Publications

What in the digital era is knowledge? Who has knowledge and whose knowledge has value? Postmodernism has introduced a relativist flavour into educational research such that big questions about the purposes of education have tended to be eclipsed by minutiae. Changes in economic and financial markets induce a sense that we are also experiencing an…

While accepting that the concept of restricted code has a troubled history that resulted in Bernstein being associated with deficit models of working-class life, it is argued that the concept should be re-imagined rather than abandoned. Bernstein’s early work refers to restricted code as a form of condensed shorthand established through familiarity that was not…

A recent study of the educational attainment of British children found that boys who live in poverty are more educationally disadvantaged even than girls in similar circumstances (Mensah and Kiernan, 2010). The author’s recent work in the south Wales ex-mining valleys has brought her into contact with boys who are disaffected from school and who…