The Open Book is a crowdsourced, multi-author publication published by the Finnish Institute in London that contextualises an international movement for open knowledge in the words of the communities who are helping build it. What are the aims and motivations of open knowledge advocates, and how do concepts like digital transparency, open access, open data, digital ethics and the commons impact society? With contributions across sustainability, design, business and development, The Open Book offers a platform for discussion, and a launching pad for new ideas about the future of a global open knowledge movement in a time of rapid technological and societal progress.

This paper describes the design of a tool to allow children to create their own Augmented Reality (AR) content as part of creative engagement with their local environment. We are exploring AR Maps (physical maps with augmented digital content) as a way of documenting children's experiences of their local area and encouraging their understanding and appreciation of objects and sites in their communities. We have piloted the approach with children in a local primary school, with positive feedback. However, children were not able to create the AR content themselves, and their physical artwork had to be scanned by researchers. In this paper we give an overview of the design context and describe the design and implementation of a tool to allow children to create their own 3D models for the AR environment by digitising their own artwork.

Spontaneous gestures produced during mathematics learning have been widely studied, however, research on the role of gesture in computing education is limited. This paper presents an investigation into children's use of spontaneous gestures when learning programming using either a tangible user interface (TUI) or a graphical user interface (GUI). The study explored the relationship between spontaneous gestures, interface type and learning outcomes in a programming lesson for primary school students aged 6-7. In the study, 34 participants engaged in a learning activity lasting approximately 37 minutes, using a TUI or a GUI. The study used a between-subjects design, and mixed methods. Pre-test and post-test data were collected, and sessions were video recorded and subsequently coded and analysed. A video analysis scheme, adapted from mathematics education research, was used to code the spontaneous gestures produced during the learning session. We found a statistically significant difference between the mean learning gains of high-frequency gesturers and low-frequency gesturers, with the top quartile showing significantly greater learning gains. There was no significant difference in the frequency of gestures between interface types. A qualitative analysis of representational gestures showed that some children use spontaneous hand gestures to demonstrate abstract computational concepts, providing evidence for the embodiment of children's offline thinking in the computing domain.

Background
In the UK , 2.3% of men and 1.6% of women identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB ). Of the UK population, 1% are estimated to identify as transgender (T). Of the LGB population, 46% do not disclose their sexual orientation to health care professionals (HCP s) and 18% of transgender patients avoid health care altogether. Non‐disclosure of sexual orientation and/or gender identity contributes to worse health outcomes for LGBT patients.

Objectives
This study aimed to explore medical students’ perceptions of the barriers to health care for LGBT patients and the importance of patient disclosure of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Methods
Focus groups included medical students across five year‐groups from a medical school in the South East of England. Discussions followed a pre‐approved topic guide with a primary and co‐facilitator present. Focus groups were audio‐recorded, transcribed verbatim and the data underwent framework analysis.

Results
Forty‐five undergraduate medical students participated (40% of whom were non‐heterosexual). Most participants believed that the incorrect use of pronouns and discrimination would be a cause for non‐disclosure of gender identity and sexual orientation to HCP s. Several participants thought it was more important to know a patient's gender identity than sexual orientation. Many participants felt that collecting sexual orientation information on healthcare registration forms is acceptable.

Discussion
More education regarding LGBT health needs and ways to encourage patient disclosure of sexual orientation or gender identity should be included in the undergraduate medical school curricula to increase the competency of future doctors when interacting with LGBT patients.

There is considerable interest in using tangible user interfaces (TUIs) to support teaching children programming, but evidence for the benefits is mixed, and their deployment in school environments presents more challenges than graphical user interfaces (GUIs). This study investigates the effect of GUIs and TUIs on learning outcomes, attitudes toward computing, and reported enjoyment in a computer-programming activity with primary-school students aged 6-7 in Saudi Arabia. Forty-two students engaged in a 45-minute learning activity using either a TUI or GUI programming environment. The study used a between-groups design, and quantitative data were collected, including pre-test and post-test results, and ratings on attitudinal and enjoyment surveys. Learning gains were significantly higher for the GUI group than the TUI group. However, post-activity increases in reported attitude toward computing were significantly higher for the TUI group. There was no difference in activity enjoyment scores, which were high for both groups.

Les évolutions rapides des technologies de l'information et de la communication (smartphones, tablettes, imprimantes 3D, microcontrôleurs, données librement partagées, etc.) représentent une opportunité pour améliorer les conditions d’apprentissage des personnes déficientes visuelles. En s'appuyant sur ces innovations, il est possible de proposer des dispositifs adaptés qui permettent de répondre aux besoins des professionnels de la déficience visuelle et de leurs élèves déficients visuels.

The principal aim of this article is to provide a historical overview of 25 years of competence policy in the European Union, highlighting connections between past and current initiatives and outlining possible scenarios for the decade to come. The article presents the social investment turn in social policy as the critical political background against which the emergence of a competence strategy in European Union education policy should be analysed and understood. The competence strategy, it is argued, finds its roots in a renewed attention at the European Union level for harmonising educational outputs and labour market demands. While trying to produce a schematic history of the emergence and change of the competence strategy, the article does not seek to offer strict definitions of competence itself; instead, it conveys the nebulous and context-dependent nature of the concept.

Can governments contract out the management of schools to private operators at scale? This paper estimates the effect of a school reform in Punjab, Pakistan, in which 4,276 poorly performing public primary schools (around 10 percent of the total) were contracted out to private operators in a single school year. These schools remain free to students and the private operator receives a per-student subsidy equivalent to less than half of spending in government schools. Using a difference-in-difference framework we estimate that enrolment in converted schools increased by over 60 percent. Converted schools see a slight decline in overall average test scores, but this may be a composition effect rather than a treatment effect. Schools with the same number or fewer students as in the previous year saw no change in average test scores.

Through an exploration of oral history and ethnographic material, this article makes a comparative examination of the life-trajectories of students from Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan who studied in Russia (Moscow) during the late 1980s, and from Tajikistan, Iran, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia who studied in China in the 2000s. In contrast to the cohort of students in Moscow who were mainly men from places with relatively amicable relations with the USSR, the female students of Muslim background from West and Central Asia regarded China as a place where they could pursue fulfilling forms of economic and personal autonomy. By comparing these two groups of international students, this article sheds light into the nature of historical, geographical and geopolitical connections and disconnections between West-Central Asia, Eurasia (especially Russia) and East Asia (especially China). By centring its attention to the demise of Soviet/Russian education and the emergence of China as a figure of economic prosperity, the article theorises West-Central Asia as a particular arena of interaction suitable to comprehend the networks, ‘third spaces’ or zones of interaction (e.g. Moscow and Yiwu), and forms of connection fostered by these students’ trajectories.

Teachers are central for learning, but their hiring and management can be influenced by political factors, especially when they are civil servants. Using an administrative school-level panel data set for India, we find significant increases in teacher transfers and moderate increases in hiring after state elections. The timing of these elections is pre-determined and staggered across states. The reorganization of teachers is partly related to political turnover. Pupils’ test scores are also up to 0.15 standard deviations lower in the post-election phase. Following a range of estimations for alternative explanations, we conclude that the reorganization of teachers can disrupt learning.

This paper situates sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university. Using data from a ‘composite ethnography’ representing twelve years of research, I argue that institutional inaction on these issues reflects how they are ‘reckoned up’ in the context of gender and other structures. The impact of disclosure is projected in market terms: this produces institutional airbrushing which protects both the institution and those (usually privileged men) whose welfare is bound up with its success. Staff and students are differentiated by power/value relations, which interact with gender and intersecting categories. Survivors are often left with few alternatives to speaking out in the ‘outrage economy’ of the corporate media: however, this can support institutional airbrushing and bolster punitive technologies. I propose the method of Grounded Action Inquiry, implemented with attention to Lorde’s work on anger, as a parrhesiastic practice of ‘speaking in’ to the neoliberal institution.

Since the 2015 launch of the Rockefeller Foundation Lancet Commission on planetary health,1 an enormous groundswell of interest in planetary health education has emerged across many disciplines, institutions, and geographical regions. Advancing these global efforts in planetary health education will equip the next generation of scholars to address crucial questions in this emerging field and support the development of a community of practice. To provide a foundation for the growing interest and efforts in this field, the Planetary Health Alliance has facilitated the first attempt to create a set of principles for planetary health education that intersect education at all levels, across all scales, and in all regions of the world—ie, a set of cross-cutting principles.

In Accelerating Academia: The Changing Structure of Academic Time, Filip Vostal examines how speed has become a key pressure within Higher Education through interviews with twenty academics based in the UK. While the empirical research could be broader, Luke Martell highly recommends the book for offering considered, inquiring reflections on the structures that are contributing to the acceleration of academic life.

Throughout West Africa, the Universal Education movement has prompted a greater insistence on reform in Koranic schools, especially in teaching. The pressure comes from above (governments, international donors and nongovernmental organizations) and below (teachers and students). Some Koranic teachers have made reforms while others strongly resist any form of change. The reasons for these opposed reactions remains poorly understood. Analyzing findings from ethnographic interviews conducted with two Koranic teachers in northern Senegal, this article argues for a micro-approach, one that examines the relationship between national- and international-level reforms and the actions of Koranic teachers anchored in local situations.

Background: Improving people’s knowledge, perceptions and attitudes of dementia is important in the formation of dementia-friendly communities. However, at present, there is very little evidence from adolescents, who are already the junior members of such communities and will be carers in their own rights in the future. Our aim was to evaluate adolescents’ knowledge and attitudes of dementia.

Methods: Four-hundred and fifty adolescents, aged 15–18 years, from schools in Sussex (UK) were invited to complete a series of questions that assessed their dementia knowledge and attitudes.

Results: A total of 359 adolescent students completed the questionnaire. Out of 15 questions on dementia knowledge, participants were on average able to answer less than half correctly (M = 6.65, standard deviation = 2.34). Responses to the attitudes questionnaire showed that adolescent students had both positive and negative attitudes toward dementia.

Discussion: There is scope for adolescents attending school to improve their dementia knowledge and attitudes. More effort is needed to embed initial dementia understanding in the school curriculum which will improve awareness about dementia at an earlier age and will enhance dementia-friendly communities.

Urban India is undergoing a rapid transformation, which also encompasses the educational sector. Since 1991, this important new market in private English-medium schools, along with an explosion of private coaching centres, has transformed the lives of children and their families, as the attainment of the best education nurtures the aspirations of a growing number of Indian citizens.

Set in urban Kerala, the book discusses changing educational landscapes in the South Indian city of Kochi, a local hub for trade, tourism, and cosmopolitan middle-class lifestyles. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the author examines the way education features as a major way the transformation of the city, and India in general, are experienced and envisaged by upwardly-mobile residents. Schooling is shown to play a major role in urban lifestyles, with increased privatisation representing a response to the educational strategies of a growing and heterogeneous middle class, whose educational choices reflect broader projects of class formation within the context of religious and caste diversity particular to the region.

This path-breaking new study of a changing Indian middle class and new relationships with educational institutions contributes to the growing body of work on the experiences and meanings of schooling for youths, their parents, and the wider community and thereby adds a unique, anthropologically informed, perspective to South Asian studies, urban studies and the study of education.

In this paper we developed and validated the Academic Adjustment Scale (AAS) – a new scale for measuring academic adjustment, which was developed with a focus on student sojourners who temporarily relocate to a new culture for the purpose of tertiary education, but also is validated for use with local students. Exploratory factor analysis (Study 1) demonstrated that the AAS comprises 9-items that highly and accurately factor onto the three hypothesized subscales: academic lifestyle, academic achievement, and academic motivation. We controlled for acquiescent response styles, and then verified the structure using Confirmatory Factor Analyses (Studies 1–2). Evidence of the validity (convergent, discriminant, criterion, known-groups, and face validities; Study 2), and evidence of reliability (internal consistency: Studies 1–3; test-retest reliability: Study 3) suggest stable psychometric properties for this new measure. In summary, we provide evidence for the validity and reliability of the AAS in permanent resident and student sojourner samples, and present self-report findings.

This paper investigates the emergence of ‘internationalised’ schools as a form of middle-class aspiration in Kochi, India. It complements recent literature on the growth of international schools catering for host country elites, and shows how private schools are actively engaged in extending the aspiration for internationalised education among the city’s middle classes. The article shows how internationalised schooling has penetrated beyond Indian metropoles into secondary cities. It provides a detailed ethnographic account of how a private school has rebranded itself as an ‘internationalised’ school, involving the introduction of new practices and the repackaging of the school’s old nationalist project.

This paper outlines the state of the art in qualitative longitudinal methodology, reflecting on more than 10 years of development since a previous special issue on QLR was published by the International Journal of Social Research Methodology in 2003. The papers presented in this special issue emerge from a methodological innovation network that brought together an international community of researchers in order to map new frontiers for the method. This paper summarises the development of the method from a design to a sensibility, identifying three new frontiers as part of a future research agenda including: the need for a processual imaginary; experimentation with temporal perspectives and orientations and explicating the temporal affordances of our methods.

This research, linked to the South Asia Global Education Dialogue series, looks at the role of women in South Asia in respect to higher education and leadership. The research sought out existing knowledge and baseline data from the literature, policies, change interventions, available statistics and interviews across six countries in South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka).

From this research, recommendations about what specific future actions and interventions for change could be implemented in South Asia have been made.

By looking at an episode of censorship of a student’s artwork dealing with explicit visualizations and naming of sex, this article discusses the relationship between austerity measures and the spread of litigation culture in current academic life. My aim is not to defend the artwork, but to understand how the institutional ‘straight mind’, operating for the health of public morality, may become a threat to the safety of art teaching in times of austerity. Jacques Rancière’s elaborations on the stultification of contemporary culture will provide a theoretical framework to show how litigation culture is an effect of austerity measures, which, by pre-empting any space for intellectual disagreement, may erode the relationship between education and citizenship.

This on-going piece of research seeks to identify what music teachers, performers and students from high school through to university understand by the word spirituality in relation to music. From this it is hoped to be able to look at the relevance of the term spirituality in the music classroom. In this paper, data are presented from qualitative research gained in the form of interviews with 37 respondents and four focus groups of children, and quantitative research from questionnaires completed by 38 trainee music teachers. From these data, we identified five themes relating to the respondents’ understanding of the term ‘spirituality’ in relation to music. These were: to what extent spirituality is seen as a religious concept; whether spirituality is an inner or outer experience; to what extent words are relevant to spiritual experiences; the role that knowledge and emotion play and whether musicians experience a sense of spirituality more when listening or performing. From these data we go on to identify implications for the music classroom.

The research reported here was commissioned by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s to inform the second year of their on-going School Exclusions Inquiry. The first year of the inquiry culminated in the publication of the report They Never Give Up On You which included an analysis of recent national data on recorded exclusions from school that provided stark evidence of inequality for particular groups. Concerns about the disproportionate impact of school exclusion on specific groups of young people are not new and there have previously been attempts at policy level to reduce inequalities. However, the relationship between exclusion and other educational and social processes is complex and these inequalities persist. The over-arching objective of the research was therefore to identify characteristics of good practice in addressing inequalities in school exclusions, with particular attention to the following factors: Free School Meals; gender; ethnicity; and Special Educational Needs (SEN).

One of the most significant issues to emerge in relation to retention is the number of young people who find the transition to HE difficult and think of leaving, far more than actually do so. As this is often linked to academic factors such as a poor initial choice of course, information, advice and guidance work undertaken at the pre-entry stage has the potential to reduce this risk.
The literature explored in this synthesis highlights the diversity of young people entering HE and the importance of developing cross-phase partnerships so that work to support transition can begin at the pre-entry stage. This is particularly important for disabled students who require early induction into the support that is available.
A number of studies in the archive describe interventions carried out at the pre-entry stage that have eased the social transition to university. These have made use of such things as peer mentoring and social networking sites to engender a sense of „belonging.‟
Although a great deal of work has been undertaken at the pre-entry stage and these interventions have specifically targeted young people belonging to those groups most likely to benefit from a focus on retention and success, further research is needed to evidence the impact of this work.
HEIs need to have in place on-going processes of institutional monitoring that encourage critical self-reflection and develop nuanced understandings of the diversity of the student population, with a view to embedding these understandings in institutional policies and practices.
The current policy interest in fair access and social mobility needs to reflect an awareness of the different routes into HE, with concerns over limited opportunities for progression framed in ways that more fully reflect the diversity of the student population and a wider range of goals and outcomes.

There has been an increase in the number of children going to school in England who do not speak English as a first language. We investigate whether this has an impact on the educational outcomes of native English speakers at the end of primary school. We show that the negative correlation observed in the raw data is mainly an artefact of selection: non-native speakers are more likely to attend school with disadvantaged native speakers. We attempt to identify a causal impact of changes in the percentage of non-native speakers. Our results suggest zero effect and rule out negative effects.

The origins of modern schooling in early nineteenth-century Africa have been poorly researched. Moreover, histories of education in Africa have focused largely on the education of boys. Little attention has been paid to girls’ schooling or to the missionary women who sought to construct a new feminine Christian identity for African girls. In the absence of personal accounts of African girls’ schooling from that period, this paper draws on a slim body of 71 letters written by women and girls associated with one British mission society in Sierra Leone between 1804 and 1826 to suggest a fluid and at times contradictory construction of gender and racial identity, which sits at odds with the ideology of domestic femininity that the missionaries sought to impart through girls’ schooling. The handful of letters written by African women and girls also casts doubt on the assumed subservience of black subjects to white officialdom.

This paper draws on Anglican mission archive material to uncover the extent to which girls’ schooling in early nineteenth‐century West Africa developed as a response to male interests and perceived male needs. The founding of the colony of Sierra Leone in 1787 as a home for freed slaves followed by the arrival of Protestant missionaries in 1804 offers a laboratory type environment to trace the development of girls’ formal schooling in Africa. In particular, the missionaries understood the importance of educating women if Christianity was to prosper on the continent. Girls were to be educated to take their place in the new Christian monogamous family, to provide moral and practical support for men, and to bring up their children in the new faith. They were to be taught separately from boys where possible, by female teachers and with a differentiated curriculum dominated by sewing. Educational opportunities were expanded only insofar as women needed to provide fitting and accomplished marriage companions for educated men seeking to advance their careers in the new meritocratic society.

This article reports on a small exploratory study of adolescent girls' experiences of sexual harassment and abuse while attending secondary school in Karnataka State, South India. In South Asia, public discussion of sexual matters, especially relating to children, is largely taboo, and the study uncovers a hidden aspect of schooling, which presents a further barrier to increasing girls' educational participation in India. Data from open-ended interviews and a participatory workshop in two schools revealed that girls were vulnerable to sexual harassment both within the school grounds (mostly by male pupils) and while travelling to and from school (by older boys and adult men), especially on public transport. For some girls, sexual harassment reduced their desire to continue their schooling, for others it increased their fear of being withdrawn if parents came to hear of any incident. Given the reluctance in patriarchal societies to address the abuse and exploitation of women and girls, the authors suggest that further research into this issue is urgently needed.

This book considers these issues by reviewing selected large-scale interventions to improve education quality in South African schools. These interventions include the District Development Support Programme (DDSP), the Education Quality Improvement Partnership Programme (EQUIP), the IMBEWU programme, the Integrated Education Program (IEP), the Khanyisa School Programme, the Learning for Living (LFL) Project, and the Quality Learning Project (QLP). It locates these interventions by providing a chronology of education policy development in South Africa since 1994 as well as engaging with key debates about the notion of education quality. Furthermore, it invites policy-makers to critically review and reflect on the changes to improve education quality in South Africa since 1994. By bringing together academics, policy-makers and practitioners to reflect on education development the book sheds light on the continuous but elusive search for quality education for all. In so doing, the book provides a basis for a critical conversation about the history of education change in post-apartheid South Africa, and the implications for interventions aimed at improving education quality.

