The aim of an International Curriculum is to ensure that the stipulated pedagogical objectives, content of instruction, teaching-learning strategies and materials will lead to educational achievement. Thus, its role is to outline the social impact on educational systems and highlight the political role that education can play, as it will provide a basis of action for the future, with the aim of improving the curriculum and, by extension, helping people to accept change and diversity within a multiracial and multicultural society. Chapter I explores how inequality is rooted in and reproduced by economic, political and ideological forms and how the educational system contributes to hegemony. The object in Chapter II in studying French English Educational Systems has been, on the one hand, to use a comparative analysis to find out what social factors generally are at the root of the development of these distinctive forms of schooling, and on the other hand, to explore specific national differences in the chronology and forms of the development of state schooling. Chapter III highlights colonialism as a vitally important part of the heritage of most Third World countries and, in many instances - e.g. politics and education - influences relations between Madagascar and these countries - Britain and France. Chapter IV points out that underachievement is not a fate and highlights the phenomenon of underachievement as the effect of diverse factors such as social environment, socio-economic, socio-discrimination and institutional aspects.

The faith school debate in Scotland focuses almost exclusively on Catholic schools because they are the predominant form of faith schooling. Historically, the Catholic schools have had strong links with the Catholic Church and the wider Catholic community – a post-Reformation Catholic community that has a variety of national–cultural expressions but, ultimately, has strongest roots in the critical mass of immigrants who were part of the Irish Famine Diaspora. This Scottish-Irish Catholic Church and community, in some periods of history, have been subjected to structural and attitudinal sectarianism and appear to continue to be viewed with some ambivalence, and some suspicion, in contemporary Scottish society. This ambivalence often extends to Catholic schools, despite recent (widely publicised) educational success and perceived ‘social and moral’ success. This thesis seeks to understand this unique situation from an academic perspective. The history of Catholic schools and the Catholic community are examined using a variety of conceptual tools (primarily ‘postmodern critique of historiography’, ‘insider stories’ and ‘immigrant typology’). The postmodern critique of historiography is used to construct smaller narratives which also help to clarify the strengths and limitations of previous research and scholarship. The identification of the insider status and insider stories of the academics engaged in this debate enables insight into the emergence of a variety of histories and stories of a historically marginalised group. The application of immigrant typology provides frameworks to explore both the generic and unique nature of the experience of the Catholic community in Scotland. The thesis contextualises contemporary Catholic schools in Scotland within two major academic discussions: (1) the faith school debate in England and Wales (arguing that the debate in Scotland lacks the scope and conceptual sophistication of the debate in England and Wales) and (2) the key Catholic Church teaching and Catholic academic insights into Catholic schools. Adopting the qualitative method of expert interviews, the thesis maps out the contemporary debate concerning Catholic schools in Scotland. The debate is re-conceptualised using a uniquely constructed spectrum of views and the projected future of Catholic schools in Scotland is discussed within this spectrum.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate effective ways of designing taskbased collaborative writing lessons in the EFL classroom in South Korea. In this research, a group of 11/12 year-old children were involved in repeating three different writing tasks three times. In order to examine the effects of task type and task repetition on task performance and outcomes, written texts were measured in terms of fluency, accuracy, and lexical complexity with seven sub-measures and pair dialogues were quantified by the focus on a particular aspect of the language and then categorised into form-focus, lexical-focus, and mechanical-focus language-related episodes. Follow-up interviews were undertaken with the children to examine their perspectives on collaborative writing from their first experience of paired writing. On the basis of self-reflection on my prior learning and teaching experience in the EFL context, a classroom action research project was designed and conducted to promote my personal and professional growth. Classroom observation was undertaken to monitor the children’s performance and engagement when working together. The results of quantitative and qualitative data analysis showed strong effects of task type and task repetition on the products and processes of Korean children’s writing and the pedagogical benefits of collaborative writing. In addition, this teacher research gave me a valuable opportunity to explore ways of becoming a reflective teacher. The research findings may help classroom teachers who want to develop task-based collaborative writing lessons in the classroom and teacher researchers who want to initiate classroom action research to improve their teaching practice.

