Paul Warmington

Nottingham Trent University | NTU · School of Social Sciences

The term ‘chumocracy’ has been used to describe a tendency within the UK’s Conservative government to appoint friends and allies to key public positions; this image seriously underestimates the scale and influence of networks that shape policy and supply individuals to key roles. This paper maps networks that converge around conservative and someti...

This report summarizes the best-available evidence concerning race inequities in the English education system. We outline the scale of race inequity (especially in terms of achievement and exclusions from school) and explore the powerful, and often hidden, operation of institutional racism. Among the key issues we address are: • the complex and e...

This paper examines the development of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in England, in terms of impact and opposition. Since the early 2000s CRT has become a significant intellectual space for race-conscious scholars and activists in England. The current paper traces the growth of CRT in the field of education (where it has had the greatest impact since...

Since its introduction in 2017, QuantCrit (Quantitative Critical Race Theory) has been taken up by researchers internationally, and in numerous disciplines, as they explore how statistical methods can (sometimes unwittingly) disguise racist inequity and block attempts to advance racial justice. In this chapter the authors explore key questions that...

Quantitative research enjoys heightened esteem among policymakers, media, and the general public. Whereas qualitative research is frequently dismissed as subjective and impressionistic, statistics are often assumed to be objective and factual. We argue that these distinctions are wholly false; quantitative data is no less socially constructed than...

Drawing on a secondary analysis of official statistics, this paper examines the changing scale of the inequality of achievement between White students and their Black British peers who identify their family heritage as Black Caribbean. We examine a 25-year period from the introduction of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), in 198...

This paper explores the personal reflections of educators and contributors to policy on the shifting status of race equality in education policy in England between 1993 and 2013. The interview participants included some of the most notable figures active in race equality work in England. Part of the paper’s significance is its focus on the perspect...

Black and minority ethnic students (BME) are a significant constituency in vocational education and training (VET) and FE in England. Despite this recent research on race and VET has become a marginal concern. Insofar as current VET research addresses social justice, race appears to be a supplementary concern. Although there is a substantial litera...

Final report of a two-year research project funded by the Society for Educational Studies. The project combined two key elements; first, a quantitative analysis of statistical data to provide the first-ever authoritative picture of the changing landscape of educational achievement and experience in relation to ethnic diversity over a 20 year span s...

In this article Paul Warmington examines the dystopian analyses pervading recent work by David Blacker, John Marsh, and Pauline Lipman. Their unsettling depictions of education under late capitalism bear witness to irreversible economic and environmental malaise, the colonization of education by neoliberalism, and the unsustainability of faith in e...

Historically, to be a black public intellectual in Britain has, almost by definition, meant being located on the liberal-left spectrum, in terms of analyses of race and class. However, in the past decade a number of high-profile black British thinkers have explicitly positioned themselves at odds with black liberal and radical traditions of thought...

Ask any moderately interested Briton to name a black intellectual and chances are the response will be an American name: Malcolm X or Barack Obama, Toni Morrison or Cornel West. Yet Britain has its own robust black intellectual traditions and its own master teachers, among them C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Stuart Hall and Pa...

In the USA, where Critical Race Theory (CRT) first emerged, black public intellectuals are a longstanding, if embattled, feature of national life. However, while often marginalized in public debate, the UK has its own robust tradition of black intellectual creation. The field of education, both as a site of intellectual production and as the site o...

This article offers an analysis of The Primary, a television documentary broadcast in the UK in 2008 as part of a BBC series exploring multicultural Britain. The film documents a term at an inner-city primary school. It depicts school leadership, cultural diversity, relationships between the school and the local community, pupils’ friendships, pare...

This paper explores the challenges for social and cultural historians of education of using documentary films on schools and schooling as a research resource. It draws upon the outcomes of the British Academy-funded Documentary Film in Educational Research project, an international study that focused on developing methodological frameworks for rese...

This article draws upon, but also critiques, activity theory by combining analysis of how an activity theory derived research intervention attempted to address both everyday work practices and organisational power relationships among children's services professionals. It offers two case studies of developmental work research (DWR) interventions in...

