This report builds on an evaluation of work undertaken by the Save the Children Fund, exploring previous experience of involving young people in research.

The Guyana Education Access Project (GEAP) is a large and complex five year project which has as its overall goal the provision of good quality secondary education for all children in two regions in Guyana, Corriverton (Region 10) and Linden (Region 6). The detailed project framework sets out the project’s objectives, inputs, activities and outputs. In addition, observable verifiable indicators have been clearly specified for all the projects key objectives.

A common failing of donor-funded education projects is that there is insufficient baseline information available that can be drawn upon at the end of the project in order to reach robust conclusions about project impacts in key areas. The GEAP project memorandum clearly stipulates therefore that a comprehensive baseline survey should be undertaken that will not only provide the basis for before- and after-project comparisons, but also can provide a valuable source of information for project monitoring.

The main purpose of this report is to: (i) identify a set of indicators which can be used to assess the performance of the project in five impact areas - access, community participation, school and regional management, teacher performance, and student learning. It was agreed that the two other key output areas specified in the project framework, namely improved infrastructure and project replication, should not be included in the baseline study; and (ii) present and, where appropriate, describe the baseline information that was collected and analysed in each of these five impact areas.

The history of counselling in schools is briefly outlined. Recent educational reforms have led to a fragmented approach which represents a return to the earlier view that counselling should be provided by outside specialists. This is particularly evident in relation to the issue of student exclusion from schools. It goes against the growing emphasis on the inclusion of students and on attention to the student voice in education. Counselling has an important part to play in enhancing both learning and effective schooling. Interviews with staff and students in two schools are drawn upon. It is argued that a polarisation of the cognitive and the personal/social is false and shortsighted.

This edited volume reviews the conflict between economic prescriptions for improved education in the developing world and local cultures. Among the issues reviewed are: conceptions of culture and economics in development and education literature, economic considerations of school systems to promote cultural goals, the differentiation of schools from other sites of cultural reproduction, learning experiences of various cultural groups, and the cross-cultural work of development agencies.

Many professions besides university teaching are subject to quality assurance and quality control procedures. This review of the main requirements affecting medicine, pharmacy, law, accountancy, architecture and structural engineering provides a taxonomy of different forms of quality maintenance and offers comparative material which may be of interest and relevance to academic readers.

The paper engages with target setting, one of the government's key priorities, from the standpoint, not of teachers, policy makers, parents or academics, but rather from the perspective of the very people who are the intended beneficiaries of policy, the students themselves. It challenges the dominance, not only of a particular approach to target setting, but also some of the fundamental assumptions on which current New Labour policy seems to be based.

Ten years ago the Seychelles Polytechnic initiated a joint teacher-training scheme with Sussex University and in five years trained 100 new Seychellois teachers for the secondary school system. This scheme a numerical balance in favour of Seychellois teachers for the first time. The influx of Seychellois teachers produced a number of immediate advantages: there was a saving in the salary budget, the new teachers were able to supplement their lessons conducted in English with explanations in Kreol, and they also used a wider variety of teaching methods. They were more committed to teaching and were much preferred by the secondary school students. This paper presents findings from evaluations of the scheme. It describes the situation produced by the returnees, and follows this up with an analysis of the major developments since the scheme came to an end and since the four-year government bonding period of teachers ended. The final section of the paper discusses in more general terms the sustainability of education development projects and the implications for the progressive improvement of schemes.

There is recurrent public concern with enhancing the quality of professional performance. What is the contemporary understanding of professionalism? Are the needs of professionals in various fields being met at the end of the 20th century, as what is commonly called "continuing professional development" has become of a sizable industry? Many books treat the professions as homogeneous groups and view them from an external standpoint. In "Professional Practices" Tony Becher investigates the differences as well as the similarities between and within professional groupings, and presents the perspectives of insiders. One particular theme concerns the main patterns of change in professional careers and the specific problems faced by women professionals in a largely male-dominated environment. The book focuses on six professions - medicine, pharmacy, law, accountancy, architecture and structural engineering. The material is based on 190 interviews with a variety of members of the six professions. Becher's book offers original and sensitive insight into the working lives of practitioners and an understanding of the ideas and values they embrace. He argues that their high sense of commitment stems from a concern to enhance their individual reputations and to maintain their collective professional status. Becher highlights the variety of activities in which these professionals are engaged and the reasons for their responses to social and political pressures from outside their fields. Above all, he seeks to demystify professionalism and to show that professional people share with others a wide range of universal human feelings and concerns. A postscript raises the issue of why universities are little involved with continuing education in the professions. Practising professionals should benefit from this insight into how people in their own and other professions cope with similar problems. Becher's volume should be particularly appealing to educationists, policymakers and social scientists interested in the subject of professionalism, those involved in the provision of initial and mid-career change for the professions, and those with a lay interest in the topic.

This paper focuses upon mathematics teachers' accounts of their professional life in their classrooms. As key social actors in this arena their assumptions about classroom interaction are key structuring devices for the prevailing classroom culture. By examining teachers' accounts of their work in the classroom, using data from two research projects concerned with school mathematics assessment, connections are made between classroom culture and formal assessment procedures. In England, over the last decade since the disruption of the Education Act 1988, there have been debates about teacher professionalism. The institution of a system of national testing and accountability measures has focused attention in these debates on the public dimensions, the outcomes of schooling. In the process, teachers' working relations with students have slipped into the background. In this paper, I turn my attention to these absences by exploring teachers' accounts of their work in assessing their students' mathematical capabilities within the classroom. By highlighting the complex social relations constitutive of classroom culture, I raise questions about the distanced professional position which teachers selectively appropriate in their accounts of students' assessments. I go on to explore the tensions between this position and the teachers' explicit recognition of the more personal interactions which influence both their classroom relations and consequently their judgements of students' achievements.

To date, few universities have become substantially involved in providing for the learning needs of professionals in mid-career. This paper argues the case for their doing so in the future. It begins with a review of the current provision of formal continuing professional development (CPD) – in which universities can be seen to perform only a limited role – and goes on to examine the attitudes of practitioners towards various forms of learning experience and their resulting interactions with the academic world. The reasons why such interactions are predominantly ad hoc and individualistic, rather than systematic and collective, are briefly considered before the opportunities for greater, more coherent mutual involvement are explored. The concluding section briefly reviews the policy decisions and organisational changes which appear to be needed before the full potentialities are realised.