A Race to the bottom – Prison Education and the English and Welsh Policy Context

This article examines prison education in England and Wales arguing that a disjuncture exists between the policy rhetoric of entitlement to education in prison at the European level and the playing out of that entitlement in English and Welsh prisons. Caught between conflicting discourses around a need to combat recidivism and a need for incarceration, prison education in England exists within a policy context informed, in part, by an international human rights agenda on the one hand and global recession, financial cutbacks, and a moral panic about crime on the other. The European Commission has highlighted a number of challenges facing prison education in Europe including over‐crowded institutions, increasing diversity in prison populations, the need to keep pace with pedagogical changes in mainstream education and the adoption of new technologies for learning (Hawley et al., 2013). These are challenges confronting all policy makers involved in prison education in England and Wales in a policy context that is messy, contradictory and fiercely contested. The article argues that this policy context, exacerbated by socio‐economic discourses around neo‐liberalism, is leading to a race‐to‐the‐bottom in the standards of educational provision for prisoners in England and Wales.

Revitalizing the PE social-justice agenda in the global era: Where do we go from here?

Critical theorists have called attention to the intensification of diversity that is now occurring inside and outside of school, while critically engaging with the detrimental effects of globalization on equity, diversity, and social justice. Globalization presents new challenges to education and to issues of social justice. In this article, we argue that there is a need for scholars in the field of physical education (PE) to re-think and re-frame the social-justice agenda to address current inequalities produced by globalization. To support this argument, first, we reflect on the impact of global neoliberalism on PE; second, we discuss the ways in which, as a result of global neoliberalism, public health discourses have an “othering” effect on ethnically diverse young people; third, we propose a theoretical shift from a focus on equality to a focus on difference; and finally, we conclude with considerations for future research and curricula in school PE.

Preparing for disaster: a comparative analysis of education for critical infrastructure collapse

This article explores policy approaches to educating populations for potential critical infrastructure collapse in five different countries: the UK, the US, Germany, Japan and New Zealand. ‘Critical infrastructure’ is not always easy to define, and indeed is defined slightly differently across countries – it includes entities vital to life, such as utilities (water, energy), transportation systems and communications, and may also include social and cultural infrastructure. The article is a mapping exercise of different approaches to critical infrastructure protection and preparedness education by the five countries. The exercise facilitates a comparison of the countries and enables us to identify distinctive characteristics of each country’s approach. We argue that contrary to what most scholars of security have argued, these national approaches diverge greatly, suggesting that they are shaped more by internal politics and culture than by global approaches.

Meeting the challenges of globalisation in legal education

The focus of this paper is a critical review of the impact of globalisation on international higher education at my own institution, the University of East London (UEL), where I am Programme Leader for LLB (Hons) Law, an undergraduate qualifying law degree. Globalisation, along with internationalisation, has been one of the forces that have most changed the educational landscape in this country over the last two decades. Although closely related to each other, globalisation and internationalisation are usually regarded as distinct forces – the former being defined as the economic, political, and societal forces pushing twenty-first-century higher education towards greater international involvement, while the latter describes the policies and practices of higher education developed to deal with this. Whilst these phenomena have wide implications for higher education as a whole, they present opportunities and challenges that are very specific both to an institution like UEL, which has a high proportion of students from international backgrounds, and to my own discipline, law, which has an increasingly global profile in terms of both legal education and professional practice.

Looking at ‘both sides’ of teacher education research and policy-making: insights for the teacher education research community

Teacher education researchers appear generally not well equipped to maximise a range of dissemination strategies, and remain largely separated from the policy implications of their research. How teacher education researchers address this issue and communicate their research to a wider public audience is more important than ever to consider within a global political discourse where teacher education researchers appear frustrated that their findings should, but do not, make a difference; and where the research they produce is often marginalised. This paper seeks to disrupt the widening gap between teacher education researchers and policy-makers by looking at the issue from ‘both sides’. The paper examines policy–research tensions and the critique of teacher education researchers and then outlines some of the key findings from an Australian policy-maker study. Recommendations are offered as a way for teacher education researchers to begin to mobilise a new set of generative strategies to draw from.