The Supportive School tackles some important contemporary issues of interest to teachers, parents and policy-makers alike. There is a widespread perception across the developed world that the social and emotional wellbeing of young people has been in decline in recent years and that various problem behaviours are on the rise. Because children spend so much of their time in educational institutions, schools are assumed to be part of the problem. But how precisely do schools affect young adolescents’ wellbeing? This book aims to answer that question.

The book brings together for the first time the results of over 300 research studies, both from the UK and further afield. It identifies the key factors related to schooling which impact upon young people’s development and affect their wellbeing. These include: the extent to which they feel ‘connected’ with school, their relationships with teachers and with their peers, their sense of the school as a learning community, and the ways in which they respond to the pressures of academic work. What matters is how schools bring these elements together to create a strong ‘culture of support’.

The Supportive School documents how schools handle young people, particularly at the key transition point from primary to secondary school, as well as the ways in which they respond to their pastoral and other concerns. It also places the UK’s much-criticised ‘performance’ on wellbeing issues in an international context and asks challenging questions about how far the UK is lagging behind.

Schools are currently under considerable pressure to give greater attention to issues of wellbeing. The overriding message from The Supportive School is that how schools approach these issues can make a difference to young people’s lives and emotional wellbeing.

This compelling study, comprising of a sample of eight schools in three countries in sub-Saharan Africa – Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania – examines the sources, contents and processes of children´s community-based sexual knowledges and asks how these knowledges interact with AIDS education programmes in school. Old enough to know showcases the possibilities of consulting pupils using engaging, interactive and visual methods including digital still photography, mini-video documentaries, as well as interviews and observations. These innovative methods allow children to speak freely and openly in contexts where talking about sex to adults is a cultural taboo

Learning is generally viewed as a positive process bringing benefits to the individual, leading to growth and self development. But is this always the case? This paper draws on empirical research with refugees and considers the processes of transforming experience and learning which accompanies transition to life in the UK. I will argue for the importance of social context and non formal learning, and suggest that models and theories based on transformative learning which ignore context, provide only a partial and distorted picture of the learning and identity processes at work for this particular group of immigrants. There is a complexity and depth to the learning which they experience which calls for an enlarged concept of learning and its potential outcomes.

Twelve years ago, the British educational press, and indeed the mainstream media, were consumed by the story of Laura Spence, a super-bright pupil from a Newcastle comprehensive school who, despite having five straight-As at ‘A level’ (the final secondary school exams), had been refused a place to read Medicine at Oxford after an interview there. General outrage at Oxford’s snobbishness ensued, with politician Gordon Brown, amongst others, weighing in with the criticism that Oxford favored applicants from the UK’s fee-paying independent schools (which include the elite but perversely named ‘public schools’), thereby excluding excellent applicants from state schools like Laura – especially if they come from deprived parts of the country with strong local accents. Laura instead went to the US to Harvard on a funded scholarship, completed her biochemistry degree there and returned to do postgraduate medical training at Cambridge – the other UK university which constitutes the top duo known collectively as ‘Oxbridge’.

How typical is Laura’s story? Are there many British students who, as Oxbridge ‘rejects’, or fearful of being turned down for a place at the UK’s two most ancient and prestigious universities, apply abroad to widen their chances of success at other globally recognized institutions? Brooks and Waters (2009a) argue that there are indeed those like Laura who apply to US universities as a ‘second chance at success’; but our research suggests that there are many other explanations of the upward trend in favor of international study. Since the US is the most important destination for people from the UK studying abroad, the findings of this chapter are particularly important in producing a more robust understanding of the key drivers of international student mobility between one advanced economy and another. We suggest that there are some movers for whom study abroad is part of a carefully strategized plan of international career enhancement, while for others it is a product of their class habitus and family networks (see Bourdieu 1977). We would also argue that there are those who are looking for ‘something different’ yet, at the same time, desire a ‘knowable’ destination, familiar to them for example from film and television and without any great linguistic challenge.

In the next section we describe our research project and its aims and methods. The main body of the chapter is made up of three sections which correspond to our three key research questions: about motivations for study in the US, about experiences there, and about future career plans. The conclusion emphasises the motivational and strategic nature of UK student migration to the US, targeted especially at universities perceived to be of high international standing. In terms of the link between study abroad and future career plans, fears about a putative British ‘brain drain’ are shown to be largely unfounded, since most students plan to return to the UK.

The ideas outlined in this chapter build on and extend those presented in Hudson (2008). This exploration of differences offers a new dimension and fresh insights into the notion of reflective practice. Particular attention has been paid to the tradition of Critical Constructive Didaktik as outlined in Hudson (2003) which is in particular based on the work of Klafki (1995; 1998 and 2000), and to the notion of Didaktik Analysis (Klafki 2000, first ed. 1958) for both the development of professional practice and for the purposes of educational research. I have subsequently applied this approach to thinking about the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support learning and teaching. The focus is on the design of teaching situations, pedagogical activities and learning environments which aims to address the what, why and how of ICT use in relation to the learner, technology and specific content selected from the wider societal and cultural context. During this developmental process the question of design has emerged as a central issue for attention. Accordingly, the discussion in this paper focuses on the nature of design, the conception of teaching as a design profession, and subject didactics as design science. It also describes didactical design for technology enhanced learning as a generic field of didactics which is applicable across the range of specific subject didactics. The role of research in relation to the didactical design process is discussed over a range of levels from the macro to the micro level involving a consideration of its role at the course or curriculum level. These ideas form the basis of an Integrative Didactical Design framework and an example is presented of the application of this philosophy, an approach to the research and development of technology enhanced learning in the field of Teacher Education at a national level in Sweden

This chapter begins with an outline of the European context within which the twenty six research papers presented in this book emerged. A particularly important aspect of this context is Network 27 on Didactics, Learning and Teaching of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) which formed the core of the research community in which this work was developed over a five year period (2006-11). The next part of the chapter provides an overview of the six sections which make up the structure of the book as a whole. A discussion then follows of the clear continental divide with respect to didactics, learning and teaching in the European landscape which is based on the references used by the contributors to this book. This leads to a consideration of the historical origin of present-day didactics which can be traced back to a common heritage in the work of Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670) in order to provide a platform in the search for common ground. In the section which then follows there is a discussion of the didactic triad as a tool for holding the complexity of teaching-studying-learning situations and this is considered in an expanded context in which classroom interaction in the school is placed within a wider societal context. Based on a review of the contributions to this book, the final parts of this chapter consider existing knowledge gaps between different national traditions and also identify themes that form the basis for building and extending common ground. The themes that have been identified through this process of synthesis relate to pedagogical content knowledge, learner knowledge, joint didactical action, curriculum research, the so called shift from teaching to learning, the philosophy of Bildung and its practical implications, links between theory and practice and the significant role of experimental schools. Finally these themes are proposed for consideration within the wider research, policy and practice community as the basis for future international co-operation that offer the potential to advance mutual understanding and common insights in this field

The landscape of higher education has undergone change and transformation in recent years, partly as a result of diversification and massification. However, persistent patterns of under-representation continue to perplex policy-makers and practitioners, raising questions about current strategies, policies and approaches to widening participation. Presenting a comprehensive review and critique of contemporary widening participation policy and practice, Penny Burke interrogates the underpinning assumptions, values and perspectives shaping current concepts and understandings of widening participation. She draws on a range of perspectives within the field of the sociology of education - including feminist post-structuralism, critical pedagogy and policy sociology - to examine the ways in which wider societal inequalities and misrecognitions, which are related to difference and diversity, present particular challenges for the project to widen participation in higher education. In particular, the book: - focuses on the themes of difference and diversity to shed light on the operations of inequalities and the politics of access and participation both in terms of national and institutional policy and at the level of student and practitioner experience. - draws on the insights of the sociology of education to consider not only the patterns of under-representation in higher education but also the politics of mis-representation, critiquing key discourses of widening participation. - interrogates assumptions behind WP policy and discourse, including assumptions about education as an unassailable good and critically reflecting on what is meant by educational participation.

In this article, we examine the policy and practice of admissions to art and design courses in the context of the UK widening participation (WP) agenda. We draw on our qualitative study of admissions practices funded by the National Arts Learning Network (NALN). To provide context and background, we outline and critique WP policy discourses, focusing on issues of admissions and access, followed by an analysis of our research data, drawing on the conceptual tools of subjectivity and misrecognition. In using this analytical approach, we attempt to expose the subtle and insidious workings of inequality and exclusion in processes of selection. We argue that admissions policy problematically conflates notions of ‘fairness’ and ‘transparency’ and fails to address complex socio-cultural inequalities in processes of recognition of the potential student-subject of art and design. We show how a focus on individual practices rather than on policy discourses and processes of subjective construction helps to hide the ways that ‘potential’ is constructed in ways that privilege and recognize particular student subjectivities, whilst excluding others

This resource serves as a means of sharing good practice across schools and as a continuing professional development tool for teachers.

It will support the national PSHE continuing professional development programme and teachers participating in the Blueprint Research Programme.

The pack consists of a DVD and supporting printed material. It has been jointly funded by DfES and the Home Office and will prove to be useful to PSHE leads in schools, PSHE Certification courses, teachers as well as LEA advisers.

The way in which schools respond to 'difference' and bullying of children and young people with disabilities or special educational needs can significantly shape children's experiences. This book offers schools ideas for dealing with bullying and aims to set the agenda for the future.

Perspectives on Bullying and Difference gives voice to parents, carers and young people and offers a snapshot of how schools, teachers, local authorities and other professionals try to deal with the problem of SEN and disability bullying. It looks at several schools that are developing their own initiatives and includes:
•a consideration of the benefits and implications of a wide variety of anti-bullying practices
•a number of in-depth case studies, highlighting where practices have been used to good effect
•a discussion of teachers' evaluation of the effectiveness of interventions
•school policy and practice recommendations
•the first steps towards a research programme to evaluate effectiveness and demonstrate how well approaches work.

Based on the findings of a project undertaken by the Anti-Bullying Alliance and the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education this book integrates stories from parents, carers, young people and practitioners with research findings. Bringing these multiple perspectives together for the first time is compelling.

Perspectives on Bullying and Difference shows there is a great deal that can be done in schools right now to reduce the levels of bullying - solutions are closer than we may think. It is a must read for everyone involved in education.

This reader provides a critical perspective on work with children and young people at a time of change. Written by experts with a wide range of academic and professional experience, it examines the ways that ideas inform practice, explores recent changes in the organisation of services, especially moves towards greater integration, and explores what it means to be a critical, reflective practitioner. Covering the whole age range from early years to youth, the book will be relevant to anyone working with children and young people, for example in social work, education, healthcare, youth work, youth justice and leisure services

Despite its “economic miracle” and robust growth for more than a decade, Colombia continues to struggle to overcome social and economic disparities. Third largest country in Latin America in terms of population and fifth largest in terms of area, Colombia is rich in natural resources, but has not created enough jobs for its 46 million strong population. It lags behind Mexico, Chile and Brazil in terms of human capital development, economic diversification, innovation and productivity. In 2010, depending on the definition, up to half of the population (49.5%) lived in poverty. Sustained growth and development are necessary for improving the quality of life of the population, particularly those from lower socio-economic and rural backgrounds. The central government is committed to long term reform to modernise the economy and to expand participation in education at all levels through the “Education Revolution”.

This study explored the ways in which schools addressed the needs of pupils in low-attainment class groups, or sets, in the context of multiple and contrary government policy directives and inconclusive research findings about setting. In this article we have focused on school and classroom practices as well as the organisational processes through which low-attaining pupils were identified, grouped and reviewed within schools. The empirical data reported here predominantly refer to case studies involving classroom observations and interviews with teachers, pupils and other staff in 13 schools – both primary and secondary – from four local authorities (LAs).

In the latter part of the article, however, we also draw on survey data collected from a larger sample of schools in 12 LAs in England. Although the study found ample evidence of innovative school practices and efforts by individual teachers aimed at optimising the learning opportunities for children in low-attainment class groups, the findings also raise important questions about some of the processes of set allocation, the lack of mobility between sets, and the over-representation of particular social groups in low-attainment classes. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for equity and inclusion that moves beyond an emphasis on classroom practice to include questions about the in-school processes of social selection and educational mobility for pupils identified as low-attaining.

Cultural theorists have illuminated how photographic images contribute to autobiographical remembering and identity formation. This has new significance given that digital photography now allows personal images to circulate rapidly amongst peer groups. Taking these insights into classroom contexts, this paper draws on recent case-study data to explore a teacher’s use of digital photography to provide ‘feedback’ to pupils. Critiquing dominant psychological understandings of classroom assessment for their lack of recognition of power relations, it takes up post-structuralist theories of discourse, embodiment and affect to consider how these digital photographs became ‘sticky’ with memories of peer derision, ‘mortifying’ pupils and marking them as ‘other’ in ways that were intensified through later display to the class. Thus, rather than providing benign support for learning, the circulation of these images as part of feedback processes in this classroom context seems to have functioned as a powerful technology of individualization and normalization.

Review of:
Ecclestone, K., Davies, J., Derrick, J., Gawn, J., Transforming Formative Assessment in Lifelong Learning. Maidenhead: McGraw Hill and Open University Press, 2010. 248pp. ISBN: 9780335236541.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to explore the role and importance of numeracy skills in graduate recruitment within a diversity of employment sectors.

Design/methodology/approach – The results of a mixed-methods study, involving three online surveys (including an employer survey), student focus group sessions and interviews with tutors, are presented.

Findings – The results reveal the importance that employers attach to graduates’ numeracy skills and the extent to which employers use numeracy tests in graduate recruitment. They thus highlight the potential for poor numeracy skills to limit any graduate's acquisition of employment, irrespective of their degree subject; especially since numeracy tests are used predominantly in recruitment to the types of jobs commensurate with graduates’ career aspirations and within sectors that attract graduates from across the diversity of academic disciplines, including the arts and humanities.

Research limitations/implications – Since participants were self-selecting any conclusions and inferences relate to the samples and may or may not be generalisable to wider target populations.

Practical implications – The paper highlights what actions are necessary to enhance undergraduates’ numeracy skills in the context of graduate employability.

Social implications – The vulnerability of particular groups of students (e.g. females, those not provided with any opportunities to practise or further develop their numeracy skills whilst in higher education, those with no (or low) pre-university mathematics qualifications, and mature students) is highlighted.

Originality/value – The article is timely in view of national policy to extend the graduate employability performance indicators within quality assurance measures for UK higher education

This article questions Angela McRobbie's recent text The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change because it creates some interesting new vocabulary for understanding late modernity's revised sexual and cultural politics. Whilst acknowledging the sophistication of its cultural studies-inspired argument, I consider some consequences of this reading. If theory also performs as a politics of representation, I ask what happens if, in accounting for post-feminism, the theoretical status of class as an antagonistic relation is diminished. I suggest what gender and education discourses can add to a reading of 'new times'.

Although a great deal of previous literature has explored the ways in which social class affects parental engagement in educational processes, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the way in which social class shapes the parent–professional interaction that occurs in school exclusion processes specifically. School exclusion processes are complex and those parents who become involved in them have to negotiate not only the formal processes that surround the use of permanent and fixed-term exclusion but also the less well-regulated and increasingly favoured processes that are associated with the use of alternatives to exclusion from school. This paper draws on the perspectives of professionals working in a wide variety of roles and contexts in one local authority in England and on those of a small number of mothers of children with longer and more complex histories of involvement in school exclusion processes. It argues for greater recognition of the impact of social class on parent–professional interaction in school exclusion processes because of the way in which it helps to perpetuate an intergenerational cycle of social and educational disadvantage.

Comparative research undertaken by the Thomas Coram Research Unit found that social workers in England have more responsibility and a wider remit than many of their continental European counterparts.

Social workers in England have responsibility for all aspects of case management and direct contact with families, but in much of continental Europe these responsibilities are split between several different highly-trained professionals.

In England, most direct work with children and families is undertaken by support staff, many of whom have no specialist qualifications. In Denmark, Germany and France, most of this work is undertaken by professionals highly qualified in therapeutic and direct work, working alongside social workers.

The report’s authors, Dr Janet Boddy and Professor June Statham, called for a fundamental reassessment of what social workers can and should be expected to do.

El autor subraya algunas dudas sobre el coste, la efectividad y los impactos educativos de los programas 1:1 (un ordenador para cada alumno), que durante la última década se han implantado en diversos países. Y sugiere las características que deberían reunir para que implicasen mejoras sustanciales en la calidad educativa.

During the last decade, increasingly more public and private
actors, in both developed or developing countries, have supported initiatives 1:1 in education (a computer for each student). This initiatives represent a qualitative leap from the prior educative experiences with the information and communication technologies (TIC), because each child
has access to a personal device, normally portable, mini laptops or mobile devices. The document tries to systematize the most outstanding evidence about such initiatives from the official web sites, program valuations and academic meta-evaluations. Includes information about the expectations of these policies, the designs of the programs and the challenges for an effective implementation of the model 1:1. Due to the limited evidence available, the document emphasizes some doubts, without response,about effectiveness-cost and educational impacts that these programs have in education.

This empirical study explores factors influencing undergraduates’ self-evaluation of their numerical competence, using data from an online survey completed by 566 undergraduates from a diversity of academic disciplines, across all four faculties at a post-1992 UK university. Analysis of the data, which included correlation and multiple regression analyses, revealed that undergraduates exhibiting greater confidence in their mathematical and numeracy skills, as evidenced by their higher self-evaluation scores and their higher scores on the confidence sub-scale contributing to the measurement of attitude, possess more cohesive, rather than fragmented, conceptions of mathematics, and display more positive attitudes towards mathematics/numeracy. They also exhibit lower levels of mathematics anxiety. Students exhibiting greater confidence also tended to be those who were relatively young (i.e. 18–29 years), whose degree programmes provided them with opportunities to practise and further develop their numeracy skills, and who possessed higher pre-university mathematics qualifications. The multiple regression analysis revealed two positive predictors (overall attitude towards mathematics/numeracy and possession of a higher pre-university mathematics qualification) and five negative predictors (mathematics anxiety, lack of opportunity to practise/develop numeracy skills, being a more mature student, being enrolled in Health and Social Care compared with Science and Technology, and possessing no formal mathematics/numeracy qualification compared with a General Certificate of Secondary Education or equivalent qualification) accounted for approximately 64% of the variation in students’ perceptions of their numerical competence. Although the results initially suggested that male students were significantly more confident than females, one compounding variable was almost certainly the students’ highest pre-university mathematics or numeracy qualification, since a higher percentage of males (24%) compared to females (15%) possessed an Advanced Subsidiary or A2 qualification (or equivalent) in mathematics. Of particular concern is the fact that undergraduates based in Health and Social Care expressed significantly less confidence in their numeracy skills than students from any of the other three faculties.

Over recent years, universities have prioritised the need to enhance the employability of their graduates. Initiatives aimed at achieving this have become embedded within institutions’ learning and teaching strategies and supporting policy documents. While the list of skills that employers desire of their graduate recruits is extensive, many employers highlight the importance of numeracy skills. For example, 500 members of the Institute of Directors (IoD) ranked ‘numeracy skills’ as the sixth most important out of a list of twenty-eight employability skills, and 98% of respondents considered them to be ‘very’ or ‘quite’ important.

