Eszter Neumann

Originally, the concept of resilience refers to one’s capacity to cope with unexpected shocks and unpredictable situations. Originating from ecological theories, the approach has gained ground in social sciences. In the context of education, the concept has been applied to explain how disadvantaged students can overcome structural constraints and become educationally successful and socially mobile (Werner, E. E., Vulnerable but invincible: a longitudinal study of resilient children and youth. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1982; Masten A. S., American Psychologist 56: 227–238, 2001; Reid, R., Botterrill L. C., Australian Journal of Public Administration 72:31–40, 2013; Máté, D., Erdélyi Társadalom 13:43–55, 2015).This paper is based on the analysis of the Hungarian National Assessment of Basic Competences (NABC) database which has been conducted annually since 2001. We created a typology of school resilience based on the schools’ social and ethnic profile as well as their performance indica...

With the sudden widespread closure of schools since February-March 2020 due to the physical distancing measures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital competences became a focus of attention, being of central importance to the swift and equitable transition to the various forms of emergency remote teaching implemented throughout the world as a strategy to insure continuity in education. This almost instantaneous mass shift to teaching online has made transparent great disparities in how digital competences -- particularly those of teachers -- were conceptualized, taught and assessed within various educational programs. We present a comparative analysis of the approaches to teachers' learning and professional development that state and non-state actors in four Central and East European countries have articulated in the first months of COVID-19 related lockdown. We take a Critical Frame Analysis approach to exploring the roles played by state and non-state actors in th...

In our paper, we will present some of the findings that we have obtained in the framework of an international research1. Although the call for papers of this conference did not exactly mention the topics we are about to introduce, we decided to present our results here since we find them rather challenging.On one hand, it is in fact important to study the different mechanisms that can be introduced in the higher educational sector in order to assure quality in research (for example, creation of a policy of quality assurance within the institutions, or make it possible to find and follow up every single research, or introducing a protocol to be followed in terms of the documentation of the scientific researches etc). But on the other hand, it is also important to investigate into the conditions of research at the macro-sociological level, so at the level of the nation-state (in fact, such investigations could deal with the role of the supra-national agencies also, these latter having...

ABSTRACT Informed by the ideology of ‘deliverology’, performance measurement has become a core component of how English schools are held accountable for the quality of their provision. A wealth of research conducted in diverse national contexts where this approach has been influential has suggested that the unintended harms it generates – including a widening of inequalities, a test-driven pedagogic culture and a narrowing of the curriculum – may be outweighing its benefits. In an attempt to circumnavigate such perverse effects, the performance measures used in England have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, giving them a prima facie plausibility that has led to them being welcomed by some progressive educators as a means of increasing access to high-status knowledge for disadvantaged students. This paper uses data from a survey of English school teachers to interrogate this plausibility. The analysis suggests that when we drill down into the daily life of schools and its underlying logic it becomes increasingly difficult to be comfortable with the progressive defence of the performance measures currently in use; and that, far from improving educational quality, the measures themselves, and the wider deliverology framework with which they are associated, are in certain fundamental respects incompatible with quality improvement.

Az egyházi fenntartók aránya az utóbbi évtizedben jelentősen megemelkedett a magyar általános iskolarendszerben.Az egyházi iskolák jellemzően társadalmilag kevésbé heterogének, tanulóik magasabb társadalmi státuszúak, mint az állami fenntartású iskolák diákjai, növekvő számuk pedig szervesen hozzájárul a magyar iskolarendszer társadalmi polarizációjához. Az oktatáskutatások kevésbé foglalkoztak azonban eddig azokkal az egyházi intézményekkel, amelyek a környékbeli iskolákkal összevetve hátrányosabb társadalmi összetételűek, és roma tanulókat is fogadnak. Tanulmányunkban négy olyan református általános iskolával foglalkozunk, amelyek viszonylag magas arányban fogadnak roma tanulókat is. Részletesebben elemezzük a vizsgált általános iskolák egyházi átvételének körülményeit és beiskolázási stratégiáit, valamint a roma és hátrányos helyzetű tanulók kirekesztésének és befogadásának jellegzetes folyamatait. Végül kitérünk a roma integrációval kapcsolatos iskolai narratívákra, arra keresve...

