Geoffrey Walford’s research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

This article discussed the definitions, nature, growth, and affordability of low-fee private schools. It is shown that there is great diversity within the range of low-fee private schools both within and between different countries. It is argued that they are best understood as part of part of an expanded private education sector and discussed within the individual social, historical, educational, and economic contexts of the various countries.

This paper is a further exploration of the phenomenon of historic country houses repurposed as private schools. In a previous paper it was shown that 55 English private schools within the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference and the Girls’ Schools Association are partially housed within former country houses. This paper investigates some of the possible motivations for schools choosing to occupy such redundant country houses. There are a number of obvious reasons, such as their availability at low cost with appropriate facilities that could be readily used by the schools, but in some cases, it was found that the country house’s historic associations with arts, culture, and learning were a particular motivation for repurposing into schools.

This article explores the phenomenon of country houses repurposed as private schools. It investigates the population of English schools within the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference and the Girls’ Schools Association and finds that some 55 of these schools are partially housed within former country houses, with 19 in Grade I listed buildings and 17 in Grade II* listed buildings. The vast majority are boarding schools, with an equal number of schools that were originally designed to be single-sex schools for boys or girls. These schools and the houses they occupy are discussed within five time periods from the eighteenth century to the present.

This is a methodological paper that seeks to encourage thought about the nature of auto-ethnography and which types of auto-ethnography might be most worthwhile within educational research. It reviews the various types of auto-ethnographic writing within education, focusing initially on the accounts of the process of doing educational research which started to be published in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper discusses the merits and potential problems of such accounts, drawing upon examples of such work. During the 1980s and 1990s other forms of auto-ethnography in education started to be published that focused more on a contribution to knowledge through providing new data related to education. The paper discusses the merits and potential problems of this type of account, again drawing on various published examples. The paper argues that worthwhile auto-ethnography, of whatever type, should meet the criteria set for worthwhile ethnography as such.

This article looks back at several of the classic ethnographies in British sociology of education and shows that quantitative work played a significant part in many of them, and that quantitative results were part of the evidence used to support claims and arguments put forward by the authors. The article then examines some more recent ethnographies and shows that quantitative research within them has dwindled. It is then claimed that the artificial division between quantitative and qualitative research in education has made research poorer, and that the categorisation of ethnographic research as qualitative has been detrimental to ethnography. Some ways in which more quantitative work could (and often should) be included are then suggested.

This article argues that the growth of social media and other forms of digital communication make it impossible for ethnographers to offer anonymity to research sites or to those significant people involved in the research sites. Indeed, it was never actually fully possible to offer anonymity in ethnography. Ethical Guidelines need to recognise these facts and researchers need to modify their research procedures such that the advantages of more openness in research are exploited.

This chapter promotes what might be called a traditional form of ethnography. It recognizes that all traditions change, but puts forward a view that, for an activity or product to be regarded as ethnographic, there is a need for some strong and recognizable continuity with what was regarded as ethnography for most of the twentieth century. Legitimizing ethnographic work in the 1970s was far from easy. The chapter argues that, even where ethnographies do use multiple methods, most studies rely on interviews much more than before and often present transcriptions of interviews as data. This growing dependence on interviews is particularly strange given that the growth of ethnographic studies in education was originally driven by a desire to break away from generating data in atypical, researcher-constructed situations. Further, the validity of information given in interviews is often suspect, particularly if it relates to areas of the interviewee's life that are of importance to them.

A great variety of non-state private actors have become active in education in the Global South. A vigorous debate has emerged on the appropriateness of certain non-state actors, particularly those with commercial and entrepreneurial motives, to meet universal education goals, as well as on the relative effectiveness of private schooling and its ability to mitigate against social inequities. A number of empirical questions abound, such as relative student achievement and learning outcomes; relative costs; impacts on households accessing fee-paying sectors; the nature of the market at various education levels; relationships between different types of non-state actors and between them and the state; and regulatory compulsions. There is also a need to sharpen conceptualisations on the types of non-state actors operating in the Global South, and the nature of their engagement. The introduction to this Special Issue of the Oxford Review of Education lays out some of these concerns, and introduces the eight original contributions addressing the topic.