Until relatively recently, educational research in developing countries has focused mainly on issues of access for addressing gender inequalities in education. This paper argues that challenging patriarchal relations in schooling and education requires moving beyond access to understanding the ways the curriculum acts as a set of discursive practices which position girls and boys unequally and differently constitute them as gendered and nationalised/ist subjects. Using curriculum texts from Pakistan, the paper explores how gender and national identities intersect in a dynamic way in the processes of schooling. The paper illustrates the ideological power of both curriculum and school experiences in fashioning the reciprocal performance and construction of gender and national identities in Pakistan. It contends that in its current form, education is a means of maintaining, reproducing and reinforcing the gender hierarchies that characterise Pakistan.

This paper presents an exploration of the way Pakistani national identity is represented in the education policy, curriculum and textbooks, revealing that religion, Islam, is used as the chief marker that forms the boundary between Pakistanis and the ‘other’. Imagining Pakistani nation through Islam helps forge unity among diverse ethnic and linguistic groups comprising Pakistan. At the same time this singular national identity serves as an instrument of denial of diversity and internal difference. Furthermore, the overwhelming association of Islamic with Pakistani identity creates tensions and contradictions between the religious and national identity of Pakistanis. The paper starts with a review of current education policy, the grade V curriculum documents and textbooks and then turns to focus on the impact of the curriculum on students’ perceptions of their national identity. The curriculum analysis is organised around two key themes: Religion, Islam, as a key identifier of Pakistani identity and the tensions and contradictions between Muslim nationhood and Pakistani nationhood. The empirical study reported here explores how curriculum texts construct Pakistani identity and the ways in which students understood and described themselves as Pakistani.The data was collected over a period of five months in which four primary state schools in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), two girls’ and two boys’ schools, one each in a rural and an urban setting, were studied intensively. Within each primary school, class V students’ views were captured through single sex focus groups. The research illustrates the ideological power of the curriculum and school experiences in constructing identities, creating belonging and imagining the nation.

In many countries choice of school is an increasing concern for families and governments. In Spain and Chile, it is also associated with a long‐standing political cleavage on the regulation of large sectors of private‐dependent schools. This article analyses both the micro‐ and the macro‐politics of choice in these two countries, where low‐status 15‐year‐old students record a significant segregation. At the micro level, some evidence is provided that not only middle‐class skilful choosers but also the political representatives of private‐dependent schools manage to pursue their interests drawing on economic, social and cultural capital. At the macro level, evidence also shows that the lobbies defending private‐dependent schools can use and maintain these power resources. However, in some episodes collective action is an effective power resource for those who campaign in favour of a stricter regulation of these schools, but its influence is much difficult to maintain for longer periods.

El presente estudio es una aportación a la literatura pedagógica actual sobre las desigualdades educativas. Analizamos las diferencias de resultados entre las diez CCAA que participaron con muestra ampliada en la edición 2006 de PISA. Los resultados muestran que un proyecto como PISA, cuya primera intención era mejorar las políticas educativas de los estados-nación, permite también desvelar las diferencias educativas internas de los países. En el caso de España, este estudio evidencia que a pesar de compartir un marco normativo común, las políticas educativas autonómicas así como ciertos factores contextuales pueden producir resultados educativos bien distintos.

School choice policies in Catalonia, as well in Spain and some countries in continental Europe, lie in public funding of private dependent schools (i.e. concerted schools in Spain). The paper analyses the evolution of school segregation of immigrant students in Catalonia, from 2001 to 2006; and the influence of the concerted sector in its evolution. The Catalan education system shows high unevenness (D) and isolation (I) in the schooling of immigrant students from 2001 to 2006. Enrollment in private dependent schools is only one of the causes of school segregation in Catalonia. The role of the private dependent sector, with regard to the schooling of immigrant students, varies largely across municipalities. However, not only between sectors segregation is important. Unevenness between public schools, within some municipalities, it is strongly associated with the isolation of immigrant students.

L’article introdueix un marc conceptual per a l’anàlisi de la relació entre les polítiques d’elecció de centre i la segregació escolar. Es defensa la presa en consideració dels factors de segregació escolar com l’element clau per entendre els diferents efectes d’aquestes polítiques segons el context d’implementació. El document recull característiques estructurals i mesures de segregació en l’educació secundària de quinze sistemes educatius europeus. L’evidència empírica presentada apunta als itineraris escolars com el factor més important de segregació. La matrícula en la xarxa privada dependent mostra efectes diferents segons el país. L’anàlisi específica dels sistemes educatius europeus amb major presència del sector privat (model continental d’elecció), fa pensar que les diferències entre aquests països es deuen als diferents marcs reguladors de l’activitat d’aquests centres i a la desigual protecció de la xarxa pública.

Over the last decade, more and more public and private stakeholders, in developed and developing
countries, have been supporting 1:1 initiatives in education (i.e. every child receives her/his own personal
computing device). These 1:1 initiatives represent a qualitative move forward from previous educational
experiences with ICT, inasmuch as every child is equipped with ubiquitous access to a personal device
(usually laptops, netbooks or handhelds). The paper tries to systematise the most salient evidence about 1:1
initiatives in education drawing on official websites, program evaluations and academic meta-reviews.
Information is provided about the policy expectations, program designs and the challenges for an effective
implementation of 1:1 initiatives in education. Given the limited body of evidence, the paper raises
unsolved questions about the cost-effectiveness and educational impacts of 1:1 computing in education.

La educación puede ser una poderosa herramienta para luchar contra la pobreza y la desigualdad. Pero, ¿es posible educar en cualquier contexto?, ¿es siempre la educación una vía para la inserción socio-laboral?, ¿qué condiciones se requieren para que las prácticas educativas se puedan desarrollar con unas mínimas garantías de éxito?
Para responder a éstas preguntas es imprescindible atender
a la complejidad de las relaciones entre educación y pobreza.
Y ello requiere, entre otras cosas, invertir el orden de la ecuación, para preguntarse por los efectos que genera la pobreza sobre la educación.

Ser pobre en la escuela explora precisamente las condiciones de pobreza de los niños y niñas que habitan en entornos de favela para observar cómo afectan al desarrollo de su experiencia educativa. El libro recoge el testimonio de alumnos, familias y docentes que viven y trabajan en condiciones de extrema pobreza, y a través de sus narraciones nos muestra las múltiples caras de la pobreza y sus repercusiones sobre la experiencia, las prácticas y las oportunidades educativas. Porque ser pobre no es sólo no disponer de bienes y dinero; ser pobre es también carecer de un soporte emocional y afectivo en la infancia; es la ausencia de espacios de ocio, juego, diversión o simplemente protección; es la obligación de abandonar prematuramente la niñez. Todas estas expresiones de la pobreza son las que se reflejan cotidianamente en la escuela, en sus prácticas y sus relaciones. Son las que explican las posibilidades de los diferentes agentes educativos, niños, familias y profesorado, para hacer frente a las expectativas y exigencias de la práctica educativa.

This study estimates the trends of school segregation in Catalonia (Spain) between 2001 and 2006. Currently, new immigration has reopened the debate about the ‘Other Catalans’ triggered by concern with the integration of the incoming population. An ‘intersectional approach’ to social divisions suggests that class and ethnic school segregation responds to strategic parental choice and informal policy arrangements. School segregation indices report a more even distribution in most localities, reinforced isolation of ‘foreign students’ in a few public schools in some large cities and a persistent divide between more comprehensive public schools and selective private‐dependent schools in a variety of towns. According to these findings, the analytical approach points at some clues to make sense of impact of distributive policies, the influence of policy contradictions and the success of mobilisation and lobbying political strategies.

A principis dels anys vuitanta, l'informe "Una Nació en Risc" proposava ampliar el temps que passava l'alumnat a les escoles nord-americanes per tal de millorar els seus resultats educatius. Més recentment, el president Barack Obama i el seu secretari d'Educació, Sr. Arne Duncan, van denunciar que el temps d'escolaritat a altres països era molt superior al dels EUA i que això perjudicava seriosament la competitivitat de la seva economia en el context internacional.

Using publication, citation and h-numbers from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, we find that research output and academic influence of economists in the Republic of Ireland are heavily skewed by researcher and by institution. A subset of the results is confirmed by similar analyses based on EconLit, Google Scholar and IDEAS/REPEC. The analysis shows that while one university dominates in terms of numbers of economists, the more productive and most cited Irish research economists are spread across a range of institutions that are heavily concentrated in the Greater Dublin Area.

Using exemplars from selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa, this article considers trends in curriculum reform and the related policy challenges. Particular attention is paid to aspects of the curriculum that affect quality. These include aims and objectives, moves towards outcomes-based education, new areas of concentration in response to social changes, the balance between subject-disciplinary- and learning-area-based approaches, the challenges of effective pedagogy, the move towards assessment for learning, curricular interventions that affect inclusion and equity positively, and the centrality of teachers in improving learning.

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to consider the opportunities and difficulties in developing health-promotion work in early years settings in the UK.

Design/methodology/approach – As the first study of its kind conducted in the UK, a multi-method approach was adopted involving: an overview of health-related guidance and of effective interventions in early years settings to promote health among young children; 26 interviews with key informants in the early years and health fields, regional coordinators for the National Healthy Schools Programme (NHSP) and Foundation Stage regional advisers; a survey of 145 local Healthy Schools Programme coordinators with a response rate of 75 per cent; and six case studies of early years settings representing promising practice in the promotion of health and wellbeing.

Findings – There is considerable enthusiasm for health promotion work within early years organisations, and interest in developing such work in early years settings. The study suggests that building on existing early years curriculum frameworks, developing partnerships between health and early years professionals, engaging both parents and practitioners, and adequate national and local resourcing will facilitate development of health promoting work in the early years sector.

Practical implications – This paper and the outputs from the study offer useful evidence for health and early years professionals who are developing health-promoting work in early years settings.

Originality/value – The paper reports on the first study of its kind in which the perceptions of both early years and health professionals are brought together to consider the issues involved in developing healthy early years practice.

This research explored the process of creating a shared future and the evolution of cooperative collective endeavours in a regional rural community through a bottom-up planning process that involved professionals, public leadership and residents of a rural region in Israel. Using the MT rural region in Israel as a case study, the research was an interpretive exploration of how this community changed the way it collectively functions to achieve individual and shared aspirations. It examined how the community restructured its patterns of interaction, changing the social dynamics – which people interacted with each other, how they interacted with each other, and who felt committed to whom.

The motivation for this inquiry stemmed from my desire as a practitioner to better understand the processes by which communities learn to function cooperatively. What are the elements that contributed to enabling a community to create the conditions for collectively utilizing and sustaining common resources rather than dividing them up for private consumption and exploitative narrow interests? What type of cooperative mechanisms enabled people to accomplish together what they cannot accomplish alone?

Specifically, there are three research questions: how the change process was initiated in MT, what was significant in the nature of participation in the planning process, and how the mechanisms for regional community cooperation evolved.

It was a case study of the planning and development process that I facilitated in MT from 1994-1999 (prior to my intention to undertake research) and is based mainly upon recent interviews of the participants (in that process), their recollections, and retrospective interpretations of that experience.

The case has been explored from the theoretical perspective of viewing society in general, and community life in particular, as processes of constructing shared social realities that produce certain collective behaviours of cooperation or non-cooperation (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). This research was about understanding the process of making social rules that incorporate shared meanings and sanctions (Giddens, 1986) for undertaking joint endeavours (Ostrom, 1990, 1992, Wenger, 1998).

Specifically two primary insights have come out of this case analysis:
1. In the MT case there was a mutually reinforcing three-way interplay between the strengthening of commitments to mutual care on the regional level, the instrumental benefits from cooperative/joint endeavours, and the envisioning of a shared future.
2. The community development process was owned by the community (not by outside agencies) and they (the community members) set the rules for community involvement. They structured the social interactions which formed the basis for creating shared understandings as a collective to achieve their common future.

These insights shed light on how a community's structuring of its interactions and development interventions influenced its ability to act in a collectively optimal manner. By looking at the interrelation between trust as a function of social esteem (Honneth, 1995) and risk taking linked to instrumental benefits of cooperation (Lewis, 2002; Taylor, 1976; White, 2003) we can better understand what contributes to the way some communities continue to miss opportunities (Ostrom 1992), while others are able to promote their collective development and mutual wellbeing. By examining the process of designing (not only the design itself) community development programmes (Block, 2009) and by observing participation not as technique but as an inherent part of the way a community begins structuring its social interactions with their tacit (Polanyi, 1966) and explicit meanings, we can better understand the role of practitioners.

And finally, perhaps the elements of chance and opportunity that bring certain combinations of people together in a given time and space may need to be given more weight in what remains a very unpredictable non-linear field of professional practice.

Peer teaching has been recognized as a valuable and effective approach for learning and has been incorporated into medical, dental, and healthcare courses using a variety of approaches. The success of peer teaching is thought to be related to the ability of peer tutors and tutees to communicate more effectively, thereby improving the learning environment. Near-peer teaching involves more experienced students acting as tutors who are ideally placed to pass on their knowledge and experience. The advantage of using near-peer teachers is the opportunity for the teacher to reinforce and expand their own learning and develop essential teaching skills. This study describes the design and implementation of a program for fourth year medical students to teach anatomy to first- and second-year medical students and evaluates the perceptions of the near-peer teachers on the usefulness of the program, particularly in relation to their own learning. Feedback from participants suggests that the program fulfills its aims of providing an effective environment for developing deeper learning in anatomy through teaching. Participants recognize that the program also equips them with more advanced teaching skills that will be required as they move nearer toward taking on supervisory and teaching duties. The program has also provided the school with an additional valuable and appropriate resource for teaching anatomy to first-and second-year students, who themselves view the inclusion of near-peer teachers as a positive element in their learning.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a clinical skills programme within a new UK medical school and the journey that students take in the development of their clinical skills base. The approach at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) is to integrate clinical skills training horizontally and vertically throughout the course, providing an array of opportunities to develop specific skills and a variety of different methods including the use of purpose built clinical skills facilities and extensive patient contact. The focus of the design template was to ensure students would be able to understand the scientific and clinical basis for learning their skills and where to integrate them into their practice. This template is delivered using a building block approach, where students first develop basic skills, which are repeated and enhanced as the course progresses. The provision of extensive formative opportunities to test their own skills development including mock OSCEs and simulators has, in the eyes of the students, helped lead to high levels of competence being achieved in summative assessments. However, until the first cohort of students enter their postgraduate training and development phase, a definitive assessment of our approach to clinical skills is not possible. The feedback from students, patients and faculty thus far though, plus results from clinical skills assessments, indicate that our students are prepared for the delivery of effective patient care.

Literature clearly demonstrates that there has been a large increase in the time devoted to teaching oral communication skills within medical curricula worldwide. In contrast, the ability to communicate with patients through written means does not appear to be a feature in many programmes, despite its fundamental importance in creating understanding of medicine within the general population. This article investigates one way patient-centered written communication has been integrated into part of the early training years of medical students using anatomically related material as a focus. Following a series of interactive seminars and debates as part of a student-selected component, students were asked to prepare a patient-focused information leaflet on a particular birth defect. The leaflets included aspects of anatomy and embryology as well as causes of the birth defect, signs and symptoms, treatments, outlook, and support mechanisms. Evaluation of the leaflets using set marking criteria and readability indexes showed that students had successfully targeted the chosen audiences. Feedback showed that the component was rated highly by the students in terms of quality, usefulness, and interest. Students viewed sessions as an excellent forum for appreciating the importance of and developing their own effective written communication skills. It is hoped that such developments will enhance the capacity of all potential doctors to communicate more effectively with patients and colleagues in both the written and spoken form

One of the key issues surrounding participation in basic schooling is the phenomenon of school dropout. Dropout is known not as a single event but a process that is not well understood. The rationale for this thesis argues that unless the dropout process is understood, there will be no meaningful intervention to curb it. This study therefore explores the dropout experience of basic school children in Ghana. In the context of this exploratory study, informed by the concerns of achieving education for all children by the year 2015, I sought to gain insight into the processes that lead children to drop out of school, how dropout occurs, the manifestation of dropout and the policy implications of dropout for free compulsory universal basic education in Ghana.

The research inquiry is guided by two main research questions: what are the experiences of dropout children? And how is school dropout manifested? Specifically, the research questions sought to explore children‘s understanding and interpretation of dropout, how dropout occurred; what conditions within and outside school do children regard as responsible for their dropping out, and what the implications of the findings are for universalising universal basic education in Ghana.

In exploring the experience of dropout children, I tracked 18 children who had initial access to basic education but stopped schooling at some point for their stories. I used multiple methods of data collection, viz. in-depth interviews, observations, photographs and school records.

From the data gathered, the following are the main findings of the study:
Concerning the dropout process, children experience dropout first as temporary—sporadic, event and cohort based on their economic survival needs and later permanently—unsettled and settled as a result of becoming significantly overage and the diminished value of schooling.

Conditions both within school – teacher factor, school practices and processes, and outside – poverty, opportunity cost of schooling, networks among children to encourage dropout by pushing and/or pulling children out of school.

As a process, pupils go through three phases – disadvantage, disaffection and disappearance to become school dropouts.

It is argued that, to prevent pupils from dropping out of school and to encourage children who already dropped out to return to school. Education policy would have to focus more on addressing the peculiar needs of children who show sights of entering the dropout process. Also, it is necessary to differentiate out of school children – dropouts from out of school children –never enrolled when designing and implementing interventions for universalising basic education.

There have been various attempts to develop an affective tutoring system (ATS) framework
that considers and reacts to a student’s emotions while learning. However, there is a gap
between current systems and the theory underlying human appraisal models. The current
frameworks rely on a single appraisal and reaction phase. In contrast, the human appraisal
process (Lazarus, 1991) involves two phases of appraisal and reaction (i.e. primary and
secondary appraisal phases).

This thesis proposes an affective tutoring (ATS) framework that introduces two phases of appraisal and reaction (i.e. primary and secondary appraisal and reaction phases). This
proposed framework has been implemented and evaluated in a system to teach Data Structures.

In addition, the system employs both domain-dependent and domain-independent strategies for coping with students’ affective states. This follows the emotion regulation model (Lazarus, 1991) that underpins the ATS framework which argues that individuals use both kinds of strategies in solving daily life problems. In comparison, current affective (ITS) frameworks concentrate on the use of domain-dependent strategies to cope with students’ affective states.

The evaluation of the system provides some support for the idea that the ATS framework is useful both in improving students’ affective states (i.e. during and by the end of a learning session) and also their learning performance.

The purpose of this study is to examine the level of female participation in leadership activities in the University of Cape Coast (UCC). Leadership is experienced at various levels within the university - student, staff, committee and management levels in the university. However, the positions are mainly held by men.

This study examined the institutional structures and cultural factors responsible for the dearth of women in leadership and why it is necessary to have more women vigorously involved in the decision-making in the university. Few women reaching the top have managed it successfully because of the exposure to various forms of institutional and cultural barriers. This state of affairs works against the effective utilization of human resources in the university. Ensuring that all individuals irrespective of their gender are equally motivated to participate in the decision-making process holds the potential for maximising the human resources within the university. In this study, the barriers to female participation in leadership have been explored. A qualitative research design guided the study. Twenty semi-structured interviews, participant observation and the use of unobtrusive observation were the main data collection techniques adopted. For data analysis, 'open and axial' coding approaches based on the inductive and deductive reasoning were utilised.

A significant outcome of the study includes the fact that very few women are in head of departments and deanship positions. Women are almost absent in the top administrative echelon. Females occupy only designated 'vice/deputy' positions in students and staff unions. However, few academic women who have reached the top have managed successfully.

