Muriel Pyrah: sources and myths from a West Riding of Yorkshire school, 1967–1972

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to juxtapose different sources concerning educational experiments embarked on by an English primary school teacher, Muriel Pyrah. Pyrah taught at Airedale School, Castleford, Yorkshire, UK, from the 1950s until 1972. Her approach was celebrated in the fields of oracy and arts education in the final years of her working life. Airedale was a Local Education Authority (LEA) school within the West Riding of Yorkshire, an LEA led by Alec Clegg, from 1945 to 1974. Design/methodology/approach Using film footage, sound recordings, artwork and topic books produced by her pupils, the paper entangles these archival sources with recent interviews from Pyrah’s former pupils and a former school inspector (HMI). Pyrah’s actual name has been used, as has that of the HMI. The names of pupils who contributed insights are anonymised. Findings The former pupils provide accounts that encourage a move away from a revisiting of progressivism that is predominantly anchored in studying the intentions and hopes of high profile educationalists postwar. Research limitations/implications The number of former pupils willing to discuss their memories was small, so no claims are made that their perspectives represent the dominant views of former pupils. However, these interviews reveal details that are absent in the other surviving archival sources. Originality/value The paper lays the foundation for further research on the voices of former pupils, inviting a focus on the way those participants reflect on the long-term impact of being involved in an educational experiment. Thus far, the representation of Pyrah’s pedagogy has been choreographed in print to build the legacy of the LEA. The pupils’ stories resonate differently.

Market logic at school: Emerging intra-school competition between private and public STEM programmes in Israel

This study analyses the de facto emerging intra-school competition between the Israeli Ministry of Education (MOE) and external organisations at public Israeli secondary schools by exploring science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programmes. Given on-going privatisation processes within the education system, the participation of external organisations in schools has become significant, greatly affecting municipalities’ authority and schools principals’ autonomy. This case-study provides a comprehensive examination of this new form of intra-school competition and its possible impact on schools, based on in-depth interviews with school principals, representatives of STEM programmes, and officials at the MOE and a local education authority, as well as analysis of supporting documents. We show that despite its supposed regulatory role, the MOE is pushed to function as an additional player in this quasi-market, competing with external organisations and substituting its regulatory roles for additional market-player opportunities. Theoretical and empirical implications are suggested.

Governance, school reform and change management

This chapter looks at the changing governance of English schools. The discussion of the policy context pointed to the ‘heterarchic’ nature of school governance in Birmingham, and elsewhere, as a consequence of the emergence of new arrangements for school management and governance associated with the government's academies programme, which occurred alongside the continuation of existing arrangements for the structure and management of schools. These combined to create substantial regulatory confusion over the proper role of the Local Education Authority (LEA), the DfE, school governors and school leadership. It was in these unclear circumstances that the role of Park View in taking over the leadership of other schools, or the expression of Islam in the schools, were presented as evidence of a sinister process of Islamification.