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Nuanced interconnections of poverty and educational attainment around the UK are surveyed in this unique analysis. Across the four jurisdictions of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, experts consider the impact of curriculum reforms and devolved policy making on the lives of children and young people in poverty. They investigate differences in educational ideologies and structures, and question whether they help or hinder schools seeking to support disadvantaged and marginalised groups. For academics and students engaged in education and social justice, this is a vital exploration of poverty’s profound effects on inequalities in educational attainment and the opportunities to improve school responses.
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.
Health promotion with young people has largely been framed by theories of behaviour change to target ‘unsafe’, ‘unhealthy’ and/or ‘risky’ behaviours. These theories and models seek to encourage the development in young people of reasoned, rational and risk-aware personal strategies. This book presents an innovative and critical perspective on young people and health promotion. It explores the limits and possibilities of traditional health behaviour change models with their focus on reason, risk and rationality by examining the embodied dimensions of meaning-making in health promotion programs. Drawing on an array of critical social theories and approaches to knowledge production the authors identify and engage the aesthetic and affective dimensions of young people’s engagement with issues such as road safety, sexualities, alcohol and drug use, and physical and mental health and well-being. The book will appeal to researchers and practitioners in the fields of health promotion and health education, public health, education, the sociology of health and illness, youth studies and youth work.
The rise of the health, beauty and fitness industries in recent years has led to an increased focus on the body. Body image, gender and health are issues of long-standing concern in sociology and in youth studies, but a theoretical and empirical focus on the body has been largely missing from this field. This book explores young people’s understandings of their bodies in the context of gender and health ideals, consumer culture, individualisation and image. Body Work examines the body in youth studies. It explores paradoxical aspects of gendered body work practices, highlighting the contradiction in men’s increased participation in these industries as consumers alongside the re-emphasis ...
Focusing on what can be done to promote equity within education systems, what the barriers to progress are and how these barriers might be overcome, this book provides detailed examples of strategies that have proved to be effective in addressing this challenge. Built on the work of the authors over the last three decades, the book presents an approach to educational change that will be relevant to different countries. The authors argue that there is untapped potential for promoting progress towards greater equity within schools and the communities they serve. They also show how this potential can be mobilised by using forms of collaborative action research to stimulate the development of mo...
In a world where the term Islam is ever-increasingly an inaccurate and insensitive synonym for terrorism, it is unsurprising that many Muslim youth in the West struggle for a viable sense of identity. This book takes up the hotly-debated issue of Muslim youth identity in western countries from the standpoint of popular culture. It proposes that in the context of Islamophobia and pervasive moral panic, young Muslims frame up their identity in relation to external conditions that only see ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims, on both sides of the ideological fence between Islam and the West. Indeed, by attempting to break down the ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ Muslim dichotomy that largely derives f...
This book presents changes in UK and global educational governance in the context of a radical shift in the operating logics of politics and its interaction with education. Beginning from the colonial origins of political interest in education, the author traces a fundamental shift in the patterns of governance of schools in England in the opening decades of the 21st century. Operating through the logics of public choice economics involving both real markets and quasi-markets, policy reforms have increasingly framed school values, and the value of schooling, in line with a politically determined and nostalgic discourse of ‘British values’. This stands in contrast to a previous focus on ‘community cohesion’ which foregrounded school partnership with the parent community and wider society. Tracing the processes and mid-level actors mediating between government and school leaders, the author identifies processes of recontextualisation through which policy can be reinscribed and resisted.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. This comprehensive collection discusses topical issues essential to both scholarship and policy making in the realm of lifelong learning (LLL) policies and how far they succeed in supporting young people across their life courses, rather than one-sidedly fostering human capital for the economy. Examining specific yet diverse regional and local contexts across Europe, this book uses original research to evaluate differences in scope, approach, orientation, and objectives. It examines the embedding of LLL policies into the regional economy, the labour market, education and training systems and the individual life projects of young people, with a focus on those in situations of near social exclusion.
Investigating the hitherto unexplored topic of how young people understand and relate to religious diversity in the social context in which they are growing up, this book makes a significant contribution to the existing body of literature on religious diversity and multiculturalism. It closes a gap in knowledge about young people’s attitudes to religious diversity, and reports data gathered across the whole of the UK as well as comparative chapters on Canada, USA and continental Europe. Reporting findings from both qualitative and quantitative research which reveal, for example, the importance of the particular social and geographical context within which young people are embedded, the volume addresses young people’s attitudes towards the range of 'world religions’ as well as non-religious stances and offers an interdisciplinary approach through the different analytical perspectives of the contributors.