Publications

In the world’s richest countries, some children do worse at school than others because of circumstances beyond their control, such as where they were born, the language they speak or their parents’ occupations. These children enter the education system at a disadvantage and can drop further behind if educational policies and practices reinforce, rather than…

There has been a growing academic and policy debate in the UK on the relationship between school choice, educational performance and house prices. School choice and the chances of attending a good school are important as it relates strongly to educational attainment and qualifications, University entry and access to the labour market. This debate was…

Civil Society, Social Change and a New Popular Education in Russia is a detailed account of contemporary issues that draws upon recent survey research conducted by the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as from secondary published work in both Russian and English. The book explores how social change and developments in civil…

The Good Childhood Report 2018 is the seventh in a series of annual ‘state of the nation’ reports on children’s well-being in the UK, born out of a desire to fill the gap in what is known about how children feel about their lives. In 2005, The Children’s Society joined forces with the University of…

This article considers the professional work, identity and recruitment of head teachers (HTs) in Wales. Drawing on the sociology of professions, the article illustrates how intensive educational policy reform post‐2011 has restricted HTs’ professional agency and re‐orientated the head teacher role towards organisational professionalism. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews (n=30) with both head and deputy head…

Purpose —The oversupply of college graduates and increasing competition in the Chinese urban labor market have forced college students to undertake internships much earlier and to a greater intensity in the hope of boosting their employment prospects. It may be argued that the considerable time and energy thus spent on internships is deleterious to their…

A notable contribution of the OECD to policy development is the annual report “Education at a Glance (EAG)”. This informs the discourse on education, helping policy-makers, educators, researchers, and other stake-holders build more effective and equitable education systems. In this article, we summarize the general trends in education which the most recent “Education at a…

In January 2018, the Welsh Government appointed OB3 Research, in conjunction with the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) of Cardiff University, to undertake a scoping study for an overseas study pilot. The Welsh Government is committed to running a pilot scheme to explore the practicalities of extending the new…

There has been growing concern about the rising numbers of students being excluded from school in England – a trend that is often set against the declining levels of exclusion elsewhere. In Wales and Scotland, for example, numbers of students permanently excluded from school have fallen dramatically. However, we argue that simple system-level comparisons might…

This article considers three different concepts of the role of the teacher. Buber understands the teacher as the builder-teacher of a dialogical community playing a fundamental role in the character formation of individuals. Freire develops this notion, adding a political tinge, and argues for a political-teacher who plays a central role in the formation of critical individuals and in…