Foreword to the fiftieth volume

The very first issue of the Oxford Review of Education opened with this statement of intent from one of the Editors, Alan Bullock:

Education has come to play so large and important a part in society—or at least in our thinking and talking about it—that many people who have never thought of themselves as educationalists are drawn or driven into taking an active interest in it. Most educationalists welcome this: the problem is how to involve the others—from philosophers to medical scientists—whom everyone would like to see taking part in the discussion of educational issues. The Oxford Review of Education is an attempt to provide a forum for such an enlarged discussion. (Bullock, 1975)

That first issue featured pieces from Mary Warnock, Jerome Bruner, Hans Eysenck, A.H. Halsey and James S. Coleman. The titles reveal a concern with one of the major and enduring themes of educational discussion, in both academic and popular media: inequality, of which more below. There are perspectives from sociology, psychology, economics and philosophy. This year is the 50^th year of the Oxford Review of Education providing such a forum for an ‘enlarged discussion’ of education. Some things may change (some of those first articles had not a single reference in them!) but the core mission remains the same, and we are as committed to the publication of high-quality, interesting and innovative articles which reach beyond a narrowly focused band of scholars and across disciplinary and subject boundaries.

Following this Foreword is the list of 50 articles selected by the Editors to be made freely available for a limited time following the publication of this article in celebration of this 50^th anniversary. We purposefully set out to choose articles that represent the quality and breadth of publications in the Oxford Review of Education. In so doing, we avoided selecting articles that are already freely available, to increase the proportion of open science available from the journal. The journal addresses big topics in education in many different sectors and the selected articles focus upon early years settings (Sylva, 2014), schools (e.g. Willms, 1987) and higher education (e.g. Deem & Brehony, 2005; Boliver, 2015). Our selections are from authors and research projects in a range of geographical locations, including Australia (e.g. Martin & Marsh, 2009), Hong Kong (Vickers et al., 2003), India (Srivastava & Noronha, 2016), Korea (Kim, 2017), South Africa (Languille, 2016), Turkey (Arslan & Kılınç, 2022) and of course the UK. A greater range of contexts are evident in the publications over the years, which is most welcome as it adds to the breadth of evidence available in the field, which both extends and challenges the current state of knowledge. We welcome future submissions which add to the diversity of the field and are deliberately seeking a reviewer pool that more broadly represents the field.

In the very first edition in 1975, an article by Jerome Bruner (1975) addressed the theme of poverty. The effect of inequality on education and children’s lives is of course a perennial theme that resonates today when there are growing inequalities globally. Oxfam estimates that the richest 1% of the world’s population took nearly two thirds of all new wealth created since 2020. That leaves only half of that amount for the remaining 99% of the people on the planet, but this is of course also spread unequally (Oxfam, 2023). Inequality is addressed in many of the articles we have selected and is the direct focus of some of them (e.g. Hobbs, 2016; Pring, 2018; Reay & Ball, 1997; Strand, 2014).

Research on assessment is featured in many of the selected articles: Sadler’s (1987) paper on how performance standards are construed, Torrance’s (2012) article on formative assessment, Mansell’s (2013) article on the public understanding of assessment, Brzyska’s (2018) paper on selection effects in PISA, He et al.’s (2018) article on the comparison of standards between subjects, and Bolden and Tymms’ (2020) work on assessment standards. Use of assessment data to monitor the education system is also a focus of two of the selected articles (Baird & Elliott, 2018; O’Neill, 2013). Less represented was the field of curriculum development, which has received less funding in the past few decades. However, we have selected a couple of papers that look at the effects of curriculum and pedagogy. Macaro and Wingate (2004) investigated the transition from school to university for language students, and Bleazby (2015) examined why some school subjects attain higher status than others. Differentiated learning (Mills et al., 2014) and pedagogy for special educational needs (Tan et al., 2017) are considered in two of the selected articles. Inter-professional working across children’s services is tackled by Daniels et al. (2007).

Structural issues in education are investigated by Walford (1987), whose research has often brought to our attention factors related to private education. As long ago as 1998, Tipple outlined the declining role of the local education authority (1998). The politics of education are addressed in a number of our selections (Emler & Frazer, 1999; Furlong, 2005; Lunt, 2008). Post-pandemic, well-being in schools is a significant concern in many countries and our selections include the positive psychology of education (Seligman et al., 2009), the caring relation in teaching (Noddings, 2012), educating for well-being (Thorburn, 2014) and test anxiety (Rojas-Torres et al., 2023).

The teaching profession, their development and job design are themes which are returned to in the journal repeatedly and some of our selections reflect this. At a time when teacher shortages are of international concern (UNESCO, 2023), these articles are still highly relevant. Furlong (2005) outlined teacher education policy under the New Labour government, Edwards and Mutton (2007) re-considered partnership arrangements and their effects on professional learning for initial teacher education, Burn and Mutton (2015) conceptualised a clinical model of research-informed teaching practice, Winch et al. (2015) and Cordingley (2015) each looked at the relationship between research and teachers’ professional learning, and Green (2021) examined the effect of job design.

Whilst reviewing the publications over the past 50 years, it was noticeable that there are fewer papers that focus on methodological issues. Davies (2000) evaluated the promise of systematic reviews for the field. Mercer (2007) tackled the issues of conducting insider research. Marsden and Torgerson (2012) raised concerns about the conclusions that can be reached from pre- and post-test designs. Whilst there are journals that are dedicated to methodology in education, we consider there is scope for the Oxford Review of Education to publish more articles with a methodological focus, perhaps even to have Special Issues on these themes. Equally, we have selected a couple of articles on the economics of education for our 50^th Anniversary Collection (Dearden et al., 2009; Steiner‐Khamsi, 2006). Despite the dominance of the economic way of thinking about education in policy and it being considered as one of the foundational disciplines of education (Furlong & Lawn, 2010), few articles were to be found in the Oxford Review of Education from this disciplinary perspective. Finally, we included some excellent articles on the perennial issues of gender (Francis, 2010) and ICT in education (Livingstone, 2012; Selwyn, 2012). We hope you find these articles interesting and helpful for your work and look forward to the developments in the field over the next fifty years of the Oxford Review of Education.