A critical review of the advantages and limitations of using large-scale national surveys to examine childcare patterns and the ECEC workforce in Britain

OECD countries have established statistical collections to ensure quality within Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). Focusing on one part of ECEC – preschool ‘childcare services’ – this paper critically reviews statistical collections specifically designed to measure childcare patterns in England alongside UK data collected for other purposes which can be used to examine childcare patterns. The paper evaluates how far these data provide a reliable basis for examining the childcare workforce, how well childcare usage and provision patterns can be analysed and the degree to which the data provide comparable geographical coverage. Results show analysis is restricted by the various ways data-sets count and classify occupations. Differences in geographical coverage make them difficult to compare. More refinement of occupation categories would make existing sources more useful. The themes discussed here are relevant for other countries seeking to understand how best to utilise their statistical collections for examining childcare patterns.     

Cirriculum and assessment innovation in science

Concerns about pupils' underachievement have stimulated various curriculum and assessment innovations in recent years. One such innovation is the British Graded Assessments in Science Project (GASP). Research focusing on the implementation of GASP highlights issues about the process of educational change, and raises the question of whether innovators take into account lessons learned from past innovations. This paper reports on two case studies of GASP implementation, showing the degree to which teachers took on board the philosophy of the scheme. The results show that even volunteer teachers, familiar with GASP, exhibit barriers to change which are well documented in the literature. One conclusion is that those developing and supporting curriculum and assessment innovation should be informed by past experience, and find real ways of helping teachers to make the changes which are required to meet the demands of the innovation. Specializations: assessment, investigations in science, progression in learning science.     

Outdoor education in Hong Kong: Past, present and future

This paper examines the development of outdoor education in Hong Kong from its colonial roots to the challenges of its uncertain future. The scene is set by a synopsis of Hong Kong's geography, history, economy, and culture. Next, we trace the history of organised outdoor education from the early 1900s to the present day. This is followed by a critical exploration of issues facing youth adventure education programmes and management development programmes. The paper closes with recommendations to return to “real” outdoor courses in natural environments, to raise the standards of training available to outdoor leaders, and finally, to create a governing body that would facilitate inter-organisational learning, raise standards of programme design and delivery, and help build a body of literature that is specific to experiential learning in Hong Kong.     

‘The fun we had and the way we went about it’: Is now the time to learn lessons from L.A.T.E.’s past?

In the United Kingdom there appears to be a move to reduce the influence of ‘top down’ or centrally driven teaching and learning reforms in favour of returning control to schools and teachers to make necessary improvements at a local level. In this context, ideas about ‘professional learning communities’ or ‘communities of practice’ are potentially fruitful. This article, drawing on the author’s own research, suggests that if we are to take subject English into a life beyond the National Strategies, it would be worth our remembering how one English ‘community of practice’– the London Association for the Teaching of English – helped to shape one model of the discipline.     

Education and development: Thirty years of continuity and change

At the end of the 30th volume of IJED and in the year that the journal published its 1000th paper, it is appropriate to look back at the journal's development. In doing so, this article will discuss a series of important issues regarding the future of the field of international education and development and how it engages with development studies. The paper concludes that the challenge for IJED and for the wider work of its readership is to start imagining a more radical future in which we seek more purposefully to build bridges with other disciplines, engage with new methodological tools and encourage fresh voices but above all else communicate more clearly what we do and do not know about the wonderful complexity of the education–development relationship.     

No time to think: policy,pedagogy and professional learning

In this study, we seek to illuminate the effects of the global policy convergence in education through a close study of its enactment within an Australian Teacher Education course. Building on an examination of the changing priorities of a cohort of pre-service teachers over a short space of time, we argue that the enactment of New Public Management approaches to the governance of teaching in Australia is having adverse effects on the professional learning of new teachers, defeating the policy goals. Previous studies have investigated the affective impact of current global policy formations on teachers. Building on that work, this study considers the impacts that the teacher policy emphasis on ‘performance’ has had on professional learning processes, which are understood with reference to Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory. The study is undertaken using an interpretative phenomenographic approach and informed by the related methods of discursive psychology, which positions discourse as a discursive practice to achieve specific goals in specific contexts.     

Crossing the Line: Sport and the Limits of Civil Rights Protest

Scholars have ably considered the extent to which sport has been, and continues to be, a force for racial progress. What has been less comprehensively explored, however, are the unique difficulties encountered by athletes who have attempted to use sport to promote civil rights activism. Black athletes, and sympathetic white teammates, have faced considerable obstacles as sportsmen who supported the civil rights struggle. Sport has restricted the ability of sportsmen to successfully engage in civil rights activism. In the belief that it has provided an example of racial progress for the rest of society, in fact, sport has resisted the civil rights movement. This article explores the difficulties faced by athletes who attempted to be part of that movement.     

Touching practice and physical education: deconstruction of a contemporary moral panic

This paper explores the insecurities and discursive moral panics elicited by the discussion of intergenerational touch in education, and their subsequent manifestation in ‘classroom panopticism’. In a number of contexts, public hysteria has grown around the interaction between adult and child, and whether this interaction stays within the narrow parameters of a generally consensual ‘acceptability’. Crossing these boundaries carries grave consequences for those deemed to be exploiting their position and this has had significant implications for the self-identity of practitioners. This climate of preventative fear has also served to manipulate regulatory method, realigning conceptions of practitioner independence. Drawing on interviews with Physical Education teachers in English secondary schools, and applying a Foucauldian theoretical framework, with particular reference to his interpretation of panopticism, this paper investigates the conceptual transformation of contemporary education. Whilst school spaces were once representative of stability, in which roles were clearly defined, the hierarchical dynamic has changed. The teacher, who previously presided with relative professional freedom and autonomy, is now subject to myriad pressures associated with ‘appropriate’ behaviour and the avoidance of any ‘problematic’ interactional incident. Foucault's treatment of panopticism is apt here, as teachers must conduct themselves with an acceptance that they are now governed by an unpredictable yet persistent practical scrutiny.