We consider classification problems in a variant of the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC)-learning framework, in which an unsupervised learner creates a discriminant function over each class and observations are labeled by the learner returning the highest value associated with that observation. Consideration is given to whether this approach gains significant advantage over traditional discriminant techniques. It is shown that PAC-learning distributions over class labels under Ll distance or KL-divergence implies PAC classification in this framework. We give bounds on the regret associated with the resulting classifier, taking into account the possibility of variable misclassification penalties. We demonstrate the advantage of estimating the a posteriori probability distributions over class labels in the setting of Optical Character Recognition. We show that unsupervised learners can be used to learn a class of probabilistic concepts (stochastic rules denoting the probability that an observation has a positive label in a 2-class setting). This demonstrates a situation where unsupervised learners can be used even when it is hard to learn distributions over class labels - in this case the discriminant functions do not estimate the class probability densities. We use a standard state-merging technique to PAC-learn a class of probabilistic automata and show that by learning the distribution over outputs under the weaker L1 distance rather than KL-divergence we are able to learn without knowledge of the expected length of an output. It is also shown that for a restricted class of these automata learning under L1 distance is equivalent to learning under KL-divergence.

This study examines the policy change and continuities in the delivery of public education services both preceding and following the election of the Labour government in 1997. These involve the changing relationship between local and central government and the development of an enhanced role for the private sector in the management and delivery of education services. The study considers the limitations and possibilities of these developments and their implications for governance and performance through critical policy analysis and consideration of key texts, government publications and contemporary interviews with individuals within the policy process. The study is divided into chapters dealing with the context of the research in key literature and issues of change and continuity in national education policy. It includes a critical description of the approaches to the inspection of local education authorities and an illustrative example of government intervention in an LEA leading to the outsourcing of services. Through interview material, the policy analysis is grounded in the experience of individuals who are enacting ‘modernisation’ and also commenting on its effects. There is also a consideration of the evidence of the impact of outsourcing on school performance in a number of authorities. In addition, the study considers the implications of these developments for future strategy in relation to the development of local authorities in the light of the Children Act (2004). It suggests that the readiness of local authorities to adopt the changes needed to enact the Children Act (2004) forms a contrast to their limited adherence to the local government reforms prefigured elsewhere by central government. This reflects the strength of concepts such as the well-being of children as agents of change, in contrast to the diffuse theoretical underpinnings of the third way.

Home-education, also known as home-schooling, is an educational choice made by families to facilitate learning at home rather than in school. Research by Rothermel (2002) and Rudner (1999) shows that, on average, home-educated children far outperform school-educated children on standard mathematics tests. But at present, no study has yet investigated the key reasons behind this phenomenon – indeed, no research has taken an in-depth look into the ways in which parents facilitate the learning of mathematics at home and the resultant effects on their children’s mathematical development. Therefore, in this study, we will consider the nature of mathematics education through the eyes of the home-educating parent and their children. Through questionnaires, this research examines the relationship between the educational and mathematical beliefs of home-educating parents. Parental views are compared with the children’s perceptions of the home learning environment, their mathematical beliefs and their mathematical understanding. Furthermore, the children’s mathematical understanding is addressed through consideration of their responses to a series of mathematical questions set within the context of Key Stages 1-3 of the National Curriculum. To obtain the research sample, home-educating families from across the United Kingdom were contacted via the Internet, and information was collected through both email and postal response. From the parental data, three categories of home-educator were highlighted: (1) Structured, (2) Semi-Formal and (3) Informal (as described by Lowe and Thomas, 2002). The children’s questionnaire responses were then analysed, using illustrative case studies to demonstrate how different home-educating approaches of their parents could result in different perceptions of mathematics and mathematical learning in the children. For example, children learning via a ‘structured’ approach were less likely to be able to measure their own level of mathematical ability than children from the other families; they also mentioned limited resources and less independence when learning mathematics. When examining the children’s assessed work, selective case studies, together with detailed analysis, revealed a strong link between the home-educating approach and the problem-solving strategies of the children. Children from structured families were often competent when solving more routine, ‘calculation-type’ problems, but less able to adapt their knowledge to problems that required a ‘deeper’ understanding of the concept. Children from families where the parent themselves had a mathematical background (e.g. mathematician or mathematics teacher) typically used formal mathematical reasoning in their work. On the other hand, children learning from ‘informal’ families (where emphasis was placed on ‘child-directed’ learning) seldom used ‘standard procedural’ type approaches to solve problems, but instead displayed a range of creative strategies. The findings suggested that a home-educating parent’s conception of mathematics not only influenced the way in which they attempt to teach mathematics but also their children’s mathematical beliefs and learning style. Furthermore, there was evidence to suggest that certain home-educating approaches encouraged a ‘type’ of mathematical understanding that could be applied in a range of situations, whereas other approaches, particularly where both the learning materials and interaction with others was restricted, resulted in a more limited level of mathematical understanding.

