Policies
State and national authorities, as two separate teams, are positioned at either end of the rope and control over teacher recruitment, preparation, licensing, and professional development policy-making sits as the centre flag (Bales 2006). The federal government have little to no authority regarding actions on education policies. These policies and carried out by state and local governments in cooperation with the primary organization responsible for passing legislation, The Department of Education. Similar to the UK’s version, The Department for Education is also predominantly responsible for building laws into action for the protection and benefits of students around the UK and their families. Changes in England’s education policy have increased the autonomy of schools, thus substantially alerting the nature of the role played by local government (Baginsky et al. 2019).
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 directed focus on low-achieving students and intensified efforts to improve persistently low-performing schools (Jennings and Rentner 2006). Jennings and Rentner (2006) also highlighted one of ten major effects that this law brings in which low-performing schools are undergoing make overs rather than the most radical kinds of restructuring. Scepticism about the effects of this law is still ongoing. This law in the United States has a strong resemblance, but no relation to, the ‘No child left behind’ report of 2020. The report focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on childhood vulnerability. This report states that “while the symptoms from the virus are generally mild and death very rare among children, there is a group who may be more clinically vulnerable because of underlying health conditions or the effect the pandemic has had on access to health services and social care” (Nicholson and Bradley 2020).
One of the most talked about subjects about education in recent years has been on safeguarding and the horrible, but evident comparison to gun control. On 14 December 2012, 20 students (aged between 6 and 7 years old) and 6 staff members were shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. To this day, it remains as the second deadliest mash shooting at an elementary school in U.S. history, behind the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 that killed 33 and injured 23. The aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting was led by outcry from American citizens for gun control reform. At the time, President Obama addressed the nation: “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” (The Obama White House 2012). The president, however, has no authority to pass laws that affects the Second Amendment of the United States to bear arms. Those responsibilities lie within the U.S. Senate. Since the shooting in Newtown, there have been a recorded 239 school shootings in the United States (Cox et al. 2023). On 14 March 2023, President Joe Biden announced an Executive Order with the goal of increasing the number of background checks conducted before firearm sales, moving the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation (The White House 2023). This decades-long issue in the United States contrasts greatly with how gun laws in the UK have been in affect since 1996 and have led to only 7 mass shootings since that time (Morris 2023). The guiding principle behind the requirement to have a “good reason” to possess, purchase or acquire firearms or ammunition, is that firearms are dangerous weapons and the state has a duty to protect the public from their misuse (UK Government, 2022).