Education - Research

This first volume explores the ways lifelong learning can contribute to the development of knowledge and skills for employment, and other areas of adult life. It addresses the challenges for researchers to study issues that are central and directly relevant to the political and policy debate, and to take into account the reality of people's lives.

This second volume discusses both the meaning of the Learning Society for adults with learning difficulties, and use of social capital to explain patterns of lifelong learning. It presents five different 'trajectories' of lifelong learning, explores determinants of participation and non-participation in learning, and innovation in Higher Education.

From scarcer resources to greater stresses, this book charts how policies and cuts have compromised workers’ ability to undertake their professional roles. Combining research and practice experience, it assesses the extent of de-professionalisation in recent years, and how workers have responded.

The first authoritative volume to look back on the last 50 years of The Open University providing higher education to those in prison, this unique book gives voice to ex-prisoners whose lives have been transformed by the education they received, offering vivid personal testimonies, reflective vignettes and academic analysis of education in prison.

This book offers a comparative analysis of alternative education in the UK, focusing on learning spaces that cater for children and young people. It constitutes one of the first book-length explorations of alternative learning spaces outside mainstream education.

This book challenges the underlying presupposition that regular employment is the royal road to inclusion. Drawing on original empirical research, it investigates the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of different types of work, including activation programmes.

Recent urban disturbances, concerns about the fate of asylum seekers and renewed debates about the nature of ethnic identity and citizenship have all combined to give ethnic differences a high public and policy profile. This book explores the diverse experiences of ethnic disadvantage and challenges common assumptions.

The widespread popularity of evaluation is based on the need to provide evidence of the effectiveness of policies and programmes. This book sees evaluation as an inherently political activity, and using a wide range of examples it relates practical issues in evaluation design to their political contexts.

Informed by twenty years’ experience as a school governor, Jacqueline Baxter considers what implications the 2014 ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal has had for the future of a democratic system of education in England.

Rooted in an international political economy theoretical framework, this book provides unique insights into the global forces and local responses that are shaping education systems in Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC).

Providing integrated coverage of the policy, practice and outcomes from 1944 to 2012, this book addresses the issues relevant to school admissions arising from three different approaches adopted in this period: planning via local authorities, quasi-market mechanisms, and random allocation.