This article reports on research funded by the Australian Research Council to investigate school responses to gender equity. It addresses the efforts of a disadvantaged school to tackle what they perceived to be gender inequalities, but in the process of constructing a top-set and bottom-set/ stream class they are developing new forms of old inequalities and new forms of inequalities. This research indicates that despite popular assertions that girls' education has become the priority of schools and education systems, girls are being further disadvantaged through attempts to implement market strategies coupled with gender reform agendas grounded in liberal notions of equity and relying on unsophisticated notions of affirmative action. In addition, this study highlights the extent to which a media-driven debate about boys' education has influenced the constitution of boys as the 'new disadvantaged' with the capacity to determine the nature of gender reform agendas and programmes in schools.

This article presents a model of teacher research supported by academic partners to develop a better understanding of the barriers to education faced by young people growing up in poverty. It critiques politicians' demands for teachers to 'close the gap' for ignoring the cumulative intergenerational