Polish Migrant Parents of Secondary School Boys in the United Kingdom

This article focuses on the parents of secondary school Polish boys and their capacity to realise their educational and professional aspirations for their children. Our primary finding is that although many Polish parents face considerable challenges in manoeuvring through the educational system, some Polish parents display a level of agency comparable to that of white, British middle-class parents.     

Linking Class and Gender Inequality: the family and schooling

Some feminists have argued that a woman's class position should be determined by her own employment and work history, whereas Goldthorpe has argued that the family is the basic unit in class analysis, with the husband's occupation determining the class position of all family members, including the wife's. Goldthorpe denies that this position is an example of gender bias, claiming that class and gender inequality are separate issues. This paper argues that gender and class inequality are strongly interconnected, by virtue of the importance of the work in child‐rearing carried out by the wife‐mother and its effects on the child's scholastic achievements and life chances. It shows that within‐family processes are more important than class position in affecting children's scholastic achievements. It further argues that children's family environments are affected by the biographies of both parents. The institutional separation of the family, schooling and the work‐place means that there will be great variability in the biographies of parents who are in the same ‘class position’ by virtue of their occupations. The notion of a single indicator of ‘class position’ therefore seems inappropriate, and too static for the complex institutional relationships involved.     

Assessment of practical work

In recent years, much attention has been focused on the need to develop effective and efficient strategies and procedures for the assessment of laboratory work. Increasingly, the emphasis has moved towards a skills-based approach. The paper addresses a number of philosophical issues concerning this orientation and argues that the skills-based approach is philosophically unsound (because it isn't based on a valid model of science), educationally worthless (because it trivializes learning) and pedagogically dangerous (because it encourages bad teaching). An alternative, more holistic approach to assessment, based on a more valid model of scientific practice, is proposed.