An implicit theory of intelligence is a belief about the stability of intelligence – whether it is a fixed and innate trait (entity) or a malleable trait that can be manipulated through behaviour (incremental). Dweck & Leggett‟s (1988) model suggests that the theory which an individual holds can have a profound effect on their intrinsic motivation, achievement goals and academic achievement. Though there is support for this model in general, there is no conclusive evidence about whether it applies to the gifted and talented. This thesis tests the model with gifted and talented students quantitatively using a questionnaire (N=417) and explores the themes qualitatively with fourteen of these students using semi-structured email interviews. The data suggests that the theoretical framework does not fully apply to gifted and talented students. Two findings could explain this: a) participants showed high levels of motivation by endorsing both performance and learning goals b) the interview participants expressed quite complex beliefs about intelligence that defied categorization. Overall this thesis supports the need for a personalized approach to teaching the gifted and talented which allows them to maintain both positive performance and positive learning goals.

This thesis investigates individual language school student sojourners’ learning experiences in the UK. It takes into account the importance of learners learning through interaction with others in the target language community and recognises how learners’ social networks affect their language learning and use. There are many studies about students who study abroad for academic purposes and immigrant learners, but not many relating to individual language learners in private language schools. In order to fill this gap, this study focused on individual language school learners. With the intention of understanding how the social networks and language learning interact over time as part of their sojourner experience, I utilised different theoretical frameworks that have been applied to other groups of language learners and concluded that these frameworks are also applicable to private language school students. I recognised that in order to understand my participants’ learning experiences I needed to interact with them and also observe how they interacted with their social world. Therefore, formal interviews (semi-structured) and informal interviews (informal group meeting or chat) were the main methods for my study together with observation of interaction in various situations. This study identified the expectations that learners had with regard to the target language community, host families and native speakers’ attitudes towards foreign students, and the realisation that these expectations were higher than what was actually encountered. It also identified the steps the individual language learners took to overcome these disappointments and how they reconstructed their relationships with the target language and community respectively. In contrast with many previous studies which only focused on learning from native speakers, my study recognised that learners sometimes can have more interpersonal contact with their fellow students than native speakers. And consequently they benefit more from these contacts, in terms of language learning, than from native speakers. This thesis also helps language learners and language educators recognise basic theoretical frameworks which could help them evaluate the benefits and problems related to learning through interpersonal contact. And with this understanding learners will be able to facilitate their autonomous learning in the target language community.

