Stephen Michael Cullen

Supporting fathers to engage with their children’s learning and education: an under‐developed aspect of the Parent Support Adviser pilot

The Parent Support Adviser (PSA) role, piloted in 2006-2008 in 20 Local Authorities (LAs) in England, offered preventative and early intervention support to families where there were concerns about children‟s school attendance or behaviour. Overall, this was a highly successful initiative in terms of supporting parental engagement with their children‟s schools. However, this article presents evidence drawn from 162 interviews (with PSAs, their line managers and coordinators in 12 case study LAs) showing that there was one key area in the PSA pilot that was less successful – the engagement of fathers. The article examines views about how to engage fathers and of the barriers explaining the overall absence of fathers from the PSA project. It highlights the dissonance between policy and practitioner guidance on the one hand and practice on the other with regard to the relative failure to engage fathers with this important initiative.

The Fasces and the Saltire: the failure of the British Union of Fascists in Scotland, 1932-1940

The history of Britain’s main manifestation of inter-war fascism, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists [BUF], continues to be a hotly contested field of study. A new biography of Mosley, work on gender and the BUF, and the incorporation of new models of generic fascism have made important contributions to the historiography of the BUF. However, until recently, almost no historical consideration of the BUF’s career in Scotland had been attempted. But work by Tony Milligan and Henry Maitles has opened up the topic of fascism in Scotland between the wars. This article seeks to build on these contributions, and examines two groups of factors that led to the failure of fascism in Scotland. The inability of the BUF to find political space in Scotland, allied to internal organisational weaknesses, compounded by the indifference of the English fascist movement to the BUF in Scotland created flaws that characterised the Scottish BUF from the outset. These weaknesses were exacerbated by the failure of the BUF to understand the Scottish dimensions of politics, such as the cross-cutting appeal of Scottish nationalism, and religious tensions. Finally, anti-fascist opposition proved to be especially problematic for the Scottish BUF.

‘I'm just there to ease the burden’: the parent support adviser role in English schools and the question of emotional labour

In 2005, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) announced a £40 million investment in a new school support worker role, the Parent Support Adviser (PSA), for 20 English Local Authorities (LAs). A pilot project ran from 2006-08, and resulted in the establishment of 717 PSAs in 1,167 schools. The national evaluation of the project forms the evidential basis of this paper, with interviews conducted with 69 PSAs, 85 PSA line managers, and 105 parents, and a data base recording casework with nearly 21,000 parents. This paper focuses on the nature of the PSA role as the first centrally funded parent support role in English schools. The theoretical framework provided by the concept of ‘emotional labour’, and the development of the concept represented by the 4Ps typology, provides the conceptual structure. This paper argues that although the characteristics of the PSA role appear to place it within the category of work requiring emotional labour, PSAs, and parents, regard that aspect of the role in a positive light. For the PSAs, there was little evidence that emotional labour necessary for the role of PSA led to dissonance between role and worker, or alienation from the product of PSA labour.

The nature and outcomes of PGCE Plus as a model for teacher professional development

The present study examines an innovative attempt to address national priorities with regard to subject (mathematics and science) and the needs of gifted and talented pupils. The initiative, PGCE Plus, was at the transition from initial qualifications and the domain of continuing professional development, occurring in the summer immediately following qualification as a teacher and during the first two years of practice. The paper explores the evidence for the success of PGCE Plus pedagogically, and as a model addressed to both participants’ needs and national priorities in a context of educational change.

Fay Taylour : a dangerous woman in sport and politics

Frances Helen ‘Fay’ Taylour was the most successful woman motor cycle and car racing competitor ever. She excelled in a variety of motor cycle sports—hill climbing, scrambling and, most notably, in speedway, or ‘dirt’ racing. Her successes led her to be repeatedly banned from racing against men. In her political life too, she was banned, being interned without trial for three years during the Second World War as a danger to British national security. This is the first academic article to examine the sporting and political life of this very ‘dangerous woman’.

The land of my dreams: the gendered utopian dreams and disenchantment of British literary ex-combatants of the Great War

ABSTRACT Recent developments in the cultural history of the Great War have begun to change perceptions of the response of British servicemen to their experiences. The view that the war represented a crisis of masculinity, which led to a retreat into the world of men and combatant experience, along with a heightened sense of misogyny, is increasingly under question. This article seeks to utilize a range of middle-brow, war-themed books by British ex-combatants to examine questions of ex-combatant idealism, gender and disenchantment. It is argued that British literary ex-combatants remained loyal to the volunteer idealism of 1914/15, and imagined a renewed England characterized by traditional myths, and gendered roles modified by male and female war service.