The study concludes by expressing the view that women in UCC face several challenges which impede their progress towards leadership aspirations. These include institutional structures and culturally entrenched norms. Based on these findings and conclusions, a number of recommendations have been made to improve the chances of women in both academic and administrative departments to break the glass-ceiling and advance into leadership positions. These include the following: (1) the need for professional development opportunities for women to enable them to pursue postgraduate programmes after which they could be employed as administrators or academics, and (2) the institutionalization of policies in support of the reservation of quotas for women in some leadership positions, including chairing some of the sub-committees of the Governing Council and the Academic Board to ensure fair participation of women in critical decision-making levels in the university.

Retaining motivated teachers is a major concern across countries. Ghana, like other Sub-
Sahara African countries, has been trying to address challenges, such as the lack of teachers, particularly in rural areas, and the low levels of motivation among them. On the other hand, teachers in developing countries are not necessarily trained and, even if they are, they may not be competent, effective and efficient (Lockheed and Verspoor 1991). Mere enthusiasm and good intentions may not be enough to improve the quality of education. Nevertheless, motivation is necessary, since without it, teachers – especially those facing difficult circumstances – cannot persevere; and, no matter how skilled, without drive, teachers are unable to perform in the long term. As a consequence, without well-motivated teachers, children are less likely to attain the desired level of education. Moreover, if parents/guardians do not believe that education equips their children with the necessary skills and knowledge for a better life, access to and completion of basic education will not increase and government efforts to achieve EFA and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) may be in vain.

Teacher motivation is not a new area of research. Extensive quantitative and qualitative
research has been carried out, especially in the UK and the US, but not in Sub-Saharan
Africa. Moreover, in the case of Ghana, most of the research is based on surveys and oneshot interviews and tends to describe why teachers have low job satisfaction and motivation. As working and living conditions for most teachers are challenging, studies into
'motivation' have tended to be superficial. More specifically, little research has been
carried out into investigating why some teachers are able to stay motivated in conditions
that others do not consider to be conducive to effective practice − or how they are able to
manage. In addition, what research has been done has been concentrated in the southern
part of the country, which is considered to be better off compared to the northern part
according to many gauges.

This study has aimed to investigate how basic school teachers‟ perception of teaching as a
career is shaped by social and professional environment in rural Ghana. It has also intended to explore local realities with respect to the policy and its implementation for basic
education. One-year field research from 2007 to 2008 was conducted by using a mixedmethods approach in two 'deprived'1 districts − one from the north and the other from the south − which are geographically, socio-culturally, and economically different. The
methods of data collection involved survey, ethnographic research, interviews, and teacher
focus group discussions.

This research echoes previous research findings that physical disadvantages − such as the
lack of conducive infrastructure, the shortage of teaching and learning materials, and poor
salaries − are factors that contribute to a lower commitment to the profession. However,
this research also suggests that two other key stakeholders at micro-level − in addition to
the teachers themselves − play a role in teacher motivation. These are: colleague teachers,
including head teachers; and the communities in which teachers live and work. Support at
this level – both material such as the provision of accommodation and food and nonmaterial
like morale support – can not only enhance teachers‟ well-being and self-esteem
but also help them to see their current positions as a part of their goals.

On the other hand, at macro-level, local authorities − the main implementers of policies and
strategies formulated at central level and of teacher management − are particularly
influential, as it affects teachers‟ long-term vision. They tend to discourage teachers in their
operation, mainly due to its organisational culture that teachers perceive neither fair nor
rational. With the same reason, strategies put in place to motivate teachers do not always
produce the expected outcomes. Moreover, teachers are more likely to be subordinates to
the authority even in school management and to feel powerless in the system. Too much
emphasis on teacher motivation at school level may overlook the important role of the
District Education Offices (DEOs), since teachers‟ lives are much more related to how the
DEO manages them than is the case with similar hierarchical relationships in the West.

The Training and Development Agency for Schools continue to set an official agenda
for what constitutes professional knowledge for teachers in England. The Professional
Standards for Teachers (TDA, 2007) set out expectations regarding attributes,
knowledge and understanding and skills for teachers at different stages in their
careers. Such prescriptions have been the subject of critique by the academic
community (Furlong, 2001, Phillips, 2002, Ellis, 2007) for their implicit reductionist
assumptions about professional knowledge. History teacher educators (John, 1991,
Husbands et al, 2003) have long recognised the need to focus on what history teachers
do know, rather than what they should know. However whilst scholarship offers us rich
understandings of those considered experts (Turner-Bisset, 1999) or engaged in initial
teacher education (Pendry, Husbands, Arthur and Davison, 1998), little is known about
the professional knowledge of early career history teachers.
This study explores professional knowing of early career history teachers working in
secondary schools in South East England. Through presenting twelve case studies of
teachers at the end of initial teacher education, induction, experiencing the first two to
three years of teaching and more experienced practitioners the study analyses the
nature of professional knowing as well as its interrelations, origins and development.
Two research questions are addressed:
• What do beginning history teachers know? How does this relate to existing
models of professional knowledge?
• Where does their professional knowledge come from? What are its origins?
What factors influence its development?
The study draws upon a constructivist interpretation of professional knowing (Cochran
et al, 1993) rejecting the static nature of knowledge and instead presents knowing as
a dynamic entity. The study also draws upon Eraut's (1996, 2007) epistemology of
practice, specifically the interplay between context, time and modes of cognition and
reflection as well as conceptions of teaching as a craft (Cooper and McIntyre, 1996).
In addition, the study acknowledges the nature of situated learning and identifies how
early career teachers develop within different communities of practice (Lave and
Wenger, 1991).
Inspired by life history research, a mixed methodology is used to examine how
childhood experiences, schooling and pre-professional education combine with formal
and situated learning. Interviews exploring “critical incidents” (Tripp, 1994) are used to
encourage participants to reflect and associated narratives are analysed using a
constructivist conceptualisation of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2005), to reveal the
temporal and spacial dimensions (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) of professional
knowing as well as broader “genealogies of context” (Goodson and Sykes, 2001)
telling of changes in history education over the last three decades.
The findings illustrate how early career history teachers draw upon their knowing of
history, pedagogy, resources, learners and context as well as their beliefs and values.
Whilst it will be shown that these areas of knowing can be described and illustrated
discretely, they work in complex ways with each other and decisions, actions or
reflections often necessarily draw upon complex inter- relationships. Whether intuitively
or deliberatively, these ways of knowing are developed through interactions between
personal historical forces, learning situations and shifting professional contexts.
Drawing on these findings the thesis makes an original contribution in presenting a new
model of professional knowing connecting historical, pedagogical, curriculum knowing,
knowing about learners, the context, and ideological knowing with teacher reflectivity;
all situated in an envelope that recognises the roots, complexity and fluidity of what
history teachers know including personal histories, formal and informal learning
experiences and their environments.

This is a year-long, action-research project investigating how to develop pupils' exploratory talk and higher-cognitive thinking in secondary English classes. Four teachers, their Year 8 classes (110 pupils) in Sussex and an ITE educator collaborated to investigate whether the quality of pupils' exploratory talk could be improved by a structured, pedagogical approach, and to explore contextual factors and other conditions for its development. The approach included making the skills of this formal, oral discourse explicit to pupils, using pupils' ground-rules, teacher modelling and structured tasks; regular practice and critical reflection on talk. It also involved cross-school collaboration, for example, classes evaluated each other‟s developing talk on video; and teachers met throughout the project to reflect on individual and collective issues and to review data and emerging findings. The data include qualitative analysis of pupil discourse taken from throughout the project, supported by associated observations and interviews with teachers and pupils.

The study concludes that a rich, apprenticeship model inducting students in how to use exploratory, dialogic talk, including student critical reflection on this, contributes to the development both of this discourse and its associated higher-cognitive processes, especially in relation to the reading of texts. However, these appear to be necessary, but insufficient conditions for such development. The transformation in students‟ discourse depends on a more significant transformation in their identities, which is contingent on a similar shift in the range of teacher identities being performed. Practising exploratory talk gives students experience of a wider range of identities, especially for those who are unconfident, low-achieving and/or from low socioeconomic backgrounds, in particular boys, but also girls, enabling them to gain a 'voice' in school precluded by the discourses and identities generally adopted. This, thus, enables students to develop ways of talking and thinking essential for achievement across the curriculum, moving from silence at the margins to speech at the centre. Teachers need to appreciate the extent to which discourse exceeds language structures, encoding ways of behaving, valuing and 'being' and therefore being related to both the relationships and teacher/pupil identities generated in the classroom.

Furthermore, the study concludes that there is a highly significant relationship between pupils practising dialogic, exploratory talk in groups and developing sophisticated reading comprehension skills: critical literacy, a key aim for all English teachers. The study defines a particular type of exploratory discourse that emerges in English lessons, when pupils are reading and collaborating in groups: 'tentative talk about text'. This is characterised by its speculative, tentative and analytical nature; its openness to plural interpretations of texts and its coconstruction of meanings.

The research is a study of 12 young people constructing identities in the transition between sixth form college and university. Identity is conceptualised as fluid and self-reflective. Giddens’ (1991) work on the reflexive project focuses on both narrative and reflexivity in the construction of identity, and this research uses the tool of narrative to capture the subjective experiences of the young people. Narrative methodology is shown to produce rich and detailed data and it both constructs as well as captures stories. The research process itself becomes part of the young people’s identity work.

The young people are embedded in a social and historical context of late modernity and I endeavour to interrogate how structural forces shape and constrain identities. Some analysis of agency and choice in relation to identity is forwarded. The research findings foreground the student identities of the young people and explore what being a student means for the young people. Being in transition and issues of liminality are associated with this student status.

The nature of transition is interrogated drawing on literature from anthropology and psychoanalytic theory among others. Transition is experienced by the young people as a space of betwixt and between-ness which has four particular effects on identity. Firstly, transition encapsulates a quality of temporality which concerns both the present and the future. It pushes the young people to conceive of making the transition to university as an opportunity to make a ‘fresh start’, and the new identity is future-oriented; transition shapes future as well as present selves. Secondly, transition disrupts the normal flow of life and often involves choice-making. Making choices, particularly those which will have future implications, brings identity into sharp relief through reflexive processes. Thirdly, transition to university involves moving into a broader landscape bringing encounters with a wider range of people. This forces issues of similarity, difference and otherness into the frame. Identities are reflexively constructed through understanding of similarity and difference, and transition provides the space where the young people are faced with both possibilities and limitations. On the one hand the broad social mix of university students provides an awareness of heterogeneity that the young people had not experienced before, with all the potential for new identities this opens up. But on the other hand, butting up against otherness and difference in this way solidifies and limits identities. Fourthly, transition precipitates mechanisms for connectedness.

Connectedness- that is, the all-pervading and on-going relating with others; peers, friends and family- dominates the narratives of the young people and is significant in both social capital and support, and also identity. Cross-gender friendships are prevalent and are shown to have significant effects on identity. The role of emotion in social interaction is also analysed drawing on concepts of emotional capital and emotional literacy. Links are made between emotion and narrative and the place of emotions in the research process is also discussed.

Giddens’ work on identity emphasises the role of reflexivity and yet the concept is not well analysed. Professional discourse is drawn on to open up the concept. The different ways the young people engage in reflexivity are demonstrated and reflexivity is found to be both contextdependent and also related to self-learning. The need for reflexivity is also applied to the research process. Narratives are co-productions and research authenticity calls for transparency and reflexivity of the researcher.

This research is about the challenging behaviour of pupils in secondary schools and how this behaviour is perceived and experienced by their teachers. The impetus for the research came from my work as a teacher with pupils who had been excluded from school. The spur was the significant rise in permanent exclusions from maintained schools in England and Wales in the decade following the implementation of the 1988 Education Reform Act.

The research began in 2000. It is a piece of small-scale educational research, which had a two stage research design. The perspective taken was phenomenological within a naturalistic paradigm. In the first stage of the research design questionnaires were distributed to all the teachers and teaching assistants in two secondary schools in an area of social deprivation in a suburb of London. These questionnaires were intended to elicit information about teacher perspectives regarding challenging behaviour. In stage two of the research design in-depth interviews were held with five teachers from one of the two schools. These teachers were interviewed up to six times each over a period of several months as I attempted to track their interactions and experiences with a pupil whom they had identified as having challenging behaviour.

The data from the questionnaires revealed that a significant majority of the teacher respondents believed that incidences of challenging behaviour were increasing. The second stage of the research explored what these teachers meant by challenging behaviour and what challenging behaviour meant for them. The analysis of the data from these interviews revealed that for this group of teachers challenging behaviour predominantly meant
disruption to their lessons. A key issue to emerge from the project was that of teacher resilience in relation to managing challenging behaviour.

The main findings of the thesis explore issues around the relationships between teachers and pupils with challenging behaviour. A model is proposed which illustrates levels of persistence on the part of the teachers when they are engaged with pupils with challenging behaviour. The model explores differing responses from teachers when managing what they perceived as challenging behaviour. It illustrates how and whether they disengage with the process of actively trying to make the pupils conform to classroom expectations in order to achieve learning outcomes. The model illustrates the inter-relationship of characteristics of teacher resilience and demonstrates how resilience plays a part in determining whether teachers are able to manage disruptive behaviour in the classroom in order to achieve learning outcomes.

This thesis presents an investigation of the contribution school information
management systems make to teaching and learning based on qualitative and
quantitative research in the Bailiwick of Guernsey in the Channel Islands.
addressed the question of whether information systems contribute to teaching and
learning and to the mission of the school; to what extent their adoption forms part
of an emphasis on performativity and school improvement or on the transformation
of the teaching and learning agenda. In the course of the research a further
question was posed which sought to identify how practice in this area could be
improved to support teaching and learning better.

The research built on a critical analytical study which took the form of a Systematic
Review of the literature. Initial research drew on data from a sample of Guernsey
teachers, an Education Department manager and the Director of the company that
produces the Schools Information Management System. This was followed by a
collaborative action research project in one school involving the Headteacher, the
Senior Leadership Team, other Teachers, Students, Administrative Staff and
Parents/Carers. Consistent with this approach the position adopted by the
researcher was non-neutral: she does not control environment and knowledge was
constructed along with those that participated in the research.

The use of Levelled Assessment Tasks (LATs) in secondary science in England has
been increasing over the past five years in response to attempts to encourage more
Assessment for Learning (AfL) strategies in the science classroom. This empirical study
investigates how LATs are used by teachers and the extent to which such tasks support
teaching and learning. An online survey of 106 teachers was used. It showed that
teachers did find that the LATs supported their teaching using AfL strategies, but
revealed that a majority of teachers do not use the tasks as formatively as they could be
used. From the online questionnaire, a descriptive framework for how the LATs support
teaching and learning is proposed. Five case studies where teachers used a LAT were
observed. The data collected included a post-lesson pupil questionnaire, an interview
with a group of pupils and an interview of the teacher. From these cases, a theory
seeking approach to educational case studies through fuzzy propositions (Bassey, 1999)
was used to develop a model of the relationship between teacher values and pupil values
to assessment tasks. The fuzzy generalisations proposed from the case studies were that:
(1) Teacher attitudes to the LATs may influence pupil attitudes to the LATs, (2)
Teachers with a „big picture of levels‟ may be more likely to use LATs formatively and
(3) Teachers who engage pupils with the notion of „levelness‟ may be more likely to
improve conceptual development of pupils. The notion of „levelness‟ is explored. This
evolves into three issues being explored: whether grades should be shared with pupils,
the LATs relationship with summative and formative assessment practices and why
such tasks have become popular with science teachers. The latter is considered in the
context of the current target-driven culture of schools in England. Finally, the future of
assessments like the LATs is discussed in relation to current policy and
recommendations for their use and development are considered.

This thesis investigates how secondary school history teachers at the start of their teaching careers view the nature and purposes of their subject and how they think these views impact on their practice. Data were collected through in depth individual qualitative interviews with eleven teachers completing their initial training. These focused on: how these beginning teachers conceived of the nature of their discipline; the rationale they presented for the purposes of their subject in the school curriculum; the origins of their views on the nature and purposes of history; and how they are manifest in what and how they teach. In order to maintain coherence and to represent the richness and complexity of each teacher’s own story these were written, analysed and presented as narrative accounts. A summary is given of each the accounts with three presented in full. The accounts show these beginning history teachers’ views on the nature of history as reflecting the dominant discourse that characterises history as an academic subject, being
largely Constructionist and emphasising the objective analysis of historical evidence. The teachers’ rationales for the purpose of history emphasised broader educational, social and moral purposes. More postmodern perspectives are apparent in the emphasis given to the
importance of historical interpretations. Family background, lived experiences, literature and the media are significant influences on the teachers’ beliefs about the nature and purposes of history. These beliefs seem to impact on classroom practice and pupil learning in the subject. They influence teaching style, choice of learning activities and the areas of historical understanding emphasised, with, for example, views of the past as an uncontested body of knowledge leading to a pedagogy dominated by the transmission of substantive knowledge; and views which emphasise the more constructed nature of history leading to more pupil centred skills based approaches. Teachers’ views on the nature and purpose of the subject are a significant influence on
their mediation of the National Curriculum. The National Curriculum for History has increasingly provided opportunities for interpretations more sympathetic to the postmodern orientation but research and inspection evidence suggest that these opportunities are often poorly realised in schools. One reason for this is proposed as history teachers’ lack of engagement with postmodern perspectives on history. It is important for teachers to engage with such approaches as without further consideration of their implications history
teachers are unable to teach aspects of secondary History. Teachers also need to recognise and make explicit different orientations towards history in order to facilitate pupil learning, to engage pupils and to provide them with the skills necessary to be critical
consumers of the range of histories presented to them in society. The research has implications for history teaching, pupil learning and the initial training
and professional development of teachers. The case is made for further consideration being given to postmodern perspectives on the nature of history in initial and continuing teacher education in order to improve teaching and learning. The initial teacher education of history teachers needs to ensure that those on programmes have the syntactical knowledge necessary to develop effective teaching strategies and approaches, to enable pupil learning, and to develop their own subject knowledge and ability to reflect on their own practice and development. This research also emphasises the need for all those
involved in training to critically engage with subject orientations as where beginning teachers’ beliefs conflict with the dominant discourse of history teaching this can lead to problematic experiences of teaching and of teacher training.

The world has a mixed record towards achieving EFA and the MDGs in relation to the targets on gender equity in basic education. For researchers and practitioners, this raises the question of which factors influence the processes leading to the improvement of access and quality of girls’ education and how. This case study from China examines the human and cultural dimensions of project management in determining the planning, implementation and evaluation of interventions designed to improve gender equity. The monograph combines concepts from the actor-oriented approach of development studies, with theories of culture and development management. It generates an analytical framework composed of two super ordinate ‘cultural landscapes’. One is the ‘relational’ landscape with its dimensions of power distance, masculinity-femininity, and collectivism-individualism. The other is the ‘time-orientation’ landscape with its dimensions of uncertainty avoidance and universalism-particularism. The ‘cultural landscapes’ and dimensions provide a powerful description of how the perceptions and strategies of interaction vary and change between and within individual actors. The monograph illustrates how managers act as innovators with varied perceptions and interaction strategies influenced by multiple levels of culture, social and political contexts. Using the metaphor of a windmill, the monograph suggests that project management moves beyond the linear cyclical logic presented in many of the planning texts and manuals of development agencies. The steps and stages of development management are the windmill’s blades. The cultural interactions between actors form the wind that gives the blades energy and speed. The blades run both synchronically and sequentially depending on the wind strength. The monograph recommends that development managers should move beyond superficial concerns for outputs and products to a deeper concern for human and cultural processes that lead to results for achieving EFA and the MDGs.

