It’s for this second group that An Introduction to Education Studies, edited by Steve Bartlett, Diana Burton and Nick Peim (Paul Chapman Publishing pound;16.99) is written. And very good it is, too. It explains clearly and crisply why education is important and why it will always be contested, what we mean (for example) by “knowledge” and “attainment”, and how social issues and perspectives affect educational policies and outcomes. It explains, with a refreshing absence of jargon, why “theory” still matters. It could be useful for students of “education”, too - and as a handy work of reference for hard-pressed teachers.

One of its topics is mixed-ability teaching. Current orthodoxy holds that selection andor ability setting is necessary to maximise pupils’ attainment. Orthodoxy, though, is not always firmly founded, and the authors of Ability Grouping in Education (Judith Ireson and Susan Hallam, Paul Chapman Publishing pound;16.99) cite extensive evidence from school and classroom practice to argue that rigid banding or setting may disadvantage weaker pupils.

Though ability grouping policy appears to have little effect on attainment, it does, they claim, have a significant (often negative) effect on a pupil’s attitude to school and learning. A range of alternative strategies is examined, with interesting comments on the implications of gender grouping and of a modularised curriculum. A clear and balanced contribution to the educational debate.

Few contributions to that debate, unfortunately, can be so described, and not enough teachers have the skills needed to navigate the contradictory currents of evidence, argument and assertion. Hence Reading Educational Research and Policy by David Scott (pound;15.99 in RoutledgeFalmer’s Key Issues in Teaching and Learning series) aims to help teachers read between the lines of policy documents or research reports, or media texts that claim to instruct or make them more effective. Scott says we need to understand how and why such texts are constructed, and cites convincing (and enjoyable) examples. A more valuable (and more subversive) book than the rather dry title suggests.

Developing Teachers and Teaching Practice (edited by Ciaran Sugrue and Christopher Day, RoutledgeFalmer pound;14.99) is a compendium drawn from the 200 papers that were delivered to the conference of the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching in 1999. The 15 papers here represent “a variety of macro and micro research perspectives”, the central (and unsurprising) message of which is that “business as usualI is no longer an adequate response to a rapidly changing educational landscape”.

Inevitably, the book’s major audience is in academia, but certain chapters are relevant to teachers and written so as to be accessible to them, such as Cheryl Craig’s American perspective on how schools can build up portfolios of good practice.

Angela Brew’s The Nature of Research (RoutledgeFalmer pound;18.99) is similarly addressed to the academic community, butin content and style it merits a wider readership. Internationally, Brew argues, research is the rationale, indeed the obsession, of an ever-expanding higher education industry, but increasingly it is controlled and funded from outside academia. Post-modernism has sapped its theoretical basis and the knowledge it generates is commodified.

So has research a future? Only, she claims, if it learns to ditch the rigidities of “objectivity” (and all too often gender) that now fetter it. Intuition may be as important as analysis; knowledge may be gained as much by undoing what we thought we knew as by piling more facts upon it. But who will fund such research - and does it need the vast community that now depends upon it? To those questions, unfortunately, this stimulating, provocative book offers no convincing answer.

MICHAEL DUFFY