Commitments to inclusive education have been articulated in policy across the UK, in the context of increasingly inclusive rhetoric in education policy globally over recent years. This paper uses a critical policy analysis approach to understand the framing of inclusion within national legislation, policy documents and associated key resources…

This paper reports findings from a review of school exclusion policy and legislation in Scotland, conducted as part of a comparative study of school exclusion across the four UK jurisdictions by the Excluded Lives research group. Drawing on a range of policy sources, this paper adopts Hyatt's (2013) framework to contextualise school exclusion…

The recent review of the Scottish professional standards for teachers, led by the General Teaching Council for Scotland, offered a unique perspective to interrogate participative approaches in policy-making in the Scottish education context and to provide insights and implications for future policy-making. Using one of the authors' experiences as…

Previous comparative research has revealed recent high and rising school exclusion rates in England and a contrasting picture of much lower and reducing rates in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In this paper, we examine findings from new research into school exclusion policies across the four countries of the UK. This interrogates for the…

Background: Public service practitioners on all levels aim to solve increasingly complex policy problems by making use of different forms of evidence. While there are many complex models of knowledge mobilisation, not enough attention is paid to the types of knowledge that are mobilised for public service reform. Ward (2017) has returned to…

This open access book explores different landscapes of Lifelong Learning policies (LLP), producing case-based examinations of their institutional, discursive, and relational dimensions. Across Europe, young people develop their life courses amidst diverse living conditions and are confronted with a variety of institutional and structural…

Educational policy in the UK and beyond increasingly focuses on promoting skills that encourage learners to be independent thinkers and to self-manage their own learning. While the educational benefits of metacognition (i.e., thinking about and managing one's own thinking) are widely acknowledged, little attention has been paid to teachers'…

This account explores the experience of an action inquiry approach to develop a coaching culture within a public service organisation. We position action inquiry as a fresh interpretation of action learning that draws on a variety of roots and traditions and focuses on the nurturing of the collective capacity to lead through everyday interactions.…

Policy cycles are initiated via a variety of context-bound causal drivers. In situations where systemic reform is desired, agenda-setting is vital to this process. This paper examines 'The National Discussion on Scottish Education', which was a sequence of stakeholder engagements promoted as a listening exercise to enable policy agenda-setting for…

This edited book provides a critical re-reading of the concept of teacher education, in addition to a re-thinking of the sole focus on Initial Teacher Education (ITE), with implications for education policy, theory, and practice. This book presents new investigations that explore the concept of teacher education from ITE to retirement and how this…

This article examines the policy construction of leadership at all levels in Scottish education. In the current reforms 'leadership at all levels' is being used to mobilise support around changes to the role of the headteacher and of the local authorities (LAs) to bring about greater system alignment. From a critical policy analysis six themes are…

This critical paper investigates one influential post-millennial initiative -- the Daily Mile programme -- which is designed to promote the multifarious lifelong enhancing benefits of running-based experiences. A textually orientated discourse analysis of the language used in media, policy and research-related documentary sources of evidence are…

This book investigates the ways in which new developments in areas of language teaching practice, such as policy-making, planning, methodology and the use of educational technology are locally adopted, adapted, and initiated and implemented in the four nations of the United Kingdom: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. By looking at the…

Inspired by the work of David Raffe and his co-authors who set out the positive benefits gained from comparing the policies of "the UK home nations" in an article published in 1999, researchers in the Education and Curriculum Team launched a project in early 2020 that we called Curriculum Watch. The aim of this project was to collate a…

In the following article, we share our findings from the comparative analyses of 54 lifelong learning policy measures implemented in nine European countries, with a particular focus on their orientations, objectives, and solutions devised. Informed by the theoretical framework of Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA), we have further reasoned on the…