Lifelong Learning,Equality and Social Cohesion1

This article compares the evidence from the 2009 PISA survey on the distribution of skills amongst 15-year-olds in different regions and country groups and explores how education systems in these regions contribute to different levels of inequality. In the second part, it presents evidence from surveys on adult skills and attitudes on how skills inequality affects social attitudes and social cohesion.     

False Uniqueness: the Self‐Perception of New Entrants to Higher Education in the UK and Its Implications for Access – a Pilot Study1

A central tenet of contemporary education policy relates to the desire to extend higher education (HE) provision to less advantaged groups (‘widening participation’). Our paper contends that a key behavioural obstacle to widening participation lies in the erroneous belief that persists among potential entrants from disadvantaged backgrounds as to their capabilities of succeeding within the HE environment – a perception that serves to deflate application/recruitment rates from such groupings. We test this ‘false uniqueness’ thesis using a sample of 127 new UK undergraduates, finding that students drawn from lower social class backgrounds consistently underestimated their abilities vis‐à‐vis the overall cohort.     

School inspections in low- and middle-income countries: Explaining impact and mechanisms of impact

Many efforts to implement and improve school inspections have been modelled on examples from high-income countries, and many studies on the effectiveness of such systems have also only been carried out in these countries. However, local contexts in low- and middle-income countries are very different from those in developed countries, and findings about the effectiveness of school inspections from Western studies are therefore not easily transferable to low- and middle-income countries. Existing literature portrays complex and varied links amongst governance context, policy, design of accountability systems, mechanisms of impact and school outcomes that make translation of conditions across studies challenging. This paper presents the results of a systematic review about the conditions under which school inspections lead to improvement in schools and to positive learning outcomes for schoolchildren in low- and middle-income countries, especially the poorest and most marginalised.