'There is no alternative’:Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence and its relationship with high culture

This article uses the concept of high culture to assess the underlying assumptions and philosophy of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). For the most part, these remain vague and unarticulated. This has two consequences. First, a consensus forms easily around CfE because it means different things to different stakeholders and is presented to teachers as a depoliticised and technocratic policy response. Second, because its core tenets are so hazy, it is extremely difficult to argue against. Although CfE is widely regarded to have at its heart some form of constructivism, the justification for such an approach is never articulated. By assessing CfE’s relationship with high culture, this article attempts to flush out its implicit core assumptions. Its central argument is that CfE cannot simultaneously please everyone. Perfectly justifiable alternative curricular paths have been abandoned. Far from being a technocratic and depoliticised policy response, CfE is in fact a much more controversial and ideological shift than the level of scrutiny it has thus far received would suggest

Financial Flows and International Imbalances - The Role of Catching-up by Late Industrializing Developing Countries

While the traditional approach to the adjustment of international imbalances assumes industrialized countries at a similar level of development and with similar production structures, such imbalances have historically been the result of a process of catching up by late-industrializing developing countries. This may call for an alternative approach that assesses how these imbalances can be managed in order to support developing countries' efforts to achieve successful industrialization and integration into the global trade and financial system. In this light, the paper presents an alternative explanation of the existence and persistence of the currently high levels of imbalances and suggests reasons why they may persist in the medium term

An exploration of the relationship between nuclear decommissioning projects characteristics and cost performance

Nuclear Decommissioning Projects and Programmes (NDPs) are characterized by high complexity and variety, and a schedule that can take decades. Moreover, NDPs estimates at completion can reach billions of Euro and (for many of these projects) keep increasing, while there is a limited understanding of why this happens. To address this knowledge gap, this paper describes how to statistically test the association between the NDP characteristics and the NDP cost performance. The implementation of statistics on a pool of European NDPs highlights the significance of several country-specific and site-specific characteristics (e.g. respectively, the governance system and the availability of facilities to deal with radioactive material on site). Hence, the original contribution of this paper consists in (i) the selection of statistical tests suitable for analysing small sample sizes (i.e. NDPs) and (ii) the presentation of the results from the implementation of these tests on a pool of 24 European NDPs with an illustrative purpose