This article presents a review on three books that have been published from positions of considerable authority on educational developments in the USA and England over the past two decades. All of the authors have considerable knowledge, not only of policy making at the top but also of the ways in which this interacts with and impacts upon…

Children with disabilities are one of the many groups of children still not enrolled in primary education in developing countries. However, their educational exclusion and right to education are now receiving more policy attention. This paper reviews some of the key issues and challenges in relation to disability, education and development:…

This article addresses the diverging policies of England and Scotland since 1999 on the issue of tuition fees. While the UK Parliament has introduced (and henceforth enhanced the level of) tuition fees for students at English universities, the Scottish Parliament has refuted fees in two successive stages. In this article I trace the political…

This paper examines recent privatisation practices in New Zealand public schooling. The standard political rhetoric is that free publicly provided schooling is guaranteed by statute. This position may be challenged by reference to two apparently insignificant practical examples of the way in which policy gives effect to privatisation in public…

Sultanate of Oman is one out of many developing countries around the world which have valued English as a very important international language and a tool for achieving multiple purposes. When His Majesty the Sultan came to power in 1970, the government accepted English as the only official foreign language and allocated huge budgets and resources…

Part-time study in the UK is significant: nearly 40 per cent of higher education students study part-time. This article reports on a literature review that sought to understand the economic and social benefits of part-time study in the UK. It concludes that there are substantial and wide-ranging benefits from studying part-time. The article also…

Beginning with an analysis of the manifesto commitments of the two Coalition partners the author proceeds to set their subsequent policies as they are understood by June 2011 in the context of successive new "frameworks" for UK higher education since the Robbins Report of 1963. This analysis is developed in relation to: the relative…

Education is often seen as the key agency in international development and poverty reduction. Frequently the emphasis is on the economic and social role of education in development. This book, on the other hand, is unusual in explicitly examining the political role of education in development. In particular, it sets out the theories, evidence and…

This paper critically analyses discourses of educational inclusion in England through the lens of Derridean deconstruction. Linking Derrida's thesis on writing and speech to presence and absence, the paper contends that inclusion acts as a "suppleance" to previous policies of integration. The paper suggests that, for many teachers,…

The current decade has seen a significant return of interest in vocational education and training (VET) amongst the international policy community. This rise in policy and programmatic interest in VET's role in development, however, stands in contrast to the state of the academic debate. Whilst there have continued to be both policy and academic…

In 2009, the South African Department of Education extended tuition fee abolition to schools serving the poorest 60% of students, increased from 40% in 2007. This policy intends to increase access to and longevity in school for the poorest households by removing fees as a barrier and replacing private revenue with increased state funds. Despite…

Education is an area that is highly devolved in the UK, and the fact that all four constituent countries have pursued very different policies in the recent past provides a good testing ground to undertake a comparative review of the merits or otherwise of the education reforms that have taken place. There is, of course, an important policy context…

Do private and philanthropic solutions to the problems of education signal the end of state education in its "welfare" form? Education policy is being reformed and re-worked on a global scale. Policies are flowing and converging to produce a singular vision of "best practice" based on the methods and tenets of the "neo-liberal imaginary".…

Drawing upon fieldwork conducted in an elite Chinese university and English language literature of audit culture in higher education against the backdrop of Chinese higher education in transition, this paper has discovered that Chinese higher education is undergoing an auditing process. However, this Chinese audit regime is not only guarded by a…

Learner-centred education (LCE) has been a recurrent theme in many national education policies in the global South, and has had wide donor support through aid programmes and smaller projects and localised innovations. However, the history of the implementation of LCE in different contexts is riddled with stories of failures grand and small. In…