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.
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.
Advocates of school leadership do not propose a one-size-fits-all form of leadership; whether it is instructional, transformational, or distributed leadership, it must take into account aspects of the contextual factors. The standards movement is focused on understanding outcomes and goals for learning, but often with no clear strategy for implementation or understanding of the capacity that teachers need to develop to achieve the standards. Social capital is described as a quality of groups and is focused on the ability of the group to change itself as a group. Capacity building is understood as a product of purposeful doing by drawing on skills, competencies, and knowledge to accomplish the goals of the school. If the school leadership can encourage learners to become social capitalists, seeing some choices as illegitimate and inferior, then poverty and inequality cease to be key factors in bringing about educational failure. However, key terms in the field are often unclear, rarely defined, and often poorly researched; this includes key concepts such as capacity, social capital, and moral purpose. These are ideas that form the basis of the research agenda: what is an effective school, and how is effectiveness to be measured?
This chapter details the historical context of the current education system to give the reader an understanding of the role of education in the mid-twentieth century and the debates that helped to develop the understanding of education within the neoliberal economy and wider society. The organisation of the education system before the 1944 Education Act was in desperate need of reform. The 1944 Education Act provided the framework for the postwar education service, secondary education for all, and unified education service. However, by the 1950s people lost faith in the success of the eleven-plus to accurately measure the intelligence of a child or predict their future academic achievement. The chapter explores the movement from the tripartite to a comprehensive system of secondary education changes, to early years education following the Plowden Report, the impact of the Black Papers, and the impact of the ‘great debate’. The 1988 Education Reform Act began the marketisation of education, aimed at raising standards by increasing parental choice and competition between schools. Following the Kennedy Report in 1997, technical and vocational education and training were also understood to be a mechanism for providing greater social inclusion to people who are assumed to lack ambition and aspiration.
Neoliberalism is the revival of ideas and arguments initially put forward by economist Adam Smith in the nineteenth century, and developed by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises, on the central importance of having minimal state intervention in the workings of the economy. The underpinning assumption of neoliberalism is the belief that if the free market is left as unrestricted as possible, society – both individuals and the wider society – will benefit. In addition, allowing an unrestricted free market will help to maintain personal freedom and democracy. Adopting a Foucauldian approach, the chapter outlines how specific issues in society come to be identified as problematic, including the dominance of some interpretations of a situation over others. Young people who reject what school has to offer can be viewed as engaged in a political response to neoliberalism on its terms, the production of an alternative form of subjectivity and freedom. However, individuals have human agency and the attempt to change the subjectivity of an individual by the imposition of power can generate resistance. Although attempts to raise aspiration may be unsuccessful, the policy becomes central to regulating our understanding of educational failure and underachievement.
One of the main career stages that contributes to the gender imbalance among academic staff in physics is the transition from PhD to postdoc. At this stage, many woman physics students give up on an academic career path. To explore the causes of the gender imbalance at this stage, we focused on the decision-making juncture between PhD and postdoc. We used the mixed-methods paradigm, combining a nationwide representative survey among PhD students in Israel (n=267/404) and interviews with PhD students and postdoctoral fellows (n=38). The theoretical novelty that we suggest is viewing the career decision-making in this context as a ‘deal’, which involves contextual, organizational, and individual variables and their intersection. We argue that women are examining the components of this deal: what it offers them and what prices they will have to pay, but their decisions are made within a gendered power structure. Studying both context factors and agency, we reveal the multiple and hidden ways in which gender operates as a power structure, putting up barriers to women’s academic careers. This latent power structure influences women’s decision-making and experiences in several ways. In the academic field, it produces unequal competition in a male-dominated playground. In the social sphere, choosing a demanding academic career is seen as disrupting the gender order in Israel. Within the family, Israeli culture determines that women carry a greater burden of family work and give precedence to their husband’s career and preferences. Within this social structure, women who decide to follow an academic career feel that they must excel. The demand for ‘excellence’ acts as a hidden mechanism within the gender power structure that may prevent talented women from pursuing an academic career in physics.
The aim of this chapter is to explore personal stories of physicists including their own experiences and views on under-representation of women in physics. Discussions around the under-representation in physics often focus on structural factors that influence the attraction and retention of minorities into the field. In this chapter we focus on individual perceptions of the culture and environment in physics and the common themes that emerge from physicists’ experiences.
This chapter overviews the contribution of the collection to our understanding of the under-representation of women in physics. The chapter is divides into four sections: (1) it demonstrates the loss to physics as a discipline through the marginalization of women; (2) we address the question of why the under-representation of women in physics remains endemic and slow to change; (3) we argue that strategic leadership, evidence-based policies, and successful role models are essential for change to be effective; and (4) we conclude by offering recommendations for policy to achieve a sustainable culture shift in academic physics.
This chapter examines gendered experiences of women in physics through the analytical lens of microaggressions. It identifies subtle forms of discrimination faced at work by European women physicists, explores the strategies women use to cope with the unfriendly climates of their workplaces, and investigates the consequences of being exposed to microaggressions. The analysis is based on a qualitative study performed under the framework of the H2020 project Gender Equality Network in the European Research Area (GENERA). It covers the results of 40 semi-standardized interviews conducted in 2017 with women physicists working in 12 European research-performing organizations and higher education institutions. The study reveals microaggressions that European women physicists face at different career stages. The most prevalent themes include presumed incompetence, restrictive gender roles, invisibility, sexist jokes, and sexual objectification. The perceived negative consequences of being exposed to microaggressions include feeling bad and experiencing frustration about being treated differently than a person would like to be treated, feeling obliged to constantly provide evidence of being equally competent as men, and questioning one’s ability to continue with an academic career. In order to cope with covert sexism, women physicists employ various strategies, which – while bringing some individual advantages – hardly allow them to challenge the masculine culture of physics.
The discipline of physics is exemplified by many metaphors and superlatives that reflect the perpetuation of a culture purporting objectivity, elitism, and masculinity. In order to counter this physics needs to be supported by gender-sensitive institutional processes and strategies, requiring a vision of gender equality that crosses disciplinary boundaries and engages with a variety of gender and feminist perspectives. This chapter sets out a blueprint for action that includes institutional, structural, and cultural interventions that challenge prevailing behaviours, attitudes, cultures, and even the popular (among physicists at least) epistemology. Specific measures are required to create a more gender-sensitive discipline of physics thereby attracting a more inclusive, diverse, and gender-balanced quorum of students, researchers, academic staff, and decision-makers. Gender-sensitizing physics will involve meeting and countering resistance against change towards a more gender-inclusive academy.
