historical narrative is framed in reference to present-day examination-based reforms of teacher compensation systems such as performance-related-pay and value-added modelling.     

Judgement of the Teacher: the Norwood Report and internal examinations

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the intervention of the Norwood Report of 1943 in the debate over secondary school examinations. It emphasises the role of the report in supporting the active involvement of teachers in ‘internal’ examinations, as opposed to external examinations administered by examination boards. It relates this debate to its wider social and political contexts. It also suggests a longer‐term historical framework involving contestation between different interests and ideologies for control over examinations, the ‘professionalism’ of secondary school teachers in relation to their own sphere of activity, and notions such as ‘accountability’ and the ‘market’. The contribution of this historical episode to a ‘social history of education policy’ relevant to unresolved issues and tensions of the 1990s is also discussed.     

Policy ‘partnerships’? Power dynamics in curriculum reform

In curriculum policy, discourses of ‘policy partnerships’ and ‘communities of practice’ have become increasingly prevalent and were reflected in Western Australian curriculum policy processes from the mid‐1990s to the late 2000s – a period of significant, highly contested change. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study into the impact of curriculum reform on the changing dynamics within and between the government and non‐government education sectors, drawing on critical theory and post‐structuralist approaches to policy analysis within a broader framework of policy network theory. This approach is used to highlight power issues at all levels of the policy trajectory. This research found that despite policy discourses of collaborative and consultative processes to create a ‘shared’ curriculum, the government and non‐government education sectors remain largely distinct due to significant power differentials, as well as structural and cultural differences. The analysis reveals three closely connected emergent themes – limited collaboration, regulated consultation and enhanced state control of curriculum policy agendas. It is argued here that although discourses of ‘policy partnerships’ and ‘community of practice’ are increasingly evidenced in contemporary curriculum policy, they do not take sufficient account of embedded hierarchical power relationships. Further, such discourses can be used as legitimisation strategies to promulgate policy changes which enhance the steerage capacity of the state. Deeply entrenched power differentials operate simultaneously to distort policy partnerships and communities of practice, by both including and excluding particular sets of policy actors.     

Gender,toys and learning

In spite of continuing patterning of curriculum subject preference and choice by gender, there has been little recent attention to the argument developed in the 1970s that children play with different toys according to their gender, and that these provide girls and boys with (different) curriculum‐related skills. The article describes a small‐scale empirical study that asked parents of 3–5 year old children to identify their child’s favourite toys and viewing material, and analysed responses according to children’s gender. The most frequently identified toys and viewing materials were subjected to content and discourse analysis, with the intention of identifying both educative aspects of content, and the gender discourses reflected. The article explores conceptual issues around categorisations of ‘education’ within toys and entertainment resources, positing the notion of ‘didactic information’ to delineate between overtly educational content and other social discourses. Analysis reveals toy preferences to be highly gendered, with boys’ toys and resources concentrated on technology and action, and girls’ on care and stereotypically feminine interests. Didactic information, and aspects developing construction and literacy skills, were identified in the selected toys and resources for boys, and were lacking in those for girls. All the toys and resources could be read as implicated in ‘gendering’: the various gender discourses, and other discourses around aspects of social identity reflected in the toys and resources are identified and analysed. The analysis presented suggests the value of reinvigorated attention to children’s toys and entertainment resources in terms both of the education they afford, and their role in the production of social identities.     

‘New Labour,Old School Tie’: What Is Education For?

The Labour Party has been in power for the past 13 years in the UK. What is its legacy in education? What have been the salient aspects of its policy interventions, and what impact have these policies had on the practice of English teachers? With its assumption of a straightforward correlation between education and economic development, New Labour’s education policy needs to be seen primarily as a failure of politics – an abandonment of any commitment to social justice in pursuit of a standards agenda that reduces teachers to a condition of mere compliance and education to a set of commodities.