This book is an edited collection introducing the Education Policy and Social Inequality series, and presents chapters from authors on the editorial board. It investigates relations between educational policy and social inequality, not simply in terms of policy solutions for inequalities but also how education policy frames, creates and at times exacerbates social inequalities. It adopts a critical stance, encompassing innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual studies drawing on e.g. sociology, cultural studies, social and cultural geography, and history as well as original empirical work that examines a range of educational contexts, including early years education, vocational and further education, informal education, K-12 schooling and higher education. The book argues that critique and policy studies can have a transformative function, positing new dimensions for understanding the role of education policy in connection with recurrent social problems and seeking the amelioration of social inequality in ways that challenge the possibility of equity in the liberal democratic state, as well as in other forms of governance and government.

Stephen Parker is a Research Fellow in Education Policy and Social Justice at The University of Glasgow. His research interests include equity in access to higher education, policy analysis and social justice in education, and utilizes a range of social theory and philosophical approaches.

Trevor Gale is Professor of Education Policy and Social Justice, and Head of the School of Education at The University of Glasgow. He is a critical sociologist of education, drawing on Bourdieus thinking tools to research issues of social justice in schooling and higher education. He is the founding editor of Critical Studies in Education and is widely published in journals such as Journal of Education Policy, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Cambridge Journal of Education and Studies in Higher Education. His most recent book (with Lynch, Rowlands and Skourdoumbis), published by Routledge, is Practice Theory and Education: Diffractive readings in professional practice. 


Kalervo N. Gulson is an Associate Professor at in the School of Education, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Australia. His primary areas of scholarship are educational policy, race and ethnicity studies, as well as social and cultural geography. Recent published work includes: Education policy, space and the city: Markets and the (in)visibility of race (Routledge, 2011); Policy, geophilosophy, education (co-authored with P. Taylor Webb, Sense, 2015); and, Education policy and racial biopolitics in the multicultural city (co-authored with P. Taylor Webb, Policy Press, forthcoming).

1 Introduction to Policy and Inequality in Education.- 2 The illusion of meritocracy and the audacity of Elitism: Expanding the evaluative space.- 3 Emerging biological rationalities for policy: (Molecular) biopolitics and the new authorities in education.- 4 Neoliberalism and beyond: The possibilities of a social justice agenda?.- 5 Widening participation in France and its effects on the field of elite higher education and on educational policy.- 6 Fanon, Education, and the Fact of Coloniality.- 7 Equality and Education Policy in the European Union: An example from the case of Roma.- 8 Imagining policy [Data] differently.- 9 Redefining equality through incentive-based policies.- 10 Education policy and the intensification of teachers' work: The changing professional culture of teaching in England and implications for social justice.- 11 Pedagogical habitus engagement in a developing country context: A narrative-based account of a teachers' pedagogical change within a professional learning community.