Mapping government reforms in quality against higher education theory: is the relationship symbiotic?

In Australia, a review of the higher education sector is usually triggered by a change in government leadership, followed by the development and implementation of the government’s response in the form of a reform package to enact change. The aim of this study was to conduct an independent evaluation of a large-scale national government policy implementation. This article concludes that the 2003 Government Reform Package was successful in bringing attention to learning and teaching practice in the Australian higher education sector through three national initiatives: (1) Learning and Teaching Performance Fund; (2) Australian Learning and Teaching Council; (3) Australian Universities Quality Agency. These initiatives were implemented with the full delivery of the initial funding cycle, each initiative applied a different model of quality and these models were found to be aligned to Bigg’s theoretical model of teaching and learning and to have a symbiotic relationship.     

National innovation policy and public science in Australia

In this paper, I have positioned myself with Kean Birch and explored some of the political-economic actors/actants of policy suites implicated in the biotechnologies and bioeconomy. In particular, I have considered Australia’s recent National Innovation and Science Agenda and allied documents and entities (that is, Innovation and Science Australia, the National Science Statement and the 2016 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap) as one of the National Innovation Strategies in place now in OECD countries and beyond. In overview, these policy suites utilise the same high knowledge creation/low translation and commericalisation arguments as elsewhere to press for particular ideologically based ‘improvements’ to public science. Mapping the terrain of these entities has revealed the innovation, biotechnology and bioeconomy policy space to be inordinately complex and challenging to navigate. Reviewing Australia’s position enables the type of comparative work that contributes to a closer understanding of the largely neoliberal global economic imperatives shaping contemporaneity. Moreover, while these policy suites attempt to constitute and circulate particular visions of science education, their complex nature mitigates against science teachers/educators grappling with their implications.     

Interpretations of literacy

The National Literacy Strategy (NLS) was introduced into schools in England in 1998 with the aim of raising the literacy attainments of primary‐aged children. The Framework for Teaching the Literacy Hour, a key component of the NLS, proposes an interpretation of literacy that emphasises reading, writing and spelling skills. An investigation of the Literacy Hour for pupils with a range of special needs raised questions about teachers' interpretation of literacy when children have severe and complex learning needs. The research suggested that a skill‐based view of literacy is limited and has the potential to exclude pupils who cannot access or produce written material by conventional means. These issues are discussed within the context of views drawn from contemporary literature. Implications for further research are identified.     

A pre-school training programme for children with poor phonological awareness: effects on reading and spelling

An earlier paper published in this journal described the pilot study and first two phases of a longitudinal study that examined the possibility of preventing the emergence of written language difficulties, by addressing the ability of pre-schoolers to make phonological judgements (Layton, Deeny, Upton and Tall, 1996). The literacy development of the children involved in the study was assessed when they had been in mainstream education for approximately two years. It was discovered that there were no significant differences, in terms of written language achievement, between the children who had received phonological training while in nursery school and their peers in a control group whose training programme had not featured phonological awareness activities. These findings challenge the view that training pre-schoolers to attend to the sound structure of words promotes later literacy development. The results are considered in the context of other research findings, and then the study is discussed in both quantitative and qualitative terms, with some comment on the feasibility of identifying pre-schoolers at risk for literacy failure on the basis of poor phonological awareness.