Tracing the life of Sir Cyril Norwood, one of England's most prominent and influential educators, this book investigates the historical development of secondary education in England and Wales during the early Twentieth century.

This book examines an important aspect of the relationship between higher education and the public - especially secondary - system of schooling in Britain. Higher education has influenced secondary schools in a number of ways, and not least in the development of school examinations. The contributors to this book – each of them experts in their fields analyse the contributions made by some university luminaries, most of them still household names. These personalities have contributed in a variety of ways such as: becoming Ministers of Education contributing powerfully to successive reform movements using their status as members of that mysterious class called 'the great and the good' to mould public policy and to chair prestigious commissions choosing to centre their own research and scholarship on matters related to schooling. Using Oxford University as its chosen case study, this book places these studies in the wider context of the role of Oxford in public and political life, and in an international context. It examines critically the overall contribution of one university to the formulation of national policies, questions the extent to which that contribution has been unique and beneficent, and offers explanations of the contemporary decline in that influence. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Oxford Review of Education.

This handbook focuses on the often neglected dimension of interpretation in educational research. It argues that all educational research is in some sense ‘interpretive’, and that understanding this issue belies some usual dualisms of thought and practice, such as the sharp dichotomy between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ research. Interpretation extends from the very framing of the research task, through the sources which constitute the data, the process of their recording, representation and analysis, to the way in which the research is finally or provisionally presented. The thesis of the handbook is that interpretation cuts across the fields (both philosophically, organizationally and methodologically). By covering a comprehensive range of research approaches and methodologies, the handbook gives (early career) researchers what they need to know in order to decide what particular methods can offer for various educational research contexts/fields. An extensive overview includes concrete examples of different kinds of research (not limited for example to ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ examples as present in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but including as well what in the German Continental tradition is labelled ‘pädagogisch’, examples from child rearing and other contexts of non-formal education) with full description and explanation of why these were chosen in particular circumstances and reflection on the wisdom or otherwise of the choice – combined in each case with consideration of the role of interpretation in the process. The handbook includes examples of a large number of methods traditionally classified as qualitative, interpretive and quantitative used across the area of the study of education. Examples are drawn from across the globe, thus exemplifying the different ‘opportunities and constraints’ that educational research has to confront in different societies.

This book presents an exploration of how Golden Age detective fiction encounters educational ideas, particularly those forged by the transformative educational policymaking of the interwar period. Charting the educational policy and provision of the era, and referring to works by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edmund Crispin and others, this book explores the educational capacity and agency of literary detectives, the learning spaces of the genre and the kinds of knowledge that are made available to inquirers both inside and outside the text. It is argued that the genre explores a range of contemporaneous propositions on the balance between academic curriculum and practicum, length of school life and the value of lifelong learning. This book’s closing chapter considers the continuing pedagogic value for contemporary classrooms of engaging with the genre as a rich discursive and imaginative space for exploring educational ideas. Framing Golden Age detective fiction as a genre profoundly concerned with learning, this book will be highly relevant reading for academics, postgraduate students and scholars involved in the fields of English language arts, twentieth-century literature and the theories of learning more broadly. Those interested in detective fiction and interdisciplinary literary studies will also find the volume of interest.

Histories of Everyday Life is a study of the production and consumption of popular social history in mid-twentieth century Britain. It explores how non-academic historians, many of them women, developed a new breed of social history after the First World War, identified as the 'history of everyday life'. The 'history of everyday life' was a pedagogical construct based on the perceived educational needs of the new, mass democracy that emerged after 1918. It was popularized to ordinary people in educational settings, through books, in classrooms and museums, and on BBC radio. After tracing its development and dissemination between the 1920s and the 1960s, this book argues that 'history of everyday life' declined in the 1970s not because academics invented an alternative 'new' social history, but because bottom-up social change rendered this form of popular social history untenable in the changing context of mass education. Histories of Everyday Life ultimately uses the subject of history to demonstrate how profoundly the advent of mass education shaped popular culture in Britain after 1918, arguing that we should see the twentieth century as Britain's educational century.

The collection's focus is on girls' secondary education, and hence the gendered cultural expectations of the middle classes and upper classes, will provide the dominant narrative, given the relatively recent democratization of European educational systems.

This timely book argues that the New Zealand educational reforms were the product of longstanding unresolved educational issues that came to a head during the profound economic and cultural crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s.