Publications

Few people would disagree with the notion of promoting child well-being. And yet there are many different ideas about what exactly this means. Some view childhood as a developmental phase in preparation for adulthood; this view focuses on future well-being, sometimes referred to as well-becoming. The Children’s Worlds project takes a different outlook. It focuses…

This article, that draws upon a recent book (Guilherme/Morgan 2018), considers dialogue and its use in education taking the political philosopher Hannah Arendt as an example. It is argued as worthwhile for two reasons: First, dialogue is understood usually as a conversation, as an exchange between two or more individuals or sets of individuals. Secondly,…

The purpose of this article is to provide a comment on Simone Weil’s brief but seminal essay ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.’ It complements an earlier one on Weil’s Lectures on Philosophy. The essay was sent via a letter to her friend and mentor,…

This Special Issue explores the many issues that arise when a country decides to rewrite the school curriculum––and particularly when that rewriting entails a radical departure from a conventional subject-based approach.

Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 51(8) pp 1226-1240 This paper examines the complex relationship between the state, civil society and education through comparative research with young people in France and the UK. Survey data derived from two cohorts of school students in South Wales and Lyon reveal strong differences in their levels of…

This paper focuses on the implications of the transformative student‐centred curriculum being developed in Wales for tackling educational inequalities. Informed by long‐standing debates within the sociology of education about the role of school knowledge in social and cultural reproduction, our research outlines some of the challenges that those implementing the new Curriculum for Wales need…

This is the welsh national report of the third wave of the International Survey of Childrens’ Wellbeing (ISCIWEB) data collection, with a representative sample of at least 1,000 children per age group. Children’s Worlds, the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being (ISCWeB), is a worldwide research survey on children’s subjective well-being. The study aims to collect…

Following trends across the developed world to devolve power and responsibility for public services to more local agencies, curriculum reforms in several countries have been characterised by policies designed to increase teacher agency and professionalism as a means of achieving successful change. In Wales, this approach has been promoted through adoption of a principle of…

The past thirty years have seen a remarkable expansion of the World Bank’s programme of educational support. During this period the Bank has established itself as the largest financier of education in the developing world (World Bank 2018). In this article we examine the trends in World Bank education funding, its research and strategy from…

We’ve gathered young people’s views on their teachers, school trips, why they’ve been asked to leave the classroom and why they’ve been given a detention. We also asked about the GCSE subjects they’ve chosen and their awareness of vocational education. We’ve also asked them about growing up in Wales more generally, including their awareness of…