ABSTRACT With the rise of accountability policies since the early nineties, the daily operation of English schools has profoundly changed. Through the in-depth analysis of ability grouping practices in one English secondary school, this paper aims to explore how the accountability shift and datafication impacted the practice of student grouping and students’ experience of education. The paper documents how an English secondary school which had fully endorsed the comprehensive ideal gradually shifted from mixed ability teaching to a rigid system of hierarchically arranged attainment-based grouping structure over a period of decades, and explores the pedagogical dilemmas that data-driven governance generates. The paper concludes that the school’s data-driven practice creates an environment of competition and an experience of incessant insecurities for the students which unsettlingly echo the culture of the late neoliberal labour market.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the implications of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) for secondary school physical education (PE) departments and their teachers. The EBacc is a key performance measure that is published annually for each school, which privileges a particular set of traditional academic subjects, and in doing so, marginalises other subjects, including PE. At the same time as responding to this performance measure, secondary schools in England are required to respond to a wider set of policy reforms and innovations. This can sometimes result in overlap, collision and policy clash. For example, while PE is being sidelined and PE staffing reduced by the EBacc, there is national concern surrounding issues of fitness, health and well-being that schools are expected to address and which are often traditionally seen as the responsibility of PE departments. A reduction in their staffing will inevitably have consequences for their ability to respond in meaningful ways to such non-academic policy imperatives. Drawing on a study of the impact of recent curriculum and accountability reforms in English secondary schools (Neumann, E., Towers, E., Gewirtz, S., & Maguire, M. 2016. A curriculum for all? The effects of recent Key Stage 4 curriculum, assessment and accountability reforms on English secondary education. London: National Union of Teachers), this paper presents evidence of the marginalisation of PE and PE teachers’ ensuing concerns about their job security. It also explores changes that have been made to the PE curriculum in an attempt to make the subject more academically demanding and considers what this means for PE teachers and their students. The authors conclude that if PE is going to contribute to broader fitness, health and wellbeing agendas, then there is an urgent need for a renewed debate – that reaches beyond PE communities and constituencies – about what PE is for, why it is important and how it can be better supported.

ABSTRACT This paper returns to a long-standing theme in education research, the ways in which ‘contextual factors impact on what schools do, as well as directly on what pupils achieve’ (Lupton, 2004, 4). Drawing on a project designed to explore the early effects of reforms to national examinations, the curriculum for 14−16 year olds and school accountability measures in English secondary schools, this paper considers the perceptions and experiences of teachers currently charged with enacting these reforms specifically in the light of their situated school realities in three different settings. A case is made for a contextually sensitive approach towards policy making and policy enactment that takes account of some of the more nuanced distinctions among schools’ contextual positionings.

This special issue of the European Educational Research Journal collects articles from the sessions organised by the newly launched sociologies of education network (network 28) of the European Education Research Association (EERA) at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) held in 2012. Scholars who contributed to the sessions as presenters or commenters from the audience argued that there is a need to reconsider the methodologies, missions and the traditional themes of the sociology of education in an era when the institutions of education and learning practices are being profoundly re-shaped by the processes of globalisation. A core part of this reflection is to expand sociological imagination and to think beyond fixed and nation-state bound categories in which sociology of education had traditionally understood education, policy and society. This issue collects articles that have, to lesser or greater extent, gained inspiration from the Latourian version of actor-...

This article discusses the dynamic interaction between global policy and knowledge flows and two post-communist education systems — Hungary and Romania — with special attention to the appropriation of post-bureaucratic regulation tools and the structural changes enhanced by the knowledge transmitted by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey. First, through the lens of the socio-history of educational assessments, the varieties of state socialist education systems are detailed in order to contextualise the subsequent discussion about the entry of the two countries into the PISA survey and the national institutional changes generated by PISA. After the thematic comparison of the country case studies, the article concludes that the two cases do not allow the conceptualisation of a single post-socialist model of PISA reception, but, on the contrary, the international comparative framework of PISA offers an opportunity to critically interrogate the complex proce...

41 Resumo: A Hungria é um dos países europeus cujo sistema educativo foi repetidamente diagnos-ticado como apresentando um desempenho abaixo da média e uma discrepância entre as escolas acima da média quando comparada com outros países que participam ...

Conservativism has gained significant influence on education-policy making and debates about education in many Anglophone countries. While conservative educational governments have advanced some neoliberal governance trends, they have also introduced characteristic neoconservative education elements, notably in the area of curricular content. This article focuses on the impact of conservative ideology on curriculum and assessment policies in English secondary education and specifically explores schools’ first reactions to the introduction of a policy initiative that is emblematic of neoconservatism, the English Baccalaureate. The empirical discussion relies on a mixed methods study on the reception of the latest assessment and curriculum policies in English secondary schools. The findings suggest that the current reforms are transforming school subject hierarchies, resource allocation across subjects, and what counts as knowledge in English secondary schools, and introducing a new culture of subject—and by implication, teacher and student—‘worth’.

