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This important new book is a comparative study of social mobility based on qualitative interviews with middle-class parents in America and Britain. It addresses the key issue in stratification research, namely, the stability of class relations and middle-class reproduction. Drawing on interviewee accounts of how parents mobilised economic, cultural and social resources to help them into professional careers, it then considers how the interviewees, as parents, seek to increase their children's chances of educational success and occupational advancement. Middle-class parents may try to secure their children's social position but it is not an easy or straightforward affair. With the decline of the quality of state education and increased job insecurity in the labour market since the 1970s and 1980s, the reproduction of advantage is more difficult than in the affluent decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The implications for public policy, especially public investment in higher education, are considered.

For too long, leadership has been researched and written about without taking account of context and societal culture. This article takes as its context under researched multi-ethnic urban schools, and looks at leadership--specifically five successful head teacher case studies--of these schools. The research project that it reports was carried out for the National College for School Leadership in the United Kingdom, but the implications from the study cross national boundaries. The findings confirm the centrality of passionate promulgation of values-driven leadership as the hallmark of successful leaders of these schools. Realising that global events and hostilities now for the first time penetrate inside schools to effect their micro-management, the study suggests that notions of head teacher as leader of local learning communities are now obsolete and need replacing with leaders as connected to communities at local, national and global levels. However, the project raised more questions than it answered: we still need to know how leaders conceptualise values such as social justice, inclusion, and equity, and how they put them into practice.