This article outlines the damage done by more than a decade of Conservative education policy and offers a set of arguments by which Labour could win support for a radical reconfiguration of formal education in England. It sets out elements from the Socialist Educational Association's "Manifesto for Education" in an attempt to inspire a…

This paper argues that contemporary Western societies' fixation on different elements of capitalist production, consumption and distribution lies at the heart of the crisis in mental health and wellbeing increasingly experienced by individuals within key state institutions. The paper weaves together Lefebvre's and Marcuse's theoretical insights to…

By troubling notions of time-as-progress and human exceptionality, this paper considers what shifts in conceptualisations of children's literacies and futures might be possible in the context of faltering of capitalist logics of progress. The paper draws on a 3 year ethnographic study with families and young children in northern England, which…

This article is concerned with teacher populism on social media in England. This has grown in the last 10 years, facilitated by Twitter. While it appears to be a response to challenging working conditions and declining pay, it has largely been driven by conservative political strategy, an adaptation of the New Right coalition between social…

Brian Simon (1915-2002) was a leading advocate of comprehensive education in the second half of the twentieth century in Britain. In the 1980s, in the face of the ideological offensive from the New Right, he firmly stood by Marxist ideals and resolutely resisted policies of the right-wing leading to the 1988 Education Reform Act. Despite this…

This article explores how the UK Conservative Government's Department for Education is taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to restructure higher education in England towards labour-power production. There is nothing new in UK governments seeking to reshape higher education for labour-power development. But under cover of apparent concern for…

Ian Cushing's 'Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England's Schools' draws on raciolinguistic theory to offer a detailed and compelling critique of language policies and teaching practices in contemporary urban schools in England. It argues that 'minoritised' pupils and teachers are consistently positioned in deficit…

This paper addressed the lived experiences of two community sports coaches in an era of neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, and insecure employment. Specifically, we considered (a) their attempts to develop a desired occupational identity in a casualised and audit-driven industry and (b) their experiences of the tensions that existed between the…

School autonomy with accountability (SAWA) reforms have developed in diverse forms in Northern Europe. Following processes of decentralization to the municipal and school levels, quality assurance and inspection became key to the test-based accountability agendas of Denmark and England respectively. With an abductive approach, we explore the…

This article considers some theoretical resources for resistance to neoliberalised schooling and develops principles for reimagining the common school. Whilst relevant internationally, it is situated in the particular context of England, as a global epicentre of school reform -- a marketised and largely privatised system where the net of…

Home BAME students are under-represented on postgraduate courses in England, especially at elite universities, however, there has been little research on why this should be. This research starts to fill this gap, arguing that gatekeepers to postgraduate courses at some of the most elite universities contribute to maintaining white supremacy.…

The purpose of the paper is to develop the theory that structural or procedural changes in institutions precede changes in education in a society. It examines the development of pre-modern institutions in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and the influences this had on growth in literacy rates within these states. Literacy rates in…

This paper will investigate patterns of historical periodisation with regard to public intellectual work. It will begin with a focus on educational studies and with a specific case study of the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia. The case study will highlight the roles of leading public intellectuals…

This book explores European governance and policy coordination within lifelong learning markets. Using an instruments approach, the editors and contributors examine the ways in which governance mechanisms employed by the European Union influence policy to regulate lifelong learning, and intervene in lifelong learning markets, at both European and…

England's premier league of public schools, educating less than three thousand boys, started life in medieval times as charity schools for the poor. Closely tied to the Church, they found favour as institutions of social mobility. By the turn of the eighteenth century, vandalism and violence were endemic in many; misrule and abuses so common that…