This monograph examines progress in, and policies for, access to elementary education over the past 60 years, the role played by political factors in the process of policy formulation and implementation and the drivers and inhibitors of the implementation of reforms in elementary education in recent years in India. Drawing on interviews and documentary sources, the monograph analyses the growth in central direction and international support for elementary education alongside the parallel and at times countervailing trend towards decentralisation and community participation. It outlines the tensions between agendas focused on expansion, quality improvement, human rights and economic development that led to the legal enactment in 2009 of the Right to Education. Overall, political will is found to be an important driver of progress while corruption, resistance by vested interests and the general condition of poverty in rural areas are among the key inhibitors.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report the outcome of an education and public health collaboration investigating the impact of adapted training to enhance teachers' potential role to promote child health and wellbeing. Design/methodology/approach – The study was conducted in three phases: a survey of the health education content in universities in initial teacher training courses; a longitudinal survey at the commencement and completion of courses to capture trainees' knowledge, skills and attitudes towards health and their role in health promotion; and mapping curriculum content against qualified teacher standards and public health competencies. Findings – Training about health varies largely between institutions. Trainees' knowledge levels remained low after training; ranked importance of key health topics – nutrition, alcohol, smoking, – decreased significantly; a majority thought that teachers and schools play an important role in health promotion, but significant increases were also noted in the minority who thought health promotion is not part of their remit (Phase 2). Originality/value – To the best of one's knowledge, similar work has not so far been reported. While teachers are in a prime position to influence child health, trainees require knowledge and skills to realise their public health potential.

Over the last two decades there have been dramatic increases in the movement of people around the globe. The UK, like other wealthy countries in the global north, has become the recipient of increasing numbers of refugees, many of whom are highly qualified and have professional backgrounds (Kirk 2004; Houghton and Morrice 2008). This thesis captures the experiences of refugees with professional and higher level qualifications as they seek to rebuild their lives in the UK. Rather than look at migration through more traditional lenses of assimilation and acculturation it instead links the experience of refugees with theories and processes of learning and identity formation. This offers a more nuanced and fine grain understanding and analysis of refugee experience. The study is guided by two broad questions: firstly, how might individual biography shape and inform the strategies adopted by refugees in the UK, and secondly, what insight does learning (both informal and formal) offer to our understanding of the processes involved in transition to the UK. To address this I have adopted a longitudinal approach which follows five refugees over a four year period as they move through the asylum system, negotiate a new social space and enter higher education. The narratives presented illuminate the hybridity of experience and indicate how each refugee has his or her own personal story which is linked to their unique biographical, cultural and social background. However, each narrative is lived within the broader social template of what it means to be a refugee in the UK in the first decade of the twenty first century, and how this template is negotiated, managed and sometimes subverted in different ways. These experiences cross cut and intersect with differences of ethnicity, of gender, of country of origin, faith and age. I draw on Bourdieu’s framework of capital, field and habitus as tools to apprehend and explore the processes underlying the narratives (1977; 1998; 1999). Becoming a refugee in the UK firmly placed participants into symbolic structures of inequality and disadvantage. They are structured and positioned through mechanisms of capital transformation and trading which mean that they rarely have opportunities to convert and trade up the capitals they possessed into symbolic capital, and educational and employment reward. The narratives presented depict the struggles of refugees to accrue and convert capital in order to claim a positive identity. It is also about the struggle to be recognised as having moral worth, to be respected and seen to be respectable (Skeggs 1997; Sayer 2005). A broad range of learning processes are involved in managing transition. To capture the profundity and complexity of subjective construction and identity formation I suggest conceptualising learning as processes of ‘becoming’ and ‘unbecoming’(Biesta 2006; Hodkinson et al. 2007). From the disintegration and deconstruction of self which accompanies migration this research illuminates how participants learn to ‘become’, which in its broadest sense is learning how to rethink themselves in order to live with integrity and dignity in a new social space.

The legacy of a colonialist, assimilationist educational system in countries such as Bolivia is the under-representation of the indigenous in the large sphere encompassed by the schools - knowledge, teachers, and modes of instruction. Many indigenous students feel alienated from schooling and experience limited academic success. The calculated intervention of transforming traditional knowledge into culturally-relevant curriculum material has been suggested as a way to fortify their identities. Once students are solidly grounded in their indigenous selves, they may have a greater chance to perform better in the academic indices of formal schooling. This thesis describes a pilot study aligned with the mandates of a UNICEF project (EIBAMAZ) to bring intercultural bilingual education to schools in the Bolivian Amazon. Applying the principles of Participatory Action Research and adopting an anti-colonial stance, I explored the traditional knowledge of the Movima indigenous people and codified some of this into culturally-relevant curriculum material. The material was trialed in schools and feedback was obtained from all the participants. Results, implications and reflections from the pilot serve as recommendations to a larger scale indigenous education project. The investigative stage of the pilot revealed story-telling by community elders to be a natural method for them to exchange information. They saw themselves recording the narratives for their children from whom they felt a widening generational gap. When creating curriculum material in the second stage of the project, the needs of both student and teacher were kept as the focal point. Accessing students’ prior knowledge and catching their interest were of utmost importance. The culturally-relevant lessons were ‘put to the test’ in classrooms in semi-urban and rural schools. Differences between the two groups with respect to participation structure and interaction were noted. Teachers discovered their need for more professional training and cultural congruence between teacher-student to be important in imparting such curriculum. The last stage of the project heard voices from different segments of the population on the topic of culture and culturally-relevant curriculum. The study concludes that it is not possible to create an idealised indigenous curriculum because the Movima people are no longer living in a way that makes it possible to identify a singular culture which is outside and separate from the dominant national culture of Bolivia. Traditional knowledge is difficult to characterise. Rather than being fixed, it is mutable. It derives not just from the knower but from the interaction of the knower and the inquirer. It is dialogic and the research has shown that bringing it into the curriculum might involve a process of dialogue. Indigenising curriculum is possible to do but it requires full community participation which is precisely what makes it difficult. It is not possible to have a place-based curriculum prescribed from the centre. Because it is context based on the locale, it becomes less the role of the Ministry and more the role of the teacher and the community. Though local epistemologies and culture are domains that influence the content and purpose of schooling, there are other complex relationships (political, cultural, religious, social and organizational) involved in educational development. Top-down and bottom-up cooperation and reinforcement are necessary for the provision and sustainment of a culturally-relevant indigenous education. The research suggests that the success of an indigenising project such as this would depend on the extent to which communities can be facilitated and enthused, whether it can offer sufficient development to teachers to reconceptualise their practice and whether these teachers would have the motivation to persist.

Since the advent of international assistance, the aid paradigm has changed continually and the choice of mechanisms for providing assistance has evolved in order to try and pursue better approaches. Along with the traditional project approach, the sector-wide approach involving budgetary support has emerged as a new aid modality since the mid-1990s. While many donors – e.g. the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the World Bank and the European Union (EU) – have embraced the new modality, some donors have kept their distance from this trend, relying mostly on project assistance – e.g. United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). However, the extent to which aid resources are absorbed in the recipient government/sector under the different aid delivery mechanisms is not well known. This thesis provides insight into this question by exploring the process of absorbing foreign funds in the education sector. Employing a phenomenological research approach, the process is examined from the point of view of local actors and beneficiaries of aid aimed at improving education quality. The context chosen is basic education (primary and junior secondary) in Ghana after the introduction of the national basic education reform, which was announced as the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) programme in 1996. Two cases are chosen for comparison: the Whole School Development (WSD) programme financed by the DFID; and the Quality Improvements in Primary Schools (QUIPS) programme facilitated by USAID. The former constitutes a sector-wide type of assistance, which put Ghanaian officials in charge of DFID funds and the implementation of the programme; while the latter adopted a project type model, with implementation managed directly through a USAIDfunded project office. The major part of the data is derived from interviews conducted in 2006 with significant educational personnel at three different levels: Ministry of Education (MoE) headquarters, the District Education Office (DEO), and the schools). The analysis reveals a complex picture of aid absorption, which illuminates the pros and cons of the two approaches in relation to impact and sustainability. The study finds that the QUIPS project achieved tangible results in the pilot schools, while the WSD programme made little impact at the school level. The WSD programme, which used existing structures within the education system to deliver funds and resources to schools, showed evidence of high fungibility, but appears to have strengthened the Ministry‟s administrative capacity. On the other hand, the QUIPS approach, which had low fungibility, has been severely criticised by Ghanaian officials, who questioned its sustainability and contribution to system-wide change. The thesis concludes by stating its specific contribution to the literature on international aid assistance to developing countries and making recommendations for the Ghanaian context.

Persistently high dropout rates are one of the biggest challenges to fulfilling the right to
education in India. This paper attempts to assess the magnitude of the problem of dropout.
The paper critically reviews the evidence on some of the commonly cited reasons for
dropout, including poverty, limited to access to credit, child labour, and children’s and
parents’ lack of interest in education. The paper argues that the literature rarely looks at the
role of procedures and rules in schools and the wider education system in terms of pushing
children out of school. It is the contention of this paper that the reason a persistently high
dropout rate should be located in the absence of a social norm in terms of children’s right to
education; and that this is reflected in the lack of systemic support available for children at
risk of dropping out. The paper also documents an experiment initiated by MV Foundation in
Shankarpalle Mandal, Ranga Reddy district, Andhra Pradesh, where procedures, rules and
practices relating to various aspects of school were changed to ensure that every child stayed
in school and completed elementary level.

Sri Lanka is hailed internationally for her achievements in literacy, educational enrolment and equality of educational opportunity. However, progress has not been straightforward due to the complex interactions between politics, policy formulation, and the implementation of reforms. This dynamic process has often led to contradictory outcomes. This monograph describes and analyses the political drivers and context of educational reform from the colonial era to the present before an in-depth exploration of the origins and implementation of the comprehensive 1997 education reforms. Much of the evidence referring to the later period has been drawn from extensive interviews with 20 senior members of Sri Lanka’s education policy community. From 1931 to 1970 education policies were driven by the need to assert national control over an inherited colonial system and to create a unified system of education. Policy formation relied heavily on debate in public and in parliament, following practices of governance inherited from the former colonial master. The implementation of reforms was largely undertaken by bureaucrats and teachers without interference from politicians. This policy environment changed markedly during the 1970s as decisions regarding education came to be largely driven by the need to contain rising youth unrest. Debate was stifled both in the public domain and in parliament, and politicians became increasingly involved in the day-to-day practices of education, especially those concerning teacher transfers. The 1997 education reforms were comprehensive, including programmes to ensure universal access to basic education and improvements in learning outcomes. They attracted considerable ‘political will’, a vague but much vaunted term in the international policy discourse. Yet, despite seemingly high levels of national political will, reform has not been plain sailing. School rationalisation has been impeded by community resistance and by bureaucratic demands insensitive to local conditions and cost constraints. The reforms in junior secondary education have been inhibited by weak leadership, lack of planning, heavy curriculum demands, and the absence of a pilot programme. The monograph explores the connections between the political and technical drivers and inhibitors of reform in practice and argues that low-level, as well as high-level political will, has played an active part in determining whether formulated policies are translated into action on the ground. Bi-partisan support for education policy is essential if implementation is to endure.

This monograph examines the history and politics of educational reform in Ghana, focusing on the issue of access to basic education in the post-colonial period. The monograph employs data from a series of interviews conducted with senior policy-makers, implementers and researchers, as well as drawing on documentary sources, to explore the drivers and inhibitors of change at the political, bureaucratic and grass-roots levels. It describes the patterns of change in relation to enrolment and outlines the key policies adopted through from the British colonial administration to the various independent regimes, authoritarian and democratic. Progress in universalising access has been substantial and basic education indicators in Ghana, both in early post-colonial times and today, stand out positively when compared to most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The study explores the nature of the domestic political and administrative machinery which has enabled comparative success in enrolment growth in Ghana, attending also to the importance of political will as well as to shifting patterns of international and donor influence.

The study draws out key tensions in education policy making, including tensions between the goals of access, equity, quality and relevance; those between academic and vocational orientations; those between elite and popular interests and those between political and technical imperatives. The processes of reform begun by the Kwapong and Dzobo committees and continued through to the fCUBE policy are examined in detail and the underlying aims and objectives of these processes are shown to share a number of common although sometimes mutually conflicting features. Interview data allow a nuanced interpretation of both impetus and resistance to policy formulation and implementation. The reforms of 1987 are shown to be critical in the development of the universal basic education policies that emerged subsequently and those later policies are considered partly as responses to unrealised objectives from 1987.

Following the restoration of democratic government in Ghana, the establishment of a constitutional commitment to universal basic education in 1992 provided a lasting and binding responsibility for the state, which was followed by a comprehensive policy in fCUBE. Subsequently education policy has played an important role in political manifesto pledges. The monograph concludes by considering the election pledges of the 2008 Ghana Government, their provenance and initial indications of their implementation and finally summarises its findings on progress and on the importance of policy, regime, political will, and the drivers and inhibitors of reform implementation in relation to the pursuit of basic education for all in historical perspective.

India has witnessed substantial diversification of provision to basic education. Policy changes from 1980s onwards, has seen the creation of para-formal delivery systems and the inclusion in the system of non state providers. The Education Guarantee Scheme and the Alternate Initiatives in Education programmes have generated new pathways to access. The paper examines the different educational providers and looks at the spread of provision, the enrolment shares, the different structure, costs and facilities. It also looks at unrecognised schools, quasi-government schools, perceived hierarchies in government schools and English-medium private schools. Diversification is contributing to improved access, but is also generating new challenges for equity and meaningful participation.

In recent years, strengthening and better functioning of local governance have become prime concerns of educational reform agenda. Establishment of effective local governance has been part of overall changes in educational governance for several years in many countries including India. It is now widely recognized that effective local governance considerably impacts on access to education as well as the enrolment, retention and learning experiences of children in school. It is in this context, that this paper provides an overview of the changing framework of governance of elementary education and community participation in India with a special focus on its role in improving the participation of children. An attempt has also been made to examine the extent to which grassroots level functionaries and local bodies like panchayat and VEC are able to get involved in decision making processes and different approaches that have been taken by different states in regards to local governance of education. Drawing references from recent efforts made by different states, the paper has tried to establish a link between effectiveness of local governance and issues regarding access, equity and quality of school education. While discussing the changing framework of local governance, the paper critically examines the guiding principles of governance reform from two perspectives. ‘Top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches are discussed, in terms of ensuring the effectiveness of the system and empowering people for active participation in decentralized decision making process.

In 2007 Ghana celebrated 50 years of independence from British colonial rule. The golden jubilee offered an opportunity to take stock of how the country had progressed in expanding education and the challenges for the future. This paper offers a critique of the journey, highlighting the challenges and progress. What reforms in education has taught Ghana is that it is much easier to fix the ‘hardware’ than the ‘software’ problems of education. With huge investments from internal and external sources structural and infrastructural problems of education can be fixed. With expanded facilities access can improve. However, completion rates remain the problem, especially at junior and senior secondary where low completion rates deprive the country of much needed educated youth prepared for work and for further education and training. TVET development plans faces the challenge of ensuring that sustainable capital and recurrent investment is available to improve infrastructural facilities and thereby improve the quality of products. Fifty years after independence, although Ghana has made good progress in expanding education provision, it is still faced with the problem of securing an education system that delivers on quality and provides equitable access for all, especially the poor and disadvantaged. Until and unless significant gains are made here, the goal of producing a workforce with the knowledge and skills for development would be hard to achieve. This is the task for the next fifty years.

Multiple providers (including state, quasi-state and non-state ones) have contributed to raising initial enrolment and improving gender balance in Bangladesh. The critical question is how multiplicity and diversity of provision can contribute to achieving truly universal primary education with high completion rates and acceptable levels of learning. In this paper, these questions are addressed in the context of history and circumstances of educational development in Bangladesh, as the Government attempts to put into effect a new national education policy and design a five year (2011-15) national development plan.

This paper draws together research on seasonality, child labour and education in the context of primary education in sub-Saharan Africa. It describes how income poverty and demand for labour can fluctuate within and between years, affecting participation and progression through school systems. It highlights how analysis of the private and public costs of education frequently ignore the significance of seasonal patterns related to the agricultural cycle and migration. It argues that education policy and practice should be more clearly articulated with fluctuations in household income, demand for labour (especially school age children), and seasonal migration cycles. Educational reforms to improve school enrolment and lessen the burden of education on poor will not succeed unless seasonality is recognised.

“Interculturality” has become a key concept in the conceptualising and struggling for new relationships between dominant and subordinated identities and knowledges in Latin America. My research is based on a collaborative effort to document and examine how “interculturality” is realised as a “dialogue between equal actors and knowledges” in the creation of Indigenous and Intercultural Universities. It follows a multi-level analysis that begins by interrogating the diverse ways in which different education projects formulate and negotiate their “interculturality” in the Latin American region. It pays particular attention to the political dimensions of “dialogue” by examining the diverse engagements between social actors, discourses and agendas. Secondly, it focuses on the specific design and development of the Peasant and Indigenous University Network (UCI-Red for its Spanish acronym) as a case study. UCI-Red promotes and supports endogenous and sustainable development processes in different micro-regions of the Peninsula of Yucatan, Mexico. This is a collective project where Mexican Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) have become engaged and allied with Yucatec Mayan peasants. “Interculturality” has become one of the main principles of their definition of sustainable development and it has been assimilated into their practice of development promotion. After examining the intellectual trajectories and the perspectives on “culture”, “identity” and “learning” of the organisations involved in UCI-Red, I argue that a deeper understanding of cultural difference that goes beyond discursive and objectifying definitions of identity and knowledge is needed. Indigenous knowledge is a notion that involves not only concepts and principles but most importantly embodied forms of knowing, social and symbolic practices, and a particular ideal of personhood. Hybrid forms of learning can and must be constructed in continuity with these overlooked epistemologies if education projects want to commit to a true “dialogue between knowledges”.

The thesis focuses on the issue of the assessment of social work students in practice learning settings and draws on multi-disciplinary and international literature. The dissertation considers why practice assessors find it so difficult to fail social work students and what might get in the way of failing a student. The rationale for such an exploration concerns the relatively limited literature from both social work and other disciplines where there is a practice-learning element and what limited literature there is often appears under-theorised. A further rationale to explore this area of professional practice concerns the author‟s own experiences as a social work practitioner, practice assessor and social work educator. Located within a qualitative framework, the methodological influences on the research include: ethnography, life story and narrative approaches as well as practitioner-research paradigms; although it is clear that as the research progressed, practitioner-research paradigms became more influential. Based on twenty in-depth interviews with both new and experienced practice assessors, the research utilises the voice centred relational method to analyse the data. From this narrative process a number of stories emerge, including; “The Angry Story”, “The Dramatic Event Story”, “The Guilty Story”, “The Idealised Learner Story”, “The Internalising Failure So I Couldn‟t Always Failure Them Story”, “The Lack of Reflection Story” and the “What is my Role/Assessment Story”. Psychodynamic frameworks have been employed to theorise and make sense of these various stories as well as transactional analytical perspectives. Differences in approach to practice assessing are also considered, most notably around how practice assessors‟ conceptualise, make use of and understand the assessment process. It is also clear that disability, gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality also impact on the assessment process. For some practice assessors, ultimately the evidence of students' competence appears to rest on hope. It appears that some practice assessors are still giving students “the benefit of the doubt” a phrase coined thirty years ago by Brandon and Davies (1979) in a wide ranging but still very relevant study of the assessment of social work students in practice settings. Practice assessors thus find it difficult to fail students because of: Their lack of reflection about the intense emotions raised; The internalisation of these intense feelings; Lack of support from colleagues, the Higher Education Institute (HEI) and tutors; Lack of understanding about the process of assessment; Difficulties in managing the multifaceted role of the practice educator including the lack of acknowledgment of the gate keeping function.The dissertation concludes that although practice assessors have a very clear understanding of what behaviours might hypothetically cause a student to fail the practice learning opportunity, the reality is that not all practice assessors go on to fail the student. The high emotionality often associated with the process of managing a potentially failing student on placement often obscures the process. The thesis argues the need for practitioners to consider the intense feelings that arise in difficult practice learning opportunity situations in a more reflective, contained and considered manner. A number of ways forward have been suggested in light of these findings, including the need to pilot a reflective toolkit for practice assessors and students alike.

