A 'Third Way' Towards Self-Governing Schools?: New Labour and Opting Out

This paper takes as its starting point the special provision made for grant maintained schools through the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act and suggests that the compromise it represented may be considered as an example of New Labour' Third Way in politics. The latter is discussed in terms of general and educational policies with specific regard to the characteristics of self-governing schools.     

Tradition, tension, and transformation: a structuration analysis of a game warden service in transition

Independence and competence define the traditional characteristics of a game warden. External pressure to transform the game warden service into a more culturally and ethnically diverse state law enforcement agency, however, creates tensions surrounding these characteristics in the organization's structurationally defined agency and reflexivity of law enforcement; duality of structure in office memos and citation counts; social integration and institutional reproduction of law enforcement training, use of decoys, and search and seizure procedures; and time-space distanciation of working a 40-hour week or having complete responsibility for a territory. The present study examined how these tensions interact with the traditional assumptions of independence and competence to transform the meaning of these characteristics, and of the game warden service itself.     

How Should Reading Disabilities be Operationalized? A Survey of Experts

In the face of accumulating research and logic, the use of a discrepancy between intelligence and reading achievement test scores is becoming increasingly untenable as a marker of reading disabilities. However, it is not clear what criteria might replace the discrepancy requirement. We surveyed 218 members of journal editorial boards to solicit their opinions on current and proposed definitional components and exclusion criteria. Three components were selected by over two‐thirds of the respondents: reading achievement, phonemic awareness, and treatment validity. However, only 30 percent believed IQ‐reading achievement discrepancy should be a marker. More than 75 percent of the respondents believed exclusion criteria should remain part of the definition. Mental retardation was the most frequently selected exclusion criterion despite rejection of intelligence test scores as a definitional component. Although the findings reflect uncertainty among experts on what elements should comprise a definition, they do signal a willingness to consider new approaches to the conceptually difficult task of defining reading disabilities.     

Expert Witnesses: Voices Of Significance

Michael Fullan in 1991 made the comment that little was known about how students viewed educational change, as no one had thought to ask them. There is a small but growing literature seeking the views of students on a range of issues associated with schooling. This paper reports the findings of a study of students’ perceptions of top–down educational change, involving school amalgamations, closures and creation of middle schools. The policy process was purportedly to involve consultation with students. The study interviewed students to explore the nature and extent of their participation in the policy enactment and their views about the changes. Several meta level themes emerged from the students’ ‘voices,’ including issues associated with disempowerment, and competing social justice and economic discourses. The findings foreground the often messy and contradictory tensions evident in policy processes. The study found that despite the policy intent to include students, they continued to be the ‘objects’ of policy initiatives, submerged in what Freire labelled a ‘culture of silence.’ It was the macro level policy elite who exerted the most influence, using their power, privilege and status to propagate particular versions of schooling. The paper concludes that students are deeply impacted by educational change and they want to participate in restructuring agendas. Therefore policy makers at all levels need to make spaces for the active engagement of students in policy processes.     

Quality assurance in Australian higher education: Globalisation and `steering at a distance'

The complex and contested phenomenon of globalisation presents a fundamental challenge to higher education. Arguably, the development of quality assurance mechanisms during the 1990s and into the 2000s is one of the key globalising practices evident in many higher education sectors – in both developed and developing countries. However, there are still too few studies on the implications of globalisation processes grounded in detailed examinations of particular historical times and geographical spaces. It is important to investigate context-specific differences in potentially globalising policies and practices, rather than simply assuming global homogenisation. This paper offers an analysis of policy on quality assurance in Australian higher education over the last decade. It points to the changing discourses on `quality' over the period from a management device to a marketing device. It suggests that, in essence, quality assurance mechanisms have provided the government with an avenue for `steering at a distance', where the controls over universities and academics have not lessened but have changed form. The specific mechanisms used are both similar to, and different from, those evident in quality assurance policies in other higher education systems.     

“Dancing in a cage”: Changing autonomy in Chinese higher education

In China, the central government has released a series of key policy initiatives over the last twenty years to foster decentralisation of control over higher education, giving prominence to discourses of increased autonomy for both universities and academics. This article reports findings of an empirical study of changing autonomy in Chinese higher education and it focuses on the effects of these key policy developments in two case study universities. This research was part of a larger study of new power relationships emerging from changing policies on accountability and autonomy in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore, located within a broader context of the impact of globalisation on higher education. The focus on the three regions was selected to begin to redress a Western hegemony in such research. The larger study is premised on the principle that globalisation is characterised by ongoing tensions between global commonalities and context-specific differences, and that it is important not to gloss over the complex and often contradictory national and local mediations of “global” policy trends.     

Do Advanced Mathematics Skills Predict Success in Biology and Chemistry Degrees?

The mathematical preparedness of science undergraduates has been a subject of debate for some time. This paper investigates the relationship between school mathematics attainment and degree outcomes in biology and chemistry across England, a much larger scale of analysis than has hitherto been reported in the literature. A unique dataset which links the National Pupil Database for England (NPD) and Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data is used to track the educational trajectories of a national cohort of 16-year olds through their school and degree programmes. Multilevel regression models indicate that students who completed advanced mathematics qualifications prior to their university study of biology and chemistry were no more likely to attain the best degree outcomes than those without advanced mathematics. The models do, however, suggest that success in advanced chemistry at school predicts outcomes in undergraduate biology and vice versa. There are important social background differences and the impact of the university attended is considerable. We discuss a range of possible explanations of these findings.