Unequal Partners: teachers under indirect rule

This paper argues for a historical analysis of the relationship between teachers and the state. The historical analysis demonstrates the ways in which strategies of teacher management shifted according to circumstances. In the first period, the 1920s, restrictions on teacher autonomy were removed, and ‘indirect rule’ used as a means of moving teachers away from the labour movement. In the second period, after the 1944 Act, a restricted ‘professional’ autonomy was encouraged. In both periods equality of status for teachers as ‘partners’ in the educational enterprise was offered in return for teachers’ acceptance of a limited or licensed professionalism. Current developments in the management of the teaching force suggest that the abandonment of indirect strategies of management may result in a return by teachers to less restricted ‘professional’ behaviour.     

Governing by inspection? European inspectorates and the creation of a European education policy space

This paper draws on the first, completed phase of a research project on inspection as governing in three European inspection systems. The data presented here draw attention to the rather under-researched associational activities of European inspectorates and their developing practices of policy learning and exchange, and highlight their significance as contributing to an emergent European Education Policy Space (EEPS). The paper is framed by original approaches to inspection that locate it as a set of governing practices, connected to changing governing forms and the growth of networks of relationships and flows of data across Europe. Comparisons are drawn between the relationships with Europe of inspectorates in Scotland, Sweden and England, drawing on Jacobsson's conceptualisation of regulative, inquisitive and meditative governance as a framing device.     

Godfrey Thomson and the rise of university pedagogical study: a recorded lecture delivered at the University of Edinburgh in November 1950 by Godfrey H. Thomson: a transcript with commentary

Professor Sir Godfrey Thomson is one of the key foundational actors in the history of the educational sciences in the UK. At a time when educational studies and the study of educational psychology were very closely linked, in the decades of the mid‐twentieth century, Thomson was a crucial figure in education research. He is known for his work on intelligence, factorial analysis and the validation and production of intelligence tests (the Moray House tests). However, he viewed himself as a teacher in his work as a professor at the University of Edinburgh and as director of Moray House teachers’ college. He managed closely an ambitious plan to develop an advanced school of education, combining the university department of education, teacher training and a demonstration school, and supervised and taught on many of its courses. This paper is based on a unique resource, an audio recording of Thomson teaching in the early 1950s. It considers the distinctiveness and the research value of this audio source in relation to complementary oral and documentary sources.     

Help will be welcomed from every quarter: the work of William Boyd and the Educational Institute of Scotland’s Research Committee in the 1920s

This paper discusses evidence, collected during an ESRC‐funded project (‘Reconstructing a Scottish School of Educational Research, 1925–1950’), of a remarkable vision to involve teachers in educational research in Scotland by the Educational Institute of Scotland in the 1920s through the work of its Research Committee. Led by William Boyd, the Committee thought that involvement in research was a crucial stepping stone towards achieving professional status for teachers. It conducted a number of detailed investigations involving teachers, thereby introducing research into the consciousness and practice of teachers. This paved the way for Scotland to make significant contributions to educational research on the international stage.     

The Idea of the Visiting Inquiry in Comparative Education: The 1903 Mosely Commission and the United States

Through a study of a privately funded and ambitious inquiry into the education system of the United States, the relations between the development of comparative education as an activity and the governing of education systems in the early 20th century can be illuminated. The relations and interests of early comparativists were mobilized and enhanced by private funding and significant numbers of public actors in education were involved in comparative inquiry. The 1903 Mosely Commission was a philanthropic intervention to reengineer the patchwork of English education, and an attempt to modernize it and influence its government on a large scale. Its innovation was in its methods of influence as well as its scientific reports. The Commission was a hybrid, transnational institution, using comparison to modernize the government of education, mainly involving policy actors and finally, claimed neither by the history or comparative study of education. Consequently, its significance has been lost.