This research explores the ways in which local knowledge, attitudes and beliefs surrounding disability influence the socially constructed experience of autism in Ghana. It further explores the impact of these beliefs on educational access, policy and provision as well as on inclusion in wider society for both children with autism and their families. It is argued throughout that conceptualisations of both autism and disability are subtly, and at times unconsciously, shaped by cultural influences as well as individual experiences. Using semi-structured interviews, participatory methods and text analysis, this thesis first examines internationally accepted diagnostic criteria for cultural relevancy and concludes that while 'autism'does indeed transcend cultural barriers, its presentation is nonetheless culturally bound. The presentation of each of autism's 'triad of impairments' is explored in Ghana, namely communication and socialisation impairments alongside a restricted range of interests and repetitive behaviour patterns. Significantly, the experience of autism demonstrated in this thesis, at both a personal and familial level, is linked to, and negotiated through, cultural belief systems. A relatively shared 'worldview', understood as the culturally mediated lens through which autism and impairment are understood and managed in Ghanaian society, is outlined. Traditional values, a deep sense of spirituality and communal kinship responsibilities are highlighted. Next, an exploration of causal attributions, valued and de-valued personhood traits and the expected role of an adult in society each highlights significant influences on the perception and management of autism in Ghana. Throughout, this thesis focuses on the impact of autism, as constructed and understood in urban Ghana, on the individual, one's kin and broader society. The second half of this thesis focuses on educational access, policy and provision with particular attention to Ghana's burgeoning inclusive education efforts. Conceptualisations of disability and difference, as negotiated through Ghanaian culture, norms and history are explored alongside the implications of these beliefs in designing educational provision for students with autism as well as the socio-political pressures to adhere to large scale international movements such as Education for All (EFA). In particular, tensions between local and international conceptualisations of 'disability' and 'inclusion' are highlighted and it is concluded that adoption of international declarations into local policy, and subsequently into local practice, needs to be better negotiated alongside culturally relevant systems and beliefs. International declarations, rooted in a social model of disability, are found to clash with local conceptualisations of disability rooted in an often intuitive understanding of disability consistent with an individual model. However, consistency with an individual model did not equate to biomedical understandings of disability, which was instead mediated through a lens of socialrelational causation and management more consistent with religious or cultural models of disability. It is concluded that acknowledging and respecting Ghanaian understandings of disability is a prerequisite to ensuring inclusion of children with autism, both in education and their community. Adoption of laudable rights based international declarations must also ensure adaptation to local culture and context. Conclusions and recommendations for synergy between advocacy for, and education of, students with autism in Ghana are proffered.

The main research topic of this study is universities’ academic research and knowledge-transfer activities in a catch-up country, particularly the relationship between the two activities, which has been rarely examined in previous research. In order to understand this issue against existing literature, a critical review of previous studies has been attempted, considering the idiosyncratic characteristics of the Korean national innovation system. As a result, at the three analysis levels (i.e. national, organisational and individual levels), we propose three conceptual elements respectively: a tentative historical path of universities in catch-up countries; critical factors influencing knowledge transfer activities of universities in catch-up countries; and academics operating in synergy mode. Thereafter, based on the methodology integrating not only the three analysis levels but also qualitative and quantitative approaches, we analyse the data collected from the interviews with Korean academics, survey responses from Korean academics and government White Papers on the activities of Korean universities. The results show a close and positive relationship between Korean universities’ academic research and knowledge-transfer activities across the three levels. Firstly, during the last several decades, the Korean government has strongly encouraged the development of teaching, academic research and knowledge-transfer activities of Korean universities in harmony with the different developmental stages of Korean industry. This has resulted in selective patterns of the universities’ three activities (e.g. concentration of scientific activities in certain fields). Secondly, organisational factors such as scientific capacity and industry funding are important for universities’ knowledge-transfer activities in a catch-up country, which corroborates the positive relationship between the two activities. Finally, in terms of the factors influencing the synergy mode (i.e. a positive relationship between academic research and knowledge-transfer activities), academics’ career stage and disciplines are important. This is related to the rapid expansion of the Korean academic system and the selectivity found in its activities. Based on these findings, it is tempting to conclude that universities in East Asian catch-up countries have developed their own academic system different from those in developed countries, which can be characterised as having strong government control and a high level of interaction with other actors in the national innovation system. Therefore, the application of the controversy over the direct economic contribution of universities in western countries to the context of catch-up countries is quite limited.

In 1987, the Government of Ghana embarked on a process to decentralise education management to districts throughout the country as part of a programme of wider social and democratic governance reforms. A vital element of this reform was the prescription of active community participation in the affairs of schools within their localities. The establishment of school management committees (SMCs) was to create a new school governance landscape based on community participation, as well as devolution of power to the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies. In this regard, considerable attention has been focused on central government‟s understanding of how this devolution of authority to communities and schools should work and how communities should assume responsibility for increased participation in schools. From the inception of this policy over two decades ago, there seems to have been no feedback through research findings or diagnostic policy reviews on how this new role of the community has been received, interpreted and executed in its engagement with schools, particularly in the rural poor and underserved areas. Mindful of this, this study sought to explore the multiple understandings of how community and school relations work, as well as the challenges and pressures which influence community – school relationships. The study employed the qualitative methods of interview and documentary analysis to collect data on the understanding and experiences of community – school relations from SMCs and PTAs; other members of the community; the school; and education management. The findings suggest that many of the theoretical and policy expectations about representation and participation in school improvement through the SMC and PTA concept are only evident in form and not in practice. Furthermore, in poor rural contexts, it is often the comparatively better educated and influential members of the community, including informal groups who become the new brokers of decision-making, and who through their actions close spaces for the genuine representation and participation of others. In some cases, SMCs seldom work as the de facto representatives of the community, as decisions are made and critical interactions occur outside this formal structure for community representation and engagement in school governance. This affects the visibility of SMCs and undermines their credibility and capacity to play their intended role. Moreover, the degree of community participation in schools appears to be shaped by the school fulfilling community expectations of schooling and on a „social contract‟ based on the principle of reciprocity. These findings support the view that the fate of schools is increasingly tied to and powerfully shaped by key players at the local level, and that this happens through more informal and traditional roles which are more trusted but not necessarily representative of the image presented by policy on community participation in school governance. The findings also highlight the threat to voluntarism, a key assumption of the policy on community participation and the importance of seeking ways in which schools can play a more active role as change agents in the community, thereby legitimising in the community‟s eyes their importance in the life of the community.

In recent years India has seen an explosion in low-fee private (LFP) schooling aimed at the poorer strata of society. This marketisation of primary education, around which there is much contentious debate, is a reflexive reaction to the well-documented failings of the government system. LFP schooling, initially an urban phenomenon, has over the past decade experienced considerable growth in rural areas, and it is the rural setting, home to the majority of Indians, which is the least researched. It is argued by some that an effective policy response would be to rely increasingly on market-based competition involving LFPs, as these schools are purported to be affordable and accessible to the poor. Based primarily on a thirteen-village survey of 250 households and visits to 26 private and government schools in one rural district of Uttar Pradesh, India, this paper explores whether LFPs are in fact affordable to the rural poor and marginalised by examining the key factors in parental decision making and ultimately discovering whether equity considerations are served. Based on a detailed conceptual analysis of different poverty indicators, the paper adopts multivariate analysis to determine whether poverty is a major deciding factor in school choice, once other possible determinants associated with child and family characteristics are taken into account. The interpretation of the quantitative evidence was supported and triangulated by the qualitative evidence from focus group discussions.

The role of Medium of Instruction (MoI) or Language of Learning and Teaching (LoL&T) has not received sufficient attention as a factor denying meaningful access to education in South Africa. Yet the majority of under-performing learners are also children who learn in a language that is not their mother-tongue. This research aims to assess how recent language policies have changed the linguistic practices of schools and how this impacts on 'meaningful' access (understood as learners' access to the curriculum and therefore broad content knowledge). Interviews and open discussions were conducted with principals, teachers and parents from various township schools located in Mlazi (KwaZulu Natal) and in Soweto and Attridgeville (Gauteng) to illustrate the problems. The paper unpicks the different solutions - taken and proposed – to the disjuncture between MoI and meaningful access, whilst taking into account the legacy of past policies. Several proposals have been made to improve educational outcomes within the existing policy regarding medium of instruction (MoI) and language in general. Other proposals, in order to give transformation in education more immediate and concrete content, seek to exploit to its limit, or even alter, the official framework. They claim that such a move is a condition to reverse the overall poor outcome among learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. The MoI issue has sometimes been invoked in the debate on the relevance in societies of the periphery of what some see as essentially a Western educational model, a debate that the African renaissance ideology has helped rekindle in South Africa.

The period since 1991 has seen a general improvement both in terms of household welfare and schooling participation in Ghana. This monograph explores the patterns among descriptive indicators and uses regression analysis to examine possible causal relationships with special reference to the role of education in determining welfare and its reciprocal, the role of welfare and other aspects of economic privilege in the determination of school attendance and progression. It reviews the literature on modelling of the household consumption function as well as on modelling schooling decisions based on the household production function. Two groups of models are then fitted using data from the Ghana Living Standards Surveys. The results suggest that education levels play an important role in determining household welfare and that, for higher levels of education, these effects may be strengthening. Educational expansion has, however, meant that access to the benefits from these effects has widened somewhat. Demographic change has also played an important role in welfare improvements. In terms of absolute numbers, access to schooling in Ghana has expanded dramatically. Rates of completion and of drop-out have not improved, however, and there appears to be a worsening of age-appropriate completion rates. Nonetheless, the first half of the period since 1991 saw substantial increases in rates of ever-attendance and of current-attendance at the basic education level. This growth appears to have been driven by narrowing regional differentials, increasing welfare, urbanisation, improving gender equity, smaller and less dependent households and a reduction in the number of children involved in child labour. It is in relation to progression towards higher levels of education that more significant inequity emerges and in 2006 completion of lower secondary education in Ghana remains the preserve of children in areas and households of relative economic privilege.

The paper aims to provide evidence of the role of communications in education. The term communications is used in three interrelated ways: it refers to the interactions and engagements which take place between different actors in the education sector; it looks at the transmission of information, knowledge or data between two or more points; and it refers to the processes and means though which these interactions take place. The report identifies where communications in the education sector has been successful and some of its weaknesses. The paper focuses on spaces for communications in education, the processes of communications and the direct and indirect impacts of communications initiatives. It gives examples of a range of communication initiatives and provides evidence of impact, where available.

The use of augmented reality (AR) in formal education could prove a key component in future learning environments that are richly populated with a blend of hardware and software applications. However, relatively little is known about the potential of this technology to support teaching and learning with groups of young children in the classroom. Analysis of teacher–child dialogue in a comparative study between use of an AR virtual mirror interface and more traditional science teaching methods for 10-year-old children, revealed that the children using AR were less engaged than those using traditional resources. We suggest four design requirements that need to be considered if AR is to be successfully adopted into classroom practice. These requirements are: flexible content that teachers can adapt to the needs of their children, guided exploration so learning opportunities can be maximised, in a limited time, and attention to the needs of institutional and curricular requirements.

This country analytical review examines the key issues in access to and participation in primary and secondary education in Bangladesh, with a special focus on areas and dimensions of exclusion. Against a background of overall progress, particularly in closing the gender gap in primary and secondary enrollment, the research applies a conceptual framework outlining different forms of exclusion and presents two significant findings which compromise access and diminish gains made: high dropout rates at primary and secondary levels and nominal access but virtual exclusion from quality learning. Other areas surveyed in the review include interventions by public sector and non-governmental providers in primary and secondary education as well as the financing of basic education. This review of the literature concludes with suggestions for future research directions that might lead to new understanding and insights on equitable access and participation.

Meaningful access to education requires more than full enrolment; it requires high attendance rates, progression through grades with little or no repetition, and learning outcomes that confirm that basic skills are being mastered. This Review describes and explains patterns of access to schools in South Africa for children between the ages of 5 and 15 years. It outlines policy and legislation on access to education and provides a statistical analysis of learners enrolled in school, out-of-school children and learners vulnerable to exclusion. The quantitative data is supported by a review of research which explains the patterns of access and exclusion. The Review also analyses the way in which educational access is conceptualised, and identifies areas for future research.

This analytical review aims to explore trends in educational access and to delineate different groups which are vulnerable to exclusion from educational opportunities at the elementary stage. This review has drawn references from a series of analytical papers developed on different themes, including regional disparity in education, social equity and gender equity in education, the problem of drop out, education of the children of migrants, inequity in educational opportunities, health and nutrition, and governance of education, among others. The first and second sections of the paper present a brief review of the state of elementary education in India with particular focus on regional disparities and social inequities in provision. The third section delineates different zones of exclusion, highlighting the nature and magnitude of the problems of access, transition and equity. The fourth section captures the profiles of the varying groups of children and addresses the questions: ‘who is excluded from schooling?’ and ‘why are they excluded?’. In the final section, the paper makes an effort to identify gaps in our understanding which point to the need for further research and also identifies strategies that have had some success in addressing issues of access to elementary education in India.

The extent to which opportunities afforded by e-learning are embraced by an institution can depend in large measure on whether it is perceived as enabling and transformative or as a major and disruptive distraction. Most case studies focus on the former. This paper describes how e-learning was introduced into the latter environment. The sensitivity of competing pressures in a research intensive university substantially influenced the manner in which e-learning was promoted. This paper tells that story, from initial stealth to eventual university acknowledgement of the relevance of e-learning specifically to its own context.

This paper aims to give an introduction to the central concepts and the literature of Policy Studies in education. The first part of the paper addresses the questions of what policy is. How is it made and why is it relevant? It looks in particular at the role of the state and the Policy cycle framework which is an analytical tool that helps to analyse how policy is made and later implemented. The second part then focuses on the central concepts. The two main paradigms of education policy studies relate directly to these central themes. On the one hand a series of policy concepts cluster around social justice, inclusion and the fight against discrimination on the basis of race, gender and disability. On the other lie the debates raging around efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education. These include the issues of accountability and measurement of pupil achievement. The role of the market is discussed and a short section on globalisation explains how the nature of education policy is changing in light of globalisation. The last part of the paper four studies were chosen to look at how the concepts elaborated in the earlier part have been used in studies relating to EFA. The works chosen are: Myron Weiner’s The Child and the State in India (1991), Operation Blackboard, Policy Implementation in Indian Elementary Education by Caroline Dyer (2000), Michael Sanderson’s Education, Economic change and Society in England 1780-1870 (1991) and Social Origins of Educational Systems by Margaret Archer (1984). The paper concludes that the transferability of the concepts discussed above and their related debates to the context of EFA in developing countries require a re-contextualisation which takes into account the EFA priorities of equity and access. The basic question remains of how governments will manage to reconcile expanding the educations system and creating a true EFA system, while maintaining high levels of quality. The role of education policy analysis is key in looking at this debate from a different vantage point. vi

This paper presents education finance trends for Bangladesh since 2000. It shows that while government spending on education as a proportion of national income has stagnated, it has increased in real terms. Real increases in education spending have resulted in substantial increases in per student spending in basic education. At primary, enrolment declines have reinforced these trends and in 2005 per student spending in government primary schools was 30% higher, in real terms than in 2001. Despite these increases, per student spending on education in Bangladesh remains low compared to other countries in the region and countries at similar levels of development. Levels of government funding also vary enormously across different providers of basic education although these differences do not appear to have a significant impact on education outcomes at the primary level. At secondary, there appears to be a closer correlation between levels of public funding and outcomes although the socio-economic status of student intakes also appears to play an important role. To achieve equitable access to basic education, it is important to narrow these public funding differences. However, given the comparatively low levels of funding across the basic education system it is perhaps more important to increase overall levels of funding if the quality and overall efficiency of the system is to be improved.

The Millennium Development Goal 2 has a target of ensuring that, by 2015, all children will complete a full course of primary schooling. This is consistent with the second goal of the Dakar Framework of Action for Education for All that pre-dated it, except that the Dakar goal qualifies the Millennium Goal with ‘compulsory education of good quality’. Some countries have made spectacular progress towards increased access to education of good quality across all social groups; other countries have seen much less progress. Development agencies regularly appeal to political will as a key requirement for progress on EFA. But what is political will? What role do political interests play in the formulation of public policies and in their implementation? What factors, other than political interests, promote progress in education for all? These are questions that CREATE intends to address in a series of case studies in the future. This monograph is a prelude to these case studies and is intended to inform the conceptual framework and methods that will guide them. The monograph casts its literature net very wide. It addresses the literatures in educational policy, educational innovation and educational implementation in developed and developing countries over the past half century. It explores literatures from political science on public policy and development. It mines the literature on EFA policy and progress for glimpses of the political dimension. It delves into the history of the development of compulsory education in the West, both for the substantive lessons that may be learned, as well as for the conceptual frameworks and methods that have been employed.

Inspired by the 1990 Jomtien World Conference on Education for All and by the experience of non-governmental organisations such as BRAC, Save the Children/USA established a community schools project in southern Mali, working with 777 villages to establish and run their own primary schools between 1992 and 1998. These schools enrolled over 45,000 pupils who would otherwise have had little chance of going to school. Nearly half of these pupils were girls. School Management Committees (SMCs), composed of community members, had several responsibilities for the schools, including enrolment and retention of pupils. This monograph, based on a doctoral thesis written by one of the project leaders, which uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the following questions: How did the activity of the SMCs influence enrolment within the community school villages? How were gender-equitable enrolments arranged and maintained? Though it had originally been expected that the SMCs would be effective at promoting persistence in school, initial levels of dropout were high. What were the reasons for dropout from the community schools? How effective were the SMCs in reducing dropout and promoting persistence? The study found that the SMCs carried out their enrolment responsibilities effectively and that enrolments were equitable not only in terms of gender but also in terms of household wealth and parental educational history; enrolments did however show a bias against the pastoralist Peulh minority. While parents were very willing to enroll many of their children in the new schools, they were not receptive to the idea of “education for all” as they consciously oriented some of their children toward house and field work. This orientation of children away from school was slowing down expansion of the community schools in some villages. Parents were found to be willing to enroll girls, despite a traditional preference for enrolling boys, in exchange for a school being established in their village. But indications are that boy-preference is still prevalent, and that it reoccurs where the SMC ceases to insist on gender parity. SMCs were much less effective in preventing dropout. Dropout occurred principally for reasons outside the school. Many of the pupils had been enrolled over-age, and the transition to early adulthood led to the decision to leave school. In the parents’ and pupils’ “hierarchy of commitments”, schooling was not as important as marriage for girls and the exode (going off to seek work) for boys. The three SMCs studied in depth provide useful insights into the capacities and limits of community based school support associations in fulfilling their responsibilities for enrolment and persistence, for example the variability of leadership and dynamism among the SMCs, and the key role they played in maintaining gender equity in the schools. This paper argues that the Education for All discussions on access to schooling have become too focused on the policy level, and concludes by calling for more dialogue, reflection, and partnership with parents and community associations.