This thesis examines the philosophical drivers behind the education policy agenda pursued by the New Labour Government and will test the assertion that: Mrs Thatcher had a project. Blair's historic project is adjusting us to it. (Hall, S. 1998.14. p 28) The research considers the legislative policy, practice and continuities between Conservative and New Labour governments and critically analyses the 'Third Way'with particular reference to modernisation, competition and the restructuring of the welfare state in response to globalisation. The thesis also examines the growth of the private sector in state education, the development of the Private Finance Initiative in both policy and operational terms and draws conclusions about the implications for the governance of education of the trend towards a 'liberal state', where individual choice is perceived to be more effective and efficient than a model of governance based upon social values. The qualitative nature of this thesis includes consideration of the issues involved in the changing concepts of citizenship and consumerism within the evolving, redefined welfare state; examines the assertion by Marquand (2000) that incessant marketisation has generated a culture of distrust which has corroded the values of professionalism, citizenship, equity and public service and draws conclusions about accountabilities within a modern social democracy. The study includes an analysis of education legislation and a critique of policy intent in the broader context of societal impact. This incorporates an analysis of primary texts, government policy statements as well as Green and White Papers, compared and evaluated with contemporary research literature. Coupled with a case study of the Private Finance Initiative in Stoke-on-Trent the theoretical triangulation (Denzin, 1970) is combined with witness accounts of the 4 complex phenomena' associated with a Private Finance Initiative' (Adelman, 1980) and enabled cross cutting perspectives to be illuminated and the knowledge and understanding of modernisation extended. Such triangulation extends knowledge by clarifying meaning by the identification of different ways in which modernisation is perceived in both theoretical and practical terms (Silverman, 1993; Flick, 1998). The thesis considers within the reality of the case study the importance of the local democratic voice and local political actions in educational governance, including the political/professional/public interface. This leads to conclusions about the need for a modern social democracy to explore the concept of accountability to the citizen as well as the consumer of services within a framework of evolving local policy networks and emergent patterns of governance within state education. In essence this thesis examines whether it is a superficial assertion to equate the 'Third Way'with neo-liberalism (Marquand, 2000; Driver and Martell, 1998,2000; Giddens, 1998,2000) or that the plurality of 'Third Ways' have translated into operational definition, legislation and policies within a model of education which lacks a coherent and identifiable national drive and is therefore critically dependent upon local interpretation and local political response. It also reaches conclusions about the citizen - state relationship, the validity of the concept of the 'social investment state' and suggests constituent elements of a 'fourth way' as a contribution to the issue posed by Whitty, (2000), 'how can education best help reconstruct the social fabric and new concepts of citizenship - and who shall influence its design? (p 8).

The importance of understanding teachers' cognition has been frequently stressed in connection with an ongoing debate regarding the need for a new knowledge base in English language teacher education. However, as is indicated in Chapter One of the present thesis, there has so far been relatively little actual research into teachers' cognition in the field of ELT, and the majority of studies have focused on pre-service and novice, rather than experienced teachers. Research into experienced teachers has tended to rest on the questionable assumption that characteristics of `experts' can be identified and their knowledge prescribed to novices. Additionally, most studies have been carried out in ESL contexts, not the secondary school EFL contexts in which most teachers of English in the world work. This justifies the focus in the present study on identifying experienced (but not necessarily `expert') teachers' personal theories of good teaching in an EFL secondary school context in Turkey. Both the contents and the overall nature (structure and sources) of such teachers' theories are investigated, as is the extent to which their classroom practices are congruent with their theories. The study adopts a Personal Construct Theory (PCT) perspective which is justified and explained in Chapter Two, and employs repertory-grid and follow-up interviews, and stimulated recall interviews based on video-recordings of lessons (as explained in Chapter Three). Four teachers, whose years of experience range from eleven to twenty-five years, are particularly focused upon. Findings are presented and discussed in four chapters, which focus, respectively, on: participants' core constructs relating to `Significant others' in their past and present experience (Chapter Four); shared views (as revealed by content analysis) relating to professional development, and roles and relationships (Chapter Five); both shared views and individual constructs relating specifically to classroom practice and pedagogy (Chapter Six); and, finally, how the participants' personal theories are put into practice and situational constraints are perceived (Chapter Seven). In Chapter Eight I discuss how the personal theories of the participants in this study appear relatively unaffected by formal theories of teaching and learning but are particularly informed by core constructs which have moral and affective significance. These core constructs have deep roots in participants' personal biographies, and they have, to varying extents, developed ways of mediating them into their practice. This process is explained with reference to PCT, and original findings are also offered regarding the overall structure of teacher cognition and the way teachers respond differently to common constraints. The thesis ends (Chapter Nine) with a summary of implications and limitations of the study, suggestions for future research, and final reflections on theory-practice dissonance.