From Vocationalism to Enterprise: social and life skills become personal and transferable

In this paper we address Cohen's (1985) argument in “Against the New Vocationalism” by broadening the debate into an examination of how generic skills have gained a wider application with the emergence of new technology and structural enonomic change. In order to demonstrate the extent of this development, we include examples from training programmes in social and life skills for young people with learning difficulties and examine the Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative (EHEI), which, among other things, aims to give students personal and transferable skills. In this process, we extend Cohen's analysis to illustrate the diverse ways in which a behaviouristic model of skill transfer has been adopted.     

Comprehension and content: planning literacy in low socioeconomic and culturally diverse schools

This article defines comprehension as a pragmatic social and intellectual practice. It reviews literature on current approaches to reading instruction for linguistically and culturally diverse and low socioeconomic students, noting the current policy emphasis on the teaching of comprehension as autonomous skills and strategies. The Four Resources model (Freebody and Luke 1990) is used to frame comprehension instruction with an emphasis on student cultural and community knowledge, and substantive intellectual and sociocultural content in elementary and middle school curricula. Illustrations are drawn from research underway on the teaching of literacy in low socioeconomic schools.     

Access to General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations for students with special educational needs: what is 'best practice'?

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, recent guidance on access arrangements for students with special educational needs taking public examinations such as the end-of-school General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) has signalled a commitment to the development of access arrangements in line with 'best practice'. In this article, Kevin Woods, from the Educational Support and Inclusion section of the School of Education at the University of Manchester, provides a relevant evaluation of access arrangements for GCSE examinations using questionnaire feedback from 205 specialist teachers involved in their implementation. The findings are that the system for allocating access arrangements is considered 'manageable' by 20% of teachers and 'fair' by only 25% of teachers; 70% of teachers would consider extension of access arrangements to be appropriate, notwithstanding resource constraints. Qualitative data from the questionnaires highlight the reasons for this pattern of results and a call by teachers for wider access in examinations to readers, scribes, extra time and a word processing facility. Kevin Woods sets his findings within the context of recent Government initiatives that are designed to improve engagement and achievement in the 14 to 19 age group.     

Scandalous stories and dangerous liaisons: when female pupils and male teachers fall in love

The Sexual Offences Act, 2003 criminalised all sexual activity in England and Wales between teachers and pupils under 18, irrespective of the fact that the general age of consent is 16, and even if the parties concerned were in a consensual relationship. Accounts of pupil–teacher romantic and sexual relationships are usually presented, in the media, through a discourse of scandal and exploitation. This paper draws on accounts of heterosexual attraction and consensual sexual relationships between female secondary school pupils and their male teachers as stories that have been told, by the people involved, in a positive fashion. The paper considers the ways in which sexual activity and identity are controlled and regulated through discursive practices and invites questioning of orthodoxies and norms.     

Understanding oral reading fluency among adults with low literacy: dominance analysis of contributing component skills

This study extends the literature on the component skills involved in oral reading fluency. Dominance analysis was applied to assess the relative importance of seven reading-related component skills in the prediction of the oral reading fluency of 272 adult literacy learners. The best predictors of oral reading fluency when text difficulty was fixed at a single reading level was word reading efficiency. When text difficulty varied based on readers?? comprehension levels, word reading efficiency was also the best predictor with vocabulary and auditory working memory emerging as important predictors as well. Our findings suggest the merit of investigations into whether adults with low literacy may need vocabulary and auditory working memory strategy interventions to improve their reading fluency.