Children with disabilities are a minority that are not prioritised in the context of education programmes in India, although they are often found in many marginalised groups that are catered for if non-disabled ? for example, girls, scheduled tribe, scheduled caste, and other backward caste children. Inclusive education may be a way of merging these children’s needs in order to improve school quality and achieve EFA. However, a dominant special needs conceptualisation of IE in India, combined with negative attitudes towards disability, are currently preventing this approach. After exploring the relevance of disability and inclusive education in the context of EFA, this paper analyses the interpretation and implementation of inclusive education in India. The issues and constraints faced by the stakeholders involved, and the implications these may have, particularly for children with disabilities, lead to the conclusion that a twin-track approach to disability may assist not only in improving education access, but also the reconceptualisation of inclusive education as a school quality issue. In the long-term, it is hoped that this could assist in fulfilling the right to education for all children.

This paper provides an in-depth review and analysis of literature on dropping out from school, and focuses on children who have gained access, but fail to complete a basic education cycle. The main discussion is around why and how children drop out from school. Here drop out is not presented as a distinct event, but rather a process where a range of supply-demand factors interact to influence schooling access. The paper looks at literature in relation to household, community and social contexts of dropping out, as well as school supply and practices. It also explores what research is saying around pre-cursors to dropping out and factors which may influence retention. Finally, the study identifies gaps in research around dropping out and how CREATE research could address some of these.

Small schools are a significant feature of the educational landscape in India, with approximately 78% of primary schools having three or fewer teachers to attend to all grade levels, and more than 55% with 100 or fewer students in 2005. These schools are commonly found in impoverished rural communities, where they are often characterised by the need for multigrade classroom management as a result of low enrolment and/or too few teachers, and usually face significant shortages in terms of teaching and learning resources and basic infrastructure. This frequently leads to poor educational quality, student disillusionment, high rates of drop-out and low rates of retention. Ironically, many of these schools, especially in rural areas, were established in direct response to domestic and international pressure to achieve Education For All and the Millennium Development Goals. As such, they represent an important part of efforts to improve access to primary education for the most marginalised groups. The teaching and learning which occurs in small schools, however, varies a great deal depending on a number of factors such as local social and economic circumstances, the availability of physical and human resources, curriculum and assessment methods, and type of school management. Yet to date research on small schools in India largely consists of quantitative datasets which attempt to measure their characteristics (class size, number of classrooms, style of management, etc.) and geographical distribution. The qualitative dimension of students’, teachers’, and policy makers’ perspectives and experiences of education in these settings, on the other hand, has remained largely unexplored. This research therefore applied both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to understand the contemporary context of small schools in India. It included an extensive literature and policy review, and quantitative analysis of data available from India’s District Information System for Education (DISE), as well as fieldwork with policy makers in Delhi and in small, multigrade NGO schools in Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. This mixture of methods allowed for an exploration of small schools on several levels. At the national level, the influences and impacts of national primary education policy on small schools were examined and a national profile of small schools was created using available data. This national level work was complemented by a local-level exploration of small school initiatives by two NGOs which have shown positive results through innovations in multigrade management, teacher education, and school-community networking.

This review paper draws on recent data to map the access and participation rates of girls relative to boys. This paper offers a critical assessment of findings of different recent researches on school education in India identifying the areas that need further research. The paper reveals that while enrolment of girls has increased rapidly since the 1990s, there is still a substantial gap in upper primary and secondary schooling and gender inequalities interlock with other forms of social inequality, notably caste, ethnicity and religion. The paper concludes with recommendation for implementation of enabling policy to meet the challenges for improving the quality of schools ensuring better opportunities for girls at higher levels of education, notably upper primary and secondary schools.

The Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) are among the most socially and educationally disadvantaged groups in India. This paper examines issues concerning school access and equity for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities and also highlights their unique problems, which may require divergent policy responses. The paper is divided into seven main parts. The first two sections introduce the reader to the nature of exclusion and discrimination faced by Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and outlines the debate on the role of education in improving the socio-economic profile of both groups. The third section explains the socio-economic conditions within which Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes live and their marginalized status in contemporary India. The fourth section provides a discussion of literacy advancement among these groups, and of national policies and programmes which aim to improve school access and equity. The fifth section highlights special efforts made by certain state governments to improve educational participation of these two communities as well as the educational experiments on a more modest scale undertaken by community based Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). The sixth section focuses on casteism as a deeply ideological issue that undercuts even the most genuine reform measures, and suggests research and policy options that may help to address underlying structural and ideological issues. The concluding section highlights a few critical areas for further research in the area.

This monograph reviews literature on school and class size for its relevance to the concerns of CREATE. It estimates the numbers of small schools and numbers of children learning in small schools worldwide. It assesses the implications of school size, large and small, for learning outcomes, costs and for social equity. It outlines how policy ‘issues’ of size, large and small, are constructed and presented in a range of education systems. It identifies the curriculum, teaching and learning issues associated with small schools and examples of good practice and discusses the evidence on learning outcomes in small, multigrade schools. It synthesises the research on class size, large and small, in developed and developing countries, and identifies its relevance for EFA Goals 2, 5 and 6. Finally, the monograph draws implications for on-going and future CREATE studies, in particular the Community and School studies in Bangladesh, Ghana and India.

There are still many categories of children in India for whom adequate and appropriate strategies are not in place for their effective education. One such substantive category is children of seasonal migrants – a group which has not been on the radar screen of the government or development agencies. Distress seasonal migration is a growing phenomenon in almost all arid parts of India. Drought and lack of work in villages forces entire families to migrate for several months every year in search of work merely to survive. Children accompany their parents, and as a result drop-out rates go up. Migrants comprise the most vulnerable sections of society, and especially those that also belong to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe groups. There is no official data available on the scale of distress seasonal migration, but estimates put the numbers of migrants between 1 and 3 crore (10 to 30 million). The number of children involved in these migrations may range between 40 and 60 lakhs (4 to 6 million). Migration takes place to a range of industrial and agro-industrial sectors such as brick manufacture, salt making, sugar cane harvesting, stone quarrying, construction, plantations and fishing. This paper identifies major sectors and geographies with a high incidence of seasonal migration, and gives broad estimates of the numbers involved, especially the number of children between 0-14 years. It also outlines the nature and patterns of seasonal migration in different sectors, and how these annual migration cycles overlap with the annual school calendar. The discussion focuses on the difficulties that children face with schooling both in villages and at migration sites, and the conditions under which children drop out of schools, as well as the response or lack of response of local school systems to the education of migrant children in some areas. The paper also outlines the efforts made so far by government and NGOs to address these problems through alternative schooling, and provides recommendations for state and central governments in terms of policy and program interventions.

This country analytical review examines the key issues in access to and participation in primary and secondary education in Bangladesh, with a special focus on areas and dimensions of exclusion. Against a background of overall progress, particularly in closing the gender gap in primary and secondary enrollment, the research applies a conceptual framework outlining different forms of exclusion and presents two significant findings which compromise access and diminish gains made: high dropout rates at primary and secondary levels and nominal access but virtual exclusion from quality learning. Other areas surveyed in the review include interventions by public sector and non-governmental providers in primary and secondary education as well as the financing of basic education. This review of the literature concludes with suggestions for future research directions that might lead to new understanding and insights on equitable access and participation.

This analytical review aims to explore trends in educational access and to delineate different groups which are vulnerable to exclusion from educational opportunities at the elementary stage. This review has drawn references from a series of analytical papers developed on different themes, including regional disparity in education, social equity and gender equity in education, the problem of drop out, education of the children of migrants, inequity in educational opportunities, health and nutrition, and governance of education, among others. The first and second sections of the paper present a brief review of the state of elementary education in India with particular focus on regional disparities and social inequities in provision. The third section delineates different zones of exclusion, highlighting the nature and magnitude of the problems of access, transition and equity. The fourth section captures the profiles of the varying groups of children and addresses the questions: ‘who is excluded from schooling?’ and ‘why are they excluded?’. In the final section, the paper makes an effort to identify gaps in our understanding which point to the need for further research and also identifies strategies that have had some success in addressing issues of access to elementary education in India.

This review of educational development in Ghana has been developed to explore key issues in access to education, capture recent research, and to identify gaps in knowledge and understanding. This critical analytic review provides the basis for research which seeks to identify children who are excluded from basic education, establish the causes of their exclusion, and identify ways of ensuring that all children comnplete a full cycle of basic education successfully.

This literature review synthesises the findings from published reviews and key individual studies of health, nutrition and educational access with a particular emphasis on issues of gender, poverty, social exclusion and innovative practices. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the range of research designs and methods employed in these studies and the theoretical models of health and education that lie behind the studies and identifies knowledge gaps that could be filled by new empirical research. It also draws implications from the literature review for the further conceptual development of the CREATE Zones of Access model and for the design of future empirical studies paying special attention to school and community-based studies and identifying questions that could be included in household and school survey instruments.

The research was part of Equal, a European Social Fund initiative addressing labour market discrimination. Increasing educational participation amongst ‘non-traditional’ students can be viewed in terms of the philanthropic goal of extending opportunities to individuals, or structurally in terms of the globalised economy’s demand for skilled labour (Naidoo & Callender, 2000:227). Decreasing numbers of school leavers necessitate casting the net beyond traditional groups (Gallagher et al, 1993:2; Edwards, 1993:5), implicating responsibility for promoting positive student experiences for non-traditional students targeted by the education system. Lone parents report sacrifices in pursuit of education including debt, placing children in childcare, and loss of family time, support networks and jobs. Mature and working-class students’ low completion rates (Yorke, 2001:148) highlight difficulties managing learning with other adult responsibilities. Hands et al observe student parents’ particular susceptibility to non-completion (Hands et al, 2007:25). Institutionally, non-completion represents ‘wasted’ investment. Providing inadequate support also fails vulnerable students, setting them up for failure and exacerbating frequently low self-esteem and confidence (Murphy & Roopchand, 2003:247,256; Greif, 1992:570). The present research illustrated how negative school experiences often result in lengthy educational gaps. Institutions are responsible for ensuring that individuals’ self-esteem is not further damaged by failure through inadequate support.

The Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE), was established with DFID support in 2006. It is a partnership between research institutions in the UK, Bangladesh, India, Ghana and South Africa. This paper is the first in a series of CREATE publications which will be developed over the life of the consortium. The first part of this paper discusses why access issues remain at the centre of the problems of achieving Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals. Many children remain unenrolled at primary level, many of those enrolled attend irregularly and learn little, and large numbers fail to make the transition to secondary schooling. After outlining the magnitude of the challenge of improving access to universal levels, the paper develops analytic frameworks to understand access issues in new ways, and generate empirical studies related to each of the zones of exclusion identified. The last part of the paper briefly outlines some of the empirical research that is being developed.

While access to state schooling has grown in many countries in recent years, a hardcore of marginalised children continue to be excluded from this. Some of these children are able to gain access to education through non-state provision. The focus of this paper is on primaryschool aged children who find access through (international) non-government organisations (NGOs). Based on a review of the available literature, the paper shows that there have been fluctuations in attention paid to NGO provision by education researchers since the 1970s. Changes are due in part to the prevailing political and economic environment, as well as to pressure placed on international agencies and national governments to reach education targets. The paper also shows that there has been a shift in the priorities of these providers over this period, from seeing themselves as supporting a parallel, alternative system of education independent of the state system, towards one aimed at being complementary to the state system, with the intention of ultimately supporting children’s access to a state-provided education. The paper highlights that much of the available literature suggests that NGO provision often intends to bring benefits in terms of the alternative forms of pedagogy and accountability it aims to offer. However, as the paper indicates, there is very little systematic, critical analysis of who is gaining access to education offered by alternative providers, or what they are actually getting access to. As such, there is a need for analysis of educational access to pay greater attention to diverse forms of access – both in terms of who provides, and what is provided. Moreover, changes in priorities associated with the effects of the international economic and political agenda, along with the intention of integrating multiple providers of education into a system-wide approach, give rise to the need for an analysis of the implications for NGO-government collaboration to ensure sustainability of educational access to those who would otherwise be excluded.

Basic education is commonly regarded as a state responsibility. However, in reality, non-state providers (NSPs) have always been involved in basic education service delivery, and there is often a blurring of boundaries between state and non-state roles with respect to financing, ownership, management, and regulation. In recent years, the focus on the role of non-state providers (NSPs) has intensified within the context of the move towards achieving Education for All (EFA). The paper considers this shift, with particular attention towards service delivery to 'underserved groups', defined as those for whom access to affordable government services of appropriate quality is most problematic. In some cases, this refers to particular sub-groups of a population within a country. In other cases (notably fragile states), it can refer to large sections of the country’s population. The paper indicates the wide range of NSPs that exist to serve different underserved groups. It notes that NSPs are commonly viewed as having a comparative advantage over state provision - in terms of quality, cost-effectiveness, choice, accountability to citizens etc. However, in reality there is very limited robust analysis to support some of these claims. The paper then considers the ways in which non-state providers engage with the state in education service delivery, including with respect to contracting, policy dialogue, and regulation - and the role that donors play in this relationship. The paper concludes that relations between NSPs and the state are not straightforward given the range of different providers involved in education service delivery, with those serving the better-off tending to dominate engagement with government. This can be at the expense of smaller-scale, informal providers aiming to support those otherwise under-served by government provision. As such, the paper argues that there is a need for ‘real’ on-going dialogue which recognises the diversity amongst NSPs, to ensure collaboration between NSPs and government benefits the underserved and so assists in moving towards the achievement of EFA goals.

There is a lively debate about the extent to which private providers of educational services can contribute to the achievement of Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals. There is evidence that in some poor countries private provision has been growing especially at the secondary level. The reasons for this are not simple but include excess demand (more applicants than places), differentiated demand (preference for alternatives to existing public schools), and the opportunities created for entrepreneurs by newly liberalised regulatory frameworks for educational services. This paper identifies a range of constraints and contextual realities that will shape future development. The first section draws attention to the diversity of non-government private provision and some fundamental issues that shape its likely contribution to enhanced access to schooling. Second, estimates are presented of the numbers of children currently out of school and their location in Sub-Saharan Africa. Third, data is discussed which illustrates the extent to which exclusion is related to wealth, location and gender, focusing on economic constraints. Fourth, costs related to teachers are modelled to indicate likely minimum operating costs for unsubsidised schooling. Fifth, an analysis is offered of the underlying demographic realities of expanded enrolment to reinforce the need to understand the magnitude of the task of achieving the MDGs and the need to identify mechanisms that expand services to large numbers of school-age children drawn from the poorest households. Finally some concluding remarks draw together the arguments.

This discussion paper provides an overview and analytic guide to long term planning of education systems in the context of Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals. Long term gains in educational access depend on anticipating future financial and non-financial constraints on growth and on successful implementation of plans which support growth that can be sustained. Some recent expansion of primary schooling has failed to take a sufficiently long term approach to growth and has risked the creation of resource bottlenecks, poor trade offs between quality and quantity, and dependence on uncertain financing. The paper first outlines three different styles of long term planning – Planning Lite, Framework National Planning, and Participatory Planning. It distinguishes between aspirational and target-generating approaches. It then describes the processes and tools that are needed to develop long term plans for expanded access that can reconcile goals and targets with realistic resource envelopes. These processes are designed to include mechanisms to promote consensus and build commitment. The nature of Medium Term Expenditure Frameworks (MTEF) is then explored as a necessary tool to manage implementation. Appendix 1 provides more detailed discussion of the three approaches to planning. Appendix 2 elaborates on aspirational planning and gradients of achievement. Appendix 3 explores issues concerned with targets and indicators of performance. Appendix 4 contains a selected list of source materials.

This paper makes the case for managed expansion of secondary schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa. The great majority of secondary age African children remain excluded from access to good quality secondary schooling. Increasing numbers are graduating from primary schools where enrolments are rapidly growing as a result of successful Education for All programmes. The knowledge and skill that secondary schools can provide is central to closing the gap between Sub Saharan Africa and the rest of the world in the capabilities in the labour force that can sustain growth. The analyses undertaken for the Secondary Education in Africa (SEIA) programme of the World Bank have explored many dimensions of the challenges ahead. This paper complements this work and offers new insights into necessary reforms of policy and practice. It outlines the current status and structure of secondary provision, and the demographic issues that will influence expanded access. It then elaborates some of the key issues facing governments and development partners, and reviews the resources that would be needed to reach different levels of participation. It offers a set of policy options and strategies that can be used to shape managed growth within sustainable financial frameworks. The analysis indicates that budget shares between educational levels and overall spending on secondary education need to be revisited if higher participation is to be achieved. More than 3.0% of gross national product (GNP) would be needed to achieve gross enrolment rates of 60% at lower secondary and 30% at upper secondary in low enrolment countries with existing cost structures. The costs per pupil have to fall if expanded access is to be sustainable. No countries with ratios of secondary to primary unit costs of more than 3:1 succeed in universalising access to secondary schooling but many countries remain above these levels. New balances will have to struck between rates of expansion towards enrolment targets at primary, lower and upper secondary levels. Structural changes are needed that can facilitate higher secondary enrolment rates at affordable costs and diminish gender inequities. Better management of the flow of pupils could increase completion rates and lower costs per successful completer. Improved teacher deployment will be critical to successful expansion. Much more access could be provided if norms for pupil-teacher ratios (e.g. 35:1 at lower secondary, and 25:1 at upper secondary) could be applied and if class teacher ratios at secondary level fell from 3:1 to less than 2:1. Trained teachers will be critical to secondary expansion. Where demand is greatest, and initial training lengthy and expensive, alternative methods will have to be considered which lower costs of training and increase supply. So also will be changes in school management that can provide some incentives to manage human and physical resources efficiently. Secondary expansion without curriculum reform risks irrelevance and wastage. New populations of school children require curricula that address their needs, respond to changing social and economic circumstances, and recognise resource constraints. Alongside this physical capacity needs planned expansion in ways that optimise increased access. Expanded secondary access will benefit greatly from successful mechanisms to generate support from the communities that schools serve. There are many possible methods of cost-sharing and cost-recovery that can and should be facilitated. These need to be linked to the capacity of households to support fees and contributions so that they do not become exclusionary. Partnerships with non-government providers can make some contribution to expanded access. However, they are most likely to play a complementary role since they are unlikely to be the providers of last resort to those otherwise excluded by location, household income, or low achievement.

Kenya has introduced policies to promote universal primary schooling at least three times since independence. Analysis of enrolments over four decades shows how these initiatives have resulted in gains in participation which have not always been sustained. This study illuminates the dynamics of efforts to increase access to education and acts as a reminder that recent Education for All initiatives should learn from past experience if gains are to be sustained.

Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are among the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa which have recently implemented policies for free primary education, motivated in part by renewed democratic accountability following the re-emergence of multi-party politics in the 1990s. However, it is not the first time that the goal of expanding primary education has been pursued by these three neighbouring countries which have much in common. Since the 1960s, they have attempted to expand access at various levels of their education systems albeit with differences in philosophy and in both the modes and successes of implementation. All three countries continue to face the challenges of enrolling every child in school, keeping them in school and ensuring that meaningful learning occurs for all enrolled children. This paper provides an a review of the three countries’ policies for expanding access to education, particularly with regard to equity and the enrolment of excluded groups since their political independence in the 1960s. It considers policies in the light of the countries’ own stated goals alongside the broader international agendas set by the Millennium Development Goals and in particular, ‘Education for All’. It is concerned with the following questions: What led to those policies and how were they funded? What was the role, if any, of the international community in the formulation of those policies? What were the politics and philosophies surrounding the formulation of those policies, have the policies changed over time, and if so how and why? The paper also discusses the range of strategies for implementation adopted. Tremendous growth has occurred in access to primary education since the 1960s, not least in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The challenge of providing equitable access to schooling has been addressed in a series of education drives with varying motivations, modalities and degrees of success, the most recent of which pays attention to the increasingly pressing question of the transition to secondary education. The success of such policy remains to be seen but will be crucial for the widening of access to the benefits of education and to economic opportunity, particularly for those groups which history has so far excluded.

