Publications

A brief overview of the Booktrust Pori Drwy Stori Evaluation project.

The interpretation of graduate mismatch manifested either as over‐education or as over‐skilling remains problematical. This article analyses the relationship of educational and skills mismatch with pay, job satisfaction and job mobility using unique data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. Over‐education and over‐skilling are found to be distinct phenomena and…

The evaluation uses a mixed methods design, incorporating a quantitative element based on existing large-scale datasets. The evaluation reports two key, but interrelated, findings. The first is that there is strong evidence to suggest that the WBQ is enormously valuable in helping students to enter higher education. This benefit would appear to be largely due…

The Foundation Phase is a Welsh Government flagship policy of early years education (for 3 to 7-year old children) in Wales. Marking a radical departure from the more formal, competency-based approach associated with the previous Key Stage 1 National Curriculum, it advocates a developmental, experiential, play-based approach to teaching and learning The Learning Country: a…

The importance of the early years is well understood within the Welsh Government. Since 2003 work has been underway to develop effective interventions in this area, such as the Flying Start programme. However, the question of what works best and is most effective remains important. Events such as this that bring colleagues from the policy,…

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of a need for a general, non-language-specific assessment tool that could be used to evaluate general speech and language abilities in children, especially to assist in identifying atypical development in bilingual children who speak a language unfamiliar to the assessor. It has been suggested that a non-word…

Access to higher education (HE) has become an extremely controversial area of policy, as successive UK administrations have sought to balance increasing student fees with ensuring that HE is open to individuals from as wide a range of social backgrounds as possible. There have also been numerous initiatives that have sought to increase participation by…

Through personal narrative, I describe my experiences as a technology teacher attempting to enact a critical pedagogy “under the radar” at a suburban middle-school. As part of my story, I offer vignettes that serve as windows into my classroom, detailing the successes and challenges my students and I faced in engaging in critical pedagogy at…

This paper argues that New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ project – and the chaos that ensued – can only be understood by grasping the longstanding, complex and intimate relationship between education and the middle class. Drawing on empirical data from ongoing investigations into the allegiances of the middle class, the paper shows how New Labour’s desire…

This paper attempts to analyse current developments in education through exploring shifts in the politics of education over time. Rather than looking at education policy in terms of political provenance (left or right) or ideological underpinnings (the state or the market, the public or the private), the paper compares education policies in terms of the…