Research

 

You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.

Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
 

Books: Research

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The Rise of the Meritocracy
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Education is considered central to social mobility and, following a drive to raise learners’ aspirations, an ‘aspiration industry’ has emerged.

However, the desire to leave school early should not be regarded as evidence of students lacking ambition. This book traces the emergence of the aspiration industry and argues that to have ambitions that do not require qualifications is different, but not wrong.

Reviewing the performance of six schools in England, their Ofsted reports and responses, it evaluates underpinning assumptions of what makes an effective school. This book critically examines neo-liberal education policy developments, including the 1988 Education Reform Act, and the political discourse around changing explanations of education ‘failure’ with the rise in the marketisation of education.

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Redesigning Research Universities
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Are British research universities losing their way or are they finding a new way?

Nigel Thrift, a well-known academic and a former Vice-Chancellor, explores recent changes in the British research university that threaten to erode the quality of these higher education institutions. He considers what a research university has now become by examining the quandaries that have arisen from a succession of misplaced strategies and false expectations.

Challenging both higher education policy and leadership, he argues that the focus on student number growth and a series of research policy missteps has upset research universities’ priorities just at a point in the history of planetary breakdown when their research is most needed.

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