Educational strategies & policy

The widespread popularity of evaluation is based on the need to provide evidence of the effectiveness of policies and programmes. This book sees evaluation as an inherently political activity, and using a wide range of examples it relates practical issues in evaluation design to their political contexts.

Working within the spirit of David Blunkett's visionary foreword to The learning age: A new renaissance for Britain, David H. Hargreaves' analysis challenges the myth that lifelong learning can or should be separated from school education. It asks what changes are needed for the culture and process of lifelong learning to become a reality?

Important reforms are taking place in children's services in the UK, with a move towards greater integration. In England, Scotland and Sweden, early childhood education and care, childcare for older children, and schools are now the responsibility of education departments. This book is the first to examine this major shift in policy.

Recent urban disturbances, concerns about the fate of asylum seekers and renewed debates about the nature of ethnic identity and citizenship have all combined to give ethnic differences a high public and policy profile. This book explores the diverse experiences of ethnic disadvantage and challenges common assumptions.

Despite the expansion of higher education, representation, level of participation and likelihood of academic success remain highest amongst young people from affluent areas and lowest amongst those from deprived neighbourhoods. This report identifies factors which impact upon the minority of disadvantaged young people who enter higher education.

This book challenges the underlying presupposition that regular employment is the royal road to inclusion. Drawing on original empirical research, it investigates the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of different types of work, including activation programmes.

Lifelong learning is a key government strategy - both in the UK and internationally - to promote economic growth and combat social exclusion. This book presents a highly innovative study of participation in lifelong learning and the problems which need to be overcome if lifelong learning policies are to be successful.

This is the first book to draw together the evidence on the 'case' for skills and to examine the policies appropriate to achieving 'skills for all'.

This book makes a significant contribution to debates about how people with learning difficulties may achieve social inclusion, and the part which lifelong learning may play in this. Its exploration of the links between community care, education, training, employment, housing and benefits policies in the context of lifelong learning is unique.

This second volume discusses both the meaning of the Learning Society for adults with learning difficulties, and use of social capital to explain patterns of lifelong learning. It presents five different 'trajectories' of lifelong learning, explores determinants of participation and non-participation in learning, and innovation in Higher Education.

This first volume explores the ways lifelong learning can contribute to the development of knowledge and skills for employment, and other areas of adult life. It addresses the challenges for researchers to study issues that are central and directly relevant to the political and policy debate, and to take into account the reality of people's lives.

Policies to increase participation in learning need to concern themselves not only with increasing access and appreciating the different contexts in which learning takes place, but also with the different forms of learning. This report constitutes an exploratory study of the submerged mass of learning, which takes place informally and implicitly.