Losing the whole child? A national survey of primary education training provision for spiritual,moral, social and cultural development

International concerns about the performativity agenda in schools gives rise to concerns about the neglect of a holistic approach to teaching and learning. Whilst schools in England and Wales are legally obliged to promote the spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) development of children, little is known about how initial teacher training providers prepare trainees to do so. This project aims to address this gap in the literature. This paper details the findings of phase one of a National Survey which investigates trainers’ approaches to delivery and their views on the place of SMSC in primary schools. Findings suggest that trainers value SMSC, but time devoted to it is relatively low and policy changes are perceived to threaten SMSC’s security. The paper argues that it is vital that trainers empower trainees to understand the importance of holistic themes of their respective curricula, informed by critical engagement with theory, in order to avoid them being overshadowed by the performativity discourse.     

Regulating belonging: surveillance,inequality, and the cultural production of abjection

ABSTRACT

Conditions of abjection are increasingly viewed as problems to be managed with surveillance. Across disparate domains, bodies that challenge normalized constructions of responsible neoliberal citizenship are categorized, monitored, policed, and excluded in dehumanizing and often violent ways. This paper explores the role of surveillance in such processes. The registers covered include everyday abjection (welfare systems, battered women’s shelters, and homelessness), criminalized poverty (police targeting of the poor and emerging ‘poverty capitalism’ arrangements), and the radically adrift (the identification, tracking, and containment of refugees). In each of these cases, surveillance is yoked to structural inequalities and systems of oppression, but it also possesses a cultural dimension that thrusts marginalized and dehumanized subjectivities upon the abject Other. Therefore, I argue that in order to critique the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of contemporary surveillance, it is necessary to take seriously the mythologies that give meaning to surveillance practices and the subjectivities that are engendered by them.