Az iskola nem sziget kutatásban olyan multietnikus környezetben található iskolákat keresünk fel, amelyek hátrányos társadalmi összetételük ellenére kimagasló eredményeket érnek el a tanulókkal. A kutatás során az iskolai és települési reziliencia feltételeiről szeretnénk mélyebb megértést szerezni. Tanulmányunkban bemutatjuk a kutatás elméleti és módszertani alapvetéseit, valamint összefoglaljuk a statisztikai elemzések és a terepmunka első eredményeit.
Kulcsszavak: iskolai reziliencia, közösségi reziliencia, roma oktatás

Our research titled The School is not an Island focuses on disadvantaged schools in multiethnic communities which have a high pedagogic added value and perform above the expected level in the national assessment. The research aims to gain a deeper insight on
the conditions of community and school resilience in Hungary. Th e article presents the theoretical foundations and methodological approach of our study and it also gives a taste of the fi rst results of the statistical analysis and the fieldwork.
Keywords: community resilience, school resilience, Roma education

Joint European and national initiatives aiming at Roma inclusion in Central-Eastern European (CEE) education systems have repeatedly been assessed by policymakers, lobby groups and researchers as failing their original targets. My article centres on the in-depth analysis of the evolution of the education policy discourse and practice in a Hungarian municipality; and by doing so, it aims to contribute to this debate in two ways. Firstly, it argues that the literature often restricts itself to a national, and occasionally to a regional scope and hence the ways in which policy transforms as it travels back and forth between transnational, national and local scales become obscured. Secondly, it argues that policy evaluations often adopt a narrow perspective, bound to particular scalar positions. Instead, a more sensitive approach to the process of policy re-contextualization can offer a better understanding of complex and diverse policy effects. The analysis shows that national and supranational pressures significantly transformed the patterns of access to schooling in the studied municipality, however, particular sections of the target-group has been affected differently.

This book collects a handful of articles in the field of the history of education that investigate how the rising relevance of statistics and standardized data collection gradually transformed our thinking about education systems. The common theoretical framings of the empirically oriented studies constructively bring together various traditions of social inquiry: (a) the strand of the sociology of knowledge that investigates the emergence of statistics as a fundamental technology of modern government: the new sociology of statistics elaborated by Desrosières (2002), Hacking (1990), Shapin (1994) and Porter (1996) among many others, as well as Foucault's work (1980) on systems of thought and governmentality and Latour's actor-network theory (2005); (b) the historical sociology of the emergence of modern mass schooling systems (e.g. Turmel, 2008); and (c) the strand of policy sociology that focuses on 'travelling policies' and the new technologies of governing 'at a distance' (e.g. Popkewitz 2005, Ozga et al. 2011). Each empirical study reconnects to the theoretical issues proposed by the above schools of thought. Altogether, the discussions of the institutional histories between the last decades of the 19 th century and the first half of the 20 th century integrate to a coherent narrative about the epistemology and genealogy of education statistics. The volume is both edited and introduced by Martin Lawn who in the last decades has focussed his research on the Europeanisation of education and the 'fabrication' of a new European education policy space (Lawn & Nóvoa, 2002). Lawn explains that the common frame of the historical investigations presented in the book is the process how numerical data gained a power of explanation in the governance of education by offering " an esoteric and unknowable set of techniques for many in the field (…) *that+ operates by excluding the values, ideas and politics " (p7). The case studies explore how the rise of numerical data had fundamentally redesigned education systems and formed a new governing paradigm that considerably affects the learning subjectivities and the aims of education practices. " The Internalization of Education Data: exhibitions, tests, standards and associations " authored by Lawn focuses on how the great world expositions produced a new demand to display and compare the features of national education systems and thus fostered the growth of numerical data. The analysis argues that the second part of the 19 th century was a transition period between paradigms of describing and assessing education systems: an elongated shift took place from the dominance of visual depictions to that of statistics which was advanced by the new demand on behalf of the state administration to quantify the economic needs and the social effects of the institutionalizing national mass education system. As a result, the first half of the 20 th century witnessed an excessive growth of data production, the construction of new testing devices and the development of complex statistical apparatuses. The context of international statistical data production was the increasing interaction of the scientific and the policy fields between the two world wars. With the lead of the USA, the 1950s and 60s brought about the first large-scale international comparative projects which have significantly shaped how education systems are governed today when data production is not any more merely administrative, but linked to audit, production and performativity. It is concluded