Setting Aside Settings: On the Contradictory Dynamics of “Flat Earth,” “Ordinalization,” and “Cold Spot” Education Governing Projects

Place matters, and for schools located in the neighborhoods of towns and cities, place not only holds meaning for individuals, but shapes their experiences of school and education trajectories. This is not simply a question of meaning and identity. Rather, it is that education settings and their opportunity structures shape and are shaped by structural inequalities, in turn reproducing differences. In this paper, I make the case that the state plays an important role in producing inequality by the ways in which it governs, and that contemporary forms of governing on the global level exacerbate these differences whilst erasing the differences that matter. I explore these dynamics by focusing on socio-economic differences between schools in England, UK. I argue that a particular politics of state spatial power is at play, and that the national state and shadow sovereigns manage questions of authority and legitimacy through the use of ideologies (e.g., school effectiveness, social mobility), devices (such as rankings and league tables), and explanations of cause (such as aspiration gaps), with which one can re-express the problem of difference, not as structurally caused, but as a failure of individual effort, expectations, and aspirations.

Institutional prestige, academic supervision and research productivity of international PhD students: Evidence from Chinese returnees

Since the emergence of global university rankings in the 2000s, East Asian universities have been recruiting academics with doctoral degrees from Western countries to strengthen their competitiveness in the global university league tables. Governments offer scholarships to support students in their overseas doctoral studies and encourage graduates to return. Although much attention is given to researchers with overseas degrees, little is known about their experiences and pre-employment academic productivity. Drawing on a nationwide survey and bibliometric data, this study examines whether and how the institutional prestige of a host university and academic supervision contribute to the academic productivity of government-funded Chinese PhD returnees during their doctoral studies. Results show that supervisors’ research support and collaboration positively affect pre-employment academic productivity. However, a university's prestige does not exert such an influence. Moreover, co-authorship with a supervisor is a crucial mechanism in the influence of supervisors’ research support on PhD students’ productivity.

Institutional Accreditation and the Professionalisation of Teaching in the HE Sector

Institutional accreditation is an integral part of moves to professionalise teaching and learning in higher education (HE). Despite this growing trend, there is a paucity of literature which examines the benefits and challenges of institutional accreditation. In this chapter we draw on survey data collected in 2020 from 55 HE institutions globally which are accredited by Advance HE to award Fellowships. These teaching Fellowships are aligned to the UK Professional Standards Framework for Teaching and Supporting Learning (UKPSF). Findings show that institutional accreditation supports the career development of teaching-focused academics and impacts on teaching and learning in a number of ways. These impacts include providing an external benchmark, raising the profile and quality of teaching and encouraging teaching-related professional development, including engagement with scholarship in teaching and learning. Accreditation was also found to align with neoliberal agendas of quality, league tables and marketization. The perennial issue of how to evaluate the impact on student learning is something respondents continue to grapple with. Finally, these data demonstrate there is a clear need to develop a more systematic and embedded approach to evaluation that captures the outcomes of teaching-related professional development.

Lawyer Expertise and Contract Design – Evidence from M&A Negotiations

We argue that the relative expertise of contracting parties strongly affects contractual outcomes. Using unique data on company acquisition contracts, we document that lawyers with higher expertise relative to their counterparties negotiate better risk allocation for their clients and more favourable target prices. The benefits of high expertise outweigh its costs, largely because high-expertise lawyers economize on transaction costs by shortening negotiation times. Our findings suggest a need for explicit modelling of contracting skills, and they help explain heterogeneity in legal fees across law firms and the role of league tables of law firms.

Challenging Conventions—A Perspective From Within and Without

Academics globally are calling for urgent and proportionate action on the climate and ecological crisis (CEC), not only from governments and corporations but from leaders of academic institutions themselves. In this article, I argue that academic institutions are failing in their over-arching mission to humanity and the planet, and that they are increasingly part of the problem, not the solution. I explore the widespread use of league tables and metrics to capture and assess teaching and research performance and argue that these tell us little about how well academic institutions are faring in terms of their fundamental mission. I go on to chart the lackluster response of academic institutions to the CEC and a tendency to develop responses to the CEC that are centered on achieving carbon neutrality across estates and operations. I explore the moral and ethical case for transformative change within academia and give some examples of actions that institutions could readily take. The article concludes by stating that responsibility can no longer be shirked and that academic institutions must embrace Radical reform.

THE WILDERNESS YEARS: AN ANALYSIS OF GOVES’S EDUCATION REFORMS ON TEACHER ASSESSMENT LITERACY

During Michael Gove’s educational reforms between 2010–2014, he imposed several policy changes that changed the nature of assessment in terms of grading, terminal examinations and classroom expectations. Despite his vision of England rising up the international league tables, there has been little change in England’s position and even signs of stagnation of attainment at upper secondary. This paper uses the Teacher Assessment Literacy in Practice (TALiP) framework to understand why the reforms associated with assessment have had little impact on attainment and reveals the devastating effect of such wholesale change to school assessment systems, without time or support to change, leaving teachers in a decade of assessment wilderness.

Regulatory discretion: structuring power in the era of regulatory capitalism

Discretion gives decision makers choices as to how resources are allocated, or how other aspects of state largesse or coercion are deployed. Discretionary state power challenges aspects of the rule of law, first by transferring decisions from legislators to departments, agencies and street-level bureaucrats and secondly by risking the uniform application of key fairness and equality norms. Concerns to find alternative and decentred forms of regulation gave rise to new types of regulation, sometimes labeled ‘regulatory capitalism’. Regulatory capitalism highlights the roles of a wider range of actors exercising powers and a wider range of instruments. It includes also new forms of discretion, for example over automated decision making processes, over the formulation and dissemination of league tables or over the use of behavioural measures. This paper takes a novel approach by linking and extending the significant literature on these changing patterns of regulatory administration with consideration of the changing modes of deployment of discretion. Using this specific lens, we observe two potentially contradictory trends: an increase in determining and structuring administrative decision, leading to a more transparent use of discretion; and the increased use of automated decision making processes which have the potential of producing a less transparent black box scenario.

Child migrants’ right to education in a London academy: tensions between policy, language provision, and international standards

As a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, enshrined in national legislation, all children in the UK have the right to education. In the everyday life of schools, this human rights framework must often be balanced with other policies, such as immigration and securitisation ones. Teachers are expected to police membership boundaries and keep their students under surveillance, while delivering results in compliance with audits and league tables. Based on a thematic analysis of an ethnographic study of an English as an Additional Language (EAL) classroom in a diverse London academy, this paper argues that recently-arrived migrant students and their teachers often find themselves at the intersection of contradictory policy agendas that rarely consider the needs of the children themselves. Analysing how national and international policy discourses play out in the classroom, I argue that there is a mismatch between different policy areas, and between policy expectations and everyday practice.

A Ranking Framework for Higher Education Institutions

The use of league tables and rankings (LTRs) as a tool to rank or measure the performance of higher education institutions (HEIs) has grown in popularity. Research indicates that these ranking criteria are often discussed from the standpoint of governments, the HEI management, and the ranking institutions producing these LTR publications. The opinions of the students on the suitable ranking criteria used by ranking institutions are generally omitted. This chapter investigates the applicable criteria for ranking HEIs in South Africa, from the perspective of students. A survey was conducted to determine the most relevant university ranking criteria considered by university students. The results indicate that the students perceive resources and infrastructure, accreditation, international orientation, research output, faculty quality, and teaching and learning as the most relevant criteria for ranking HEIs. Managerial recommendations are provided for HEIs to address the ranking criteria rated important by students.