M. Houston

Silver Bullet or Red Herring? New Evidence on the Place of Aspirations in Education.

This article reports on a longitudinal study of student aspirations at the ages of 13 and 15 in three schools in the United Kingdom, where there has been a great deal of emphasis placed on aspirations in recent policy making. The data, based on individual interviews with 490 students in areas with significant deprivation as well as interviews with parents, teachers and community members, call into question the effectiveness of concentrating educational efforts on raising aspirations. Aspirations, even in these communities struggling with poverty, are very high—the missing element is the knowledge of how to make these aspirations concrete and obtainable. Implications for educators include insights into the highly aspirational nature of marginalised communities, the key role teachers play in helping aspirations come to fruition, and the need to focus on supporting young people to achieve aspirations that already substantially exceed the jobs available in the UK workforce.

Shaped by place? Young people's aspirations in disadvantaged neighbourhoods

This paper aims to better understand the relationship between young peoples aspirations towards education and jobs, and the context in which they are formed, especially to understand better the role of disadvantaged places in shaping young peoples aspirations. Policy makers maintain that disadvantaged areas are associated with low aspirations and there is support for this position from academic work on neighbourhood effects and local labour markets, but evidence is slim. Using a two-stage survey of young people in disadvantaged settings in three British cities, the paper provides new data on the nature of young peoples’ aspirations, how they change during the teenage years, and how they relate to the places where they are growing up. The findings are that aspirations are very high and, overall, they do not appear to be depressed in relation to the jobs available in the labour market either by the neighbourhood context or by young peoples perceptions of local labour markets. However, there are significant differences between the pattern of aspirations and how they change over time in the three locations. The paper then challenges assumptions in policy and in the literature that disadvantaged places equal low aspirations and suggests that understanding how aspirations are formed requires needs a nuanced approach to the nexus of class, ethnicity and institutional influences within local areas.

Private schooling and admission to medicine: a case study using matched samples and causal mediation analysis

BackgroundAre applicants from private schools advantaged in gaining entry to degrees in medicine? This is of international significance and there is continuing research in a range of nations including the USA, the UK, other English-speaking nations and EU countries. Our purpose is to seek causal explanations using a quantitative approach.MethodsWe took as a case study admission to medicine in the UK and drew samples of those who attended private schools and those who did not, with sample members matched on background characteristics. Unlike other studies in the area, causal mediation analysis was applied to resolve private-school influence into direct and indirect effects. In so doing, we sought a benchmark, using data for 2004, against which the effectiveness of policies adopted over the past decade can be assessed.ResultsPrivate schooling improved admission likelihood. This did not occur indirectly via the effect of school type on academic performance; but arose directly from attending private schools. A sensitivity analysis suggests this finding is unlikely to be eliminated by the influence of an unobserved variable.ConclusionsAcademic excellence is not a certain pathway into medicine at university; yet applying with good grades after attending private school is more certain. The results of our paper differ from those in an earlier observational study and find support in a later study. Consideration of sources of difference from the earlier observational study suggest the causal approach offers substantial benefits and the consequences in the causal study for gender, ethnicity, socio-economic classification and region of residence provide a benchmark for assessing policy in future research.

Mapping lifelong learning attributes in the context of higher education institutions

Over the past four decades lifelong learning has been an important concept in educational policy, so much so that it has become one of the essential guiding principles in almost all of the educational reforms. Accompanying its popularity amongst policy makers, however, has been a perennial debate among academics concerning the viability of the concept as a researchable construct. Such debates have also focused on addressing the conceptual issues surrounding lifelong learning. In particular, there have been only limited numbers of studies aimed at understanding what really constitute the attributes of lifelong learners in the context of higher education. Despite much rhetoric about the significance of lifelong learning as a policy goal, there is a dearth of studies focusing on exploring the possible ways in which educational institutions can really achieve this goal of policy. This article aims at contributing to these debates, in an attempt to address issues associated with the challenges of developing a conceptual framework for understanding the indicators that provide quantifiable measures of lifelong learning. In particular, the article focuses on examining the individual, social and economic dimensions of lifelong learning that are fostered in higher education institutions. The article seeks to provide an understanding of possible ways in which higher learning institutions can concretise lifelong learning and move from rhetorical commitments to action.

La relevancia de la educación universitaria de adultos para las políticas de mercado de trabajo

La formacion permanente desempena un papel fundamental en las politicas del mercado de trabajo en la UE. En el contexto de la creciente tasa de personas con estudios superiores y de cambios en los mercados de trabajo cualificados, las universidades han empezado a involucrarse en la educacion para adultos y en las politicas activas del mercado de trabajo. El articulo presenta los resultados de estudios de casos no representativos de programas universitarios de educacion para adultos realizados en siete paises europeos con especial atencion a las personas de mediana edad, quienes son cada vez mas vulnerables socialmente. Uno de los rasgos mas destacados de los estudios de casos fue la eficacia social de los programas universitarios de educacion para adultos desde el punto de vista del acceso a empleos y de la calidad de trabajo/vida. Los resultados de los estudios de casos junto con el analisis de los resultados de otros proyectos europeos de formacion permanente permitieron elaborar un esquema de las dimensiones esenciales de las universidades de educacion para adultos socialmente eficaces.

Reviews: Space, Place and Inclusive Learning, Economics, Aid and Education: Implications for DevelopmentHemingwayJudy and ArmstrongFelicity (Eds) (2014). Space, Place and Inclusive Learning. New York, NY and Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ISBN: 978-0415-71992-6 (hardback). 172 pages.MajhanovichSuzanne and Geo-JaJaMacleans A. (Eds) (2013). Economics, Aid and Education: Implications for Development. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. ISBN: 978-94-6209-363-8. 262 pages.

Developments in social geography have attracted considerable attention from education researchers in recent years. Increasingly, scholars are interested in the ways that space and place have shaped educational experiences and practices, and also in the ways that knowledge and skills can and do shape and reshape place. This collection, originally published as a special double issue of the International Journal of Inclusive Education, brings together 10 education researchers to consider how contemporary theories of space and place might reshape our understanding of exclusion and inclusion in education. Inevitably in a collection of this size, the authors approach their topics in different ways. Several acknowledge a debt to Doreen Massey, one of the foremost scholars in social geography, who has traced empirically and conceptually the ways in which space and spatial relationships matter for inequality and welfare. Her analysis emphasises the dynamic interplay between the spatial and social at all levels, from the local to the global, and stresses the central importance of power to social relations of space. Massey’s insights, as well as the work of David Harvey, are central to Rob Higham’s chapter exploring student voices in universities in South Africa. After apartheid, universities have become spaces where the politics of identity and difference are worked out, in a complex and often contended context of continuing inequalities and exclusions as well as attempts at equity and inclusion. Higham concludes that while theories of space and place can provide additional analytical tools, his analysis of student narratives suggests that they largely reinforce and complement existing accounts of inclusive education. Colin Symes also cites Harvey and Massey in his historically-informed study of correspondence schooling in New South Wales. Faced with the problem of schooling children in remote and rural areas, early twentieth-century Australian policy makers turned to the postal service as a means of ‘conquering space’. Symes borrows from Latour the idea of ‘immutable portables’ to analyse the texts, radio broadcasts and films associated with the Correspondence School; and examines the importance of intra-family relationships in ensuring that an adult – usually the mother – monitored and supervised the pupil. Through its magazine and its radio space, the School also sought to make visible and audible