Academics and activists concerned with race and racism have rightly coalesced around the sociological project to refute biologistic conceptions of race. By and large, our default position as teachers, writers and researchers is that race is a social construct. However, the deconstruction of race and its claims to theoretical intelligibility has als...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the problem of achieving “organizational justice” for children within integrated children's services. Justice is understood, following Byers and Rhodes discussion of Levinas as respecting the “unique and indivisible” character of a given child. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical material...

Shortlisted for the NASEN Special Educational Needs Academic Book Award 2009. Inter-professional collaborations are invaluable relationships which can prevent the social exclusion of children and young people and are now a common feature of welfare policies worldwide. Drawing on a four year study of the skills and understanding required of practiti...

Engeström’s (1987, 1999) innovations in cultural-historical activity theory emphasise the role of contradictions in analysing and transforming learning in practice. This paper considers some of the problems and possibilities contained in his analytical understanding of contradictions, in relation to activity and to what he terms ‘expansive learning...

Those of us teaching, researching and studying in areas that relate to race equality, anti-racism, cultural diversity or any other variation on the theme are engaged, largely against our wishes, in a dialogue with the ghost of race. We have refuted pseudo-biological notions of race and we adhere to the default position that race is a social constru...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe how Engeström's “third generation” activity theory, with its emphasis on developing conceptual tools to understand dialogues, multiple perspectives and networks of interacting activity systems, has informed research into professional learning in multiagency service settings in England. Design/method...

This study addresses the challenges faced by organisations and individual professionals, as new practices are developed and learned in multi‐agency work settings. The practices examined in the paper involve working responsively across professional boundaries with at‐risk young people. The paper draws on evidence from the Learning in and for Interag...

Background This article is concerned with professional learning within multi-agency settings. Since the publication of the government document Every child matters in 2003, professionals involved in working with children and young people have been moving into newly organized services that are required to deliver improved services for vulnerable chil...

News coverage of public examination results in the United Kingdom has escalated in recent years. The years 2002 and 2003, in particular, witnessed a bitter media debate over A-level results. Yet, while educationalists often deride the quality of the annual examination debate, there has been minimal research into the specific ways in which exam news...

Why should we, as Marxist educators, expend energy examining the news media’s construction of education issues? In the UK vast quantities of education coverage emerge each year. Stories include hardy annuals, such as the predictable August uproar over exam results, perennials, such as the relative performance of boys and girls, and sudden sprouting...

This article suggests that, despite the current preoccupation with learner-centredness, there are good reasons for maintaining a research interest in the practice of ‘studenthood’ as a means by which students enact coherence between their own personal requirements and those of the educational site. The article comprises a critical ethnography, depi...

It is a cherished belief within physical education and sport communities that participation in sport/physical activity has the potential to offer young people a range of physical, psychological and social benefits. More recently in the UK, this belief has become prominent in government policies that, among other things, are seeking to re‐engage dis...

This paper focuses on institutional practices associated with widening participation in a number of higher education institutions across the UK. The higher education sector in the UK has been subject to both quantitative and qualitative change, resulting in its transformation from elite to mass over a period of 20 years, against a background of dep...

The work of internal verifiers (IVs) is integral to ensuring that the operation of vocational qualifications meets the local needs of learners and employers, while also maintaining reliable quality nationally and throughout occupational sectors. Arguably, though, the role of IVs in the management of vocational learning often remains narrowly define...

The publication of A‐level examination results in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has become one of the major diary items in the news media’s calendar. This paper is based, in part, upon the findings of an inter‐disciplinary study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It explores two key questions about the relationship bet...

This article examines the perceptions held by mature students on an Access to Higher Education programme at an inner-city college as to the social, cultural and economic significance of the qualifications they hoped to gain. Emphasising the critical potential of the students' voices, this ethnography depicts them mining their biographies in order t...

Analysis of narratives constructed in 61 group and individual interviews with mature, working-class adults returning to education showed that, although access programs targeted disaffected learners, many still felt alienated or marginalized or received minimal support and encouragement. They believed that education had to be perceived as reasonably...