Targets,Assessment for Learning,and Whole-School Improvement

This article develops the idea that there is something of a gap in theory and practice regarding the relationship between whole-school targets and individual targets. I suggest that subject, year or key stage leaders have an important mediating and cohering role to play. I argue that all of the work in schools concerning the use of targets for school improvement, for performance management and for individual pupils' progress, rests on effective assessment for learning. Significant research is referred to in support of six main propositions, and guidance is offered on how they might be implemented.     

Engineering Training in Small French Companies

A brief account of continuous training of staff in a sample of sixteen French firms. Comment is included on method, sample and limitations of the study. Findings relating to training include expenditure, degree of forward planning, objectives, workforce attitudes, management awareness, relative strength of firms and dependence on outside consultancies. Mention is made of the importance of the ‘formation continue system’ with its compulsory training levy and its possible relevance to a UK context where training weaknesses have led to skill shortages in key industrial sectors.     

Education and Nationality

The paper argues that nationality and national sentiment have been, until recently, neglected concepts in liberal, as distinct from conservative, political and educational philosophy, It claims that, appropriately detached from nationalistic ideas associated with the political right, the promotion of national sentiment as an educational aim is not incompatible with liberalism and, more strongly, may be desirable for reasons of personal and cultural identity as well as for redistributive reasons. The paper then explores issues to do with British nationality in particular, arguing for a remodelled conception to replace the traditional one; and finally it looks at curricular implications, especially in the British context, of aiming at the cultivation of national sentiment within a liberal framework.     

Autonomy, Human Flourishing and the Curriculum

This is a book in the 'Thinking in Action' series, which 'takes philosophy to the public'. The review outlines the argument in the two halves of the book: on educational aims; and on controversial policy issues. In its assessment of the arguments it focuses on the following topics: problems in the relationships between happiness, flourishing, and personal autonomy; the justification of the traditional subject-centred curriculum; the role of conjecture in the argument for state-funded faith-based schools; and a defence of education for patriotism in the face of Brighouse's critique.