The Meno project came up with a framework for narrative guidance and narrative construction in the context of non-adaptive systems. As part of the HOMEWORK project we are now trying to take this framework forward so that we can create adaptive systems that can help teachers and learners deliver a coherent experience across artifacts and contexts. In this paper we discuss how we are attempting to ensure that the framework that underpins the HOMEWORK project helps designers, teachers and learners to work together. We discuss the evolution of the current Non Linear Narrative Framework (NINF) and, in particular, our continuing work with teachers as we try to increase our understanding about how best to design to support them in their lesson planning activities. Our focus here is on extending the Meno framework for an adaptive system and extending it to other user groups in addition to learners.

This paper discusses the development of a documentation technique for collaborative interactions. We describe the original version of the technique as used for a single learner collaborating with a software based learning partner; the second generation of the technique, which required adaptation for application to the analysis of group use of multimedia; and finally the current variation, which is being used to record young children using digital toys and associated software. Particular attention is paid to the way in which the original approach has been adapted in order to accommodate learning contexts that involve technology beyond the desktop computer. We explore some of the challenges these different learning situations pose for those involved in the evaluation of collaborative learning and suggest that tried and tested techniques can be adapted and re-used, provided that the loci of interactivity are clearly specified and the appropriate data sources identified.

This paper uses ALIS data to compare academic performance in two subjects often viewed as relatively close substitutes for one another at A-level. The important role of GCSE achievement is confirmed for both subjects. There is evidence of strong gender effects and variation in outcomes across Examination Boards. A counterfactual exercise suggests that if the sample of Business Studies candidates had studied Economics nearly 40% of those who obtained a grade C or better in the former subject would not have done so in the latter. The opposite exercise uggests that 12% more Economics candidates would have achieved a grade C or better if they had taken Business Studies. In order to render a Business Studies A-level grade comparable to an Economics one in terms of relative difficulty, we estimate that a downward adjustment of 1.5 UCAS points should be applied to the former subject. This adjustment is lower than that suggested by correction factors based on conventional subject pair analysis for these two subjects.

Description of the project The research involved six case studies of higher education institutions across England, Scotland and Wales. The project aims were:to explore staff experiences of equity issues and institutional equity policies. Participants were drawn from different occupational backgrounds and a variety of socio-cultural groups paying attention also to gender, sexual orientation, ‘race’/ethnicity, disability, age and religio to conduct a critical discourse analysis of equity policies in the six institution to gather the views of senior manager-academics and administrators on their institutional equality policies, and how these relate to national policie to identify challenges, inadequacies, examples of good practice, and constraints/incentives in relation to equity policies at institutional and sector level.

This paper presents disadvantaged households’ ‘mental models’ about low-fee private (LFP) schooling for their daughters in a study in Lucknow District, Uttar Pradesh. It argues that assumptions in the dominant discourse on girls’ schooling in India obscure the complex negotiations and trade-offs disadvantaged families make when considering schooling choices for their daughters. Furthermore, they obscure a focus on change resulting from and intertwined with changing socio-economic structures and institutional contexts for schooling over time. The changing institutional context for education through increased LFP provision is the focus for analysis. Data show that participants were not selective in choosing the LFP sector by gender, and thought of it as representing the best chance for their daughters’ livelihoods.

In this article, experiences of beginning primary teachers on an English employment-based route into teaching, called the Graduate Teacher Programme, are presented and evaluated. Factors affecting the progress of trainee teachers on the programme are explored, including prior work experience, expectations of the participants and levels of support provided by the schools. In general, those with prior classroom experience found the transition easier than those for whom this was a major career change, although schools often gave too much responsibility to those who had worked in schools before. Personal, informal support was regarded as vital in boosting trainees' often low self-confidence, while formal support was valued more in retrospect. Contextual features such as the culture of the school made a significant difference to how the beginning teachers perceived their progress. Findings are analysed with reference to studies of the Graduate Teacher Programme, mature students and workplace learning.

Computer games are continuously improving graphics capabilities and game play, but the market demands show that more compelling gaming applications are required. In this article, the requirements of modern gaming applications are investigated and a classification of the most significant game design issues is presented. To understand the issues related to video and virtual reality gaming, an interactive game engine is designed and, as a case study, a traditional two-dimensional arcade game, called Breakout, is ported. Collision detection is supported between the graphics components of the application based on Newtonian laws of physics. To test the effectiveness of our approach, a tangible platform for playing interactive three-dimensional games using video see-through augmented reality techniques is proposed. To evaluate the effectiveness of each application, a pilot study was performed and the initial results of this study are presented.

This paper draws attention to the gendered nature of violence in schools. Recent recognition that schools can be violent places has tended to ignore the fact that many such acts originate in unequal and antagonistic gender relations, which are tolerated and ‘normalised’ by everyday school structures and processes. After examining some key concepts and definitions, we provide a brief overview of the scope and various manifestations of gender violence in schools, noting that most research to date has focused on girls as victims of gender violence within a heterosexual context and ignores other forms such as homophobic and girl violence. We then move on to look at a few interventions designed to address gender violence in schools in the developing world and end by highlighting the need for more research and improved understanding of the problem and how it can be addressed.

This paper describes a project designed to provide children with a context-inclusive approach to collecting scientific data. The term context-inclusive refers to the collection of data which records the process of scientific data collection itself. We outline the design process carried out within two partner schools with the aim of engaging children in taking part in, and reflecting upon, the scientific process involved in collecting and analysing scientific data. We provided children with the ability to share and compare their data with children at their own and other schools. Our contextinclusive approach involved the design of tailored sensors and a bespoke interface displaying video data synchronised with environmental pollution data. Through evaluation of the data collection, analysis and sharing sessions, we describe how the context-inclusive approach impacts on children's understanding of the scientific process. We focus on children's discussion and reflection around understanding the constraints of measuring. We argue that the collection and presentation of contextual data engenders reflection on constraints, and may enable improved understanding of that process.

How do we conceptualise and design mixed reality environments (MREs) to support creative play? Here we describe a first pass at a conceptual framework and use it do design a MRE for young children to explore in, focussing on the familiar activity of colour mixing. Different set-ups were provided, where paint or light colours could be mixed, using either physical tools, digital tools or a combination of these. The paper describes how children collaboratively discovered creative ways of using the mixed reality spaces for colour-mixing. We reflect on the success of the framework and our findings for designing effective play in MREs.

This paper describes and contrasts findings from two related projects where groups of science pupils investigated local air pollution using a collection of mobile sensors and devices. Both projects however played out in different ways. A qualitative analysis of the projects points to the various issues that contributed to the different experiences despite similar technologies for a similar task. These include: project focus; type of facilitator input and the benefits of in-situ data collection combined with subsequent review and reflection. We point to specific relationships between technologies and context of use, and building on this draw out recommendations for the design of in-context, science learning sessions. This work contributes to the growing conceptual understanding, based on ‘real world’ experiences, of how mobile and ubiquitous technologies can be appropriated in context to support learning. It contributes to an increased understanding of the types of collaborative scientific activity that are supported by different technology configurations, and the roles that human and system facilitators can play in this process.

This annotated bibliography documents the wealth of scholarship on gender and higher education in the Commonwealth, particularly in low-income countries. It contains the results of a major literature search of published and 'grey' literature: the texts that do not reach the public domain, including conference papers, seminar papers and MA and doctoral theses. The aim is to present as full a picture as possible of issues, debates and concerns that have arisen over the past ten years. The bibliography originated in the Gender Equity in Commonwealth Higher Education Research Project, directed by Louise Morley at the Institute of Education, University of London. In the early stages of the project it became apparent that there is a paucity of published literature on women and higher education outside the West. While there is literature on girls and education in low-income countries, there appeared to be little material published about women's experiences of higher education, depsite the research on gender equity in higher education across the Commonwealth. Somehow descriptions and analysis of this work did not seem to be getting into the public domain. This meant that opportunities for dissemination and sharing were being severely limited. Researching Women addresses this lack by describing the location and reviewing the content of writing from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Australasia and the UK. As such, it should be a valuable resource for gender scholars who are interested in international patterns and interventions for gender equity in higher education.

The convergence of communications and information technology within education, as well as more widely, means that concepts developed within ITS & AIED are now applicable to a wider range of wired, and more interestingly 'wireless', technologies. In [1] we outlined the educational rationale of a Broadband User Model (BbUM) that would support the individualisation of the interactions, both between the technology and a user and between collaborating users, for a system able to deliver a variety of resources in a range of media, including interactive TV. At the heart of any such system there needs to be a database of resources from which the user, the educational designer or the system itself, including the user model, can select. Some of these resources will be items that were developed for other purposes, such as self-contained TV programmes, books or simulation programs. Others will be resources developed with such a system in mind. In either case the use and reuse of these resources depends on careful tagging at a level of granularity that enables them to be used both in their entire original form as well as in parts. For example, imagine that a TV programme is being indexed and that it consists of a number of items, originally in a chronological sequence. The tagging might indicate that one item is analagous to another or generalises it. Labelling the items makes explicit some of the implicit pedagogic relationships that underpin the design of the original programme. This enables the possibility of recomposing the TV programme in some other sequence that reflects a different overall pedagogical structure to the original. Moreover, each item is also tagged in terms of its position in some domain scheme. A prototype system has been implemented that employed a database searchable in a variety of ways, including the keywords matched against video/TV captions and/or automatically transcribed speech. Metadata included such fields as ID, title, ownership, media type, format, and duration. Content categorisation included topic, target user group, and interactivity. Form categorisation included problem, concept, description, and explanation or example.

The HomeWork project is building an exemplar system to provide individualised experiences for individual and groups of children aged 6-7 years, their parents, teachers and classmates at school. It employs an existing set of broadcast video media and associated resources that tackle both numeracy and literacy at Key Stage 1. The system employs a learner model and a pedagogical model to identify what resource is best used with an individual child or group of children collaboratively at a particular learning point and at a particular location. The Coherence Compiler is that component of the system which is designed to impose an overall narrative coherence on the materials that any particular child is exposed to. This paper presents a high level vision of the design of the Coherence Compiler and sets its design within the overall framework of the HomeWork project and its learner and pedagogical models.

We describe the use of a simulated student in a synchronous but distributed collaborative learning environment in the domain of programming. The role of the simulated student is to detect and repair difficulties in collaborative learning amongst the human students, for example when a human student is too passive or when the students start chatting about off-topic conversations. The simulated student intervenes by posting messages in the shared "chat" window, just like the human students and was believed to be another human student by them. The paper describes the rules by which the simulated student operates and briefly outlines an evaluation of the system with university first year programming students. The system proved to be successful both in detecting a range of difficulties and in intervening effectively.

This paper discusses the importance of learning context with a particular focus upon the educational application of mobile technologies. We suggest that one way to understand a learning context is to perceive it as a Learner Centric Ecology of Resources. These resources can be deployed variously but with a concern to promote and support different kinds of mediations, including those of the teacher and learner. Our approach is informed by sociocultural theory and is used to construct a framework for the evaluation of learning experiences that encompass various combinations of technologies, people, spaces and knowledge. The usefulness of the framework is tested through two case studies that evaluate a range of learning contexts in which mobile technologies are used to support learning. We identify the benefits and challenges that arise when introducing technology across multiple locations. An analytical technique mapped from the Ecology of Resources framework is presented and used to identify the ways in which different technologies can require learners to adopt particular roles and means of communication. We illustrate how we involve participants in the analysis of their context and highlight the extent to which apparently similar contexts vary in ways that are significant for learners. The use of the Ecology of Resources framework to evaluate a range of learning contexts has demonstrated that technology can be used to provide continuity across locations: the appropriate contextualization of activities across school and home contexts, for example. It has also provided evidence to support the use of technology to identify ways in which resources can be adapted to meet the needs of a learner.

Interactive Learning Environments at Sussex University is a course in which students are given mobile devices (XDAs) with PDA functionality and full Internet access for the duration of the term. They are challenged to design and evaluate learning experiences, both running and evaluating learning sessions that involve a blend of technologies. Data on technology usage was collected via backups, email and web-site logging as well as video and still photography of student-led sessions. Initial analysis indicates that large amounts of technical support, solid pedagogical underpinning and a flexible approach to both delivery context and medium are essential. The project operated under the acronym SMILE – Sussex Mobile Interactive Learning Environment.

This paper draws upon data from a longitudinal study of the first cohort of five students making the transition from teaching assistant in secondary school to specialist teacher of secondary mathematics via a new full-time honours degree in Mathematics Education Studies beginning in September 2002. Data from a second cohort of four women and one man starting in 2003 is less complete, but used as appropriate. To complete the degree each student must necessarily continue to work as a teaching assistant, and must complete some assessed work in their school setting. The study is thus located within theorised literature of widening participation, student choice, and learning mathematics. It is timely in view of government policy of a �remodelled school workforce� (DfES, 2004) whereby the stated intention is to complement a reduced cadre of qualified teachers with an enhanced number of staff supporting teaching and learning. I argue, using Bernstein�s work (1996) on subject classification, this student group represents a different type of learner, navigating simultaneously two mathematics discourses: �hard� university mathematics, and �everyday mathematics� as experienced by the lower ability school pupils that the students support when at work. Widening participation rhetoric focuses on enticing people into learning who would not otherwise be there (Hillage and Aston, 2001). This account relates to people who, despite being unqualified are already in educational institutions, i.e. schools, through their work. These are people who are �pre-disposed� favourably towards higher education (see for example Billet, 2001), and for whom progression is what is desired. The students have undergone a long, and autodidactical preparation for university study, illustrated in a variety of ways through previous personal and professional engagement with learning. The first group were aged between 35 - 49 on entry to the university, and all working as teaching assistants in three schools, two in each of two schools, and one in a third. None had higher than Grade B Intermediate GCSE in mathematics, but all had qualifications gained through continuing education as adults: in counselling, embroidery, art, design, numeracy, literacy and computer qualifications between them. In comparison with �traditional� mathematics undergraduates1, i.e. higher than average A-level points scores on entry, and mainly following on straight from school, the first group of students have extremely limited mathematics qualifications. None has any parents, brothers or sisters that had attended university, and only one has graduates in her immediate family: her husband and daughter. In terms of national data on student populations as a whole (UCAS, Labour Force Survey, Office for National Statistics, 2004) this group is older than almost three-quarters of the undergraduate population and in a lower social class than half of them. The second group show some differences from the first, not in so far as their mathematics qualifications, but in the fact that two of them are already graduates of other subjects. Nevertheless, students are progressing through the programme, between them achieving the full range of marks, and, unlike traditional mathematics students, so far there has been no drop-out. These students exemplify a different type of mathematics learner, those for who mathematics has never been easy, have never been recognised as talented, and who have developed as a consequence successful strategies for dealing with the practically inevitable difficulties. They are people with specific graduate professional ambitions entering the academy with low level formal mathematics qualifications. These distinctions are forcing a rethink of what success in mathematics means, what may be useful pre-requisites in terms of pre-qualification, and the potential relationship between university learning of mathematics alongside work-place learning, in this case in a secondary school mathematics department.

Northern Ghana presents an interesting case of the limitations of the conventional school system in reaching underserved and deprived populations with basic education. Due to the peculiar nature of its demographic characteristics and the socio-economic challenges that confront this area of Ghana, conventional school systems are unable to thrive and make an impact in remote areas. Many of these communities are sparsely populated and scattered making distance a hindrance to school. attendance. A major barrier to access and participation is also the cost. In poor deprived communities whether or not children attend school usually depends on the direct or indirect costs to families. Direct costs arises from schooling accessories such as uniforms, books and writing materials whilst the indirect costs are largely in the form of income lost from the child’s potential employment or contribution to household income through direct labor. Yet another obstacle is the official school calendar which usually conflicts with families’ economic activities to which the child is a crucial contributor. A growing number of NGOs and civil society organizations are introducing basic education initiatives that have been adjusted to reflect these demographic and socio-economic realities. Many of the NGOs try to promote the spirit of self-help efforts among poor rural people using strategies that encourage community participation and ownership of the basic education initiative. This paper describes and analyses the effort of one such NGO education programme known as the “School for Life” (SFL) in Northern Ghana. The paper examines the extent to which the activities of this organization are actually promoting self-help efforts in sustaining an aid initiated basic education programme. The acid test for aid effectiveness is what happens when it phases out - in that case is the initiative sustainable? The paper argues that for true sustainability to be achieved there is the need for a concerted working relationship between the aid programme provider and local government institutions because of the potential benefits that this relationship can bring in sustaining the programme once external support ends. Finally, using the SFL programme as an example, it argues that the key to promoting greater participation and commitment among rural communities towards basic education, is by showing that it can actually open up access to higher levels of education without conflicting with the socio-cultural and economic activities of the society.

This paper discusses how the audit culture has impacted on UK academics in terms of professional identities, priorities and social relations. Micropolitics, performativity, psychic economy and the changing political economy of higher education are some of the theoretical tools used to offer some explanatory power for the range of engagements with quality assurance. Questions are raised about the polysemic discourse of quality and how it has been subjected to multiple interpretations. For example, there are those members of the academy who see it as a major form of modernisation and student empowerment, while others see it as a form of symbolic violence. Specific attention is paid to peer review, impact studies, gendered power relations, productivity measures and whether quality intersects with equality in the academy. The paper concludes with calls to consider what the gestalt is of higher education.

Literature review on pupil grouping

This chapter reports on the case studies on formative assessment funded by OECD within which the author was responsible for that undertaken in Queensland. The full report of the research, on which this chapter draws, was peer reviewed through OECD. The empirical basis for this study made an original contribution to understanding formative assessment across cultures.

From May 2001 all teachers qualifying in England must be successful in computer-based skills tests in numeracy and literacy. The first test to be developed was the QTS Skills Test in Numeracy, which was a paper and pencil test taken on 1 June 2000 by approximately 22,000 trainee teachers. In this article I argue that the pilot test signals an unjustified departure from performance-based assessment, provides an example of inconsistency between national imperatives and teacher certification and was not robust. A small study of trainee teachers of secondary English was undertaken to explore perceptions of professional numeracy in relation to their experience in training, what was tested in the skills test and what is known about testing mathematics through questions set in pseudo-real contexts. I conclude that theoretically it would be difficult to devise an appropriate examination type test of professional numeracy and that in the event the pilot test was not successful.

This paper develops early data from a qualitative longitudinal study of the first cohort of five students making the transition from teaching assistant in secondary school to specialist teacher of secondary mathematics. Data from a second cohort of four women and one man starting in 2003 is less complete, but used as appropriate. Bernstein's work on subject classification frames an argument that this student group navigates simultaneously two mathematics discourses: hard university mathematics, and everyday mathematics as experienced by the lower ability school pupils that the students support. This raises questions about the purpose and scope of the students work in school with respect to their mathematics learning, and vice versa. The study of conventional mathematics undergraduates for the ESRC (Macrae, Brown, and Rodd, 2003) provides a foil against which to compare approaches to learning mathematics, raising the possibility of a rethink of pre-requisite pre-qualification, and potential relations between university mathematics and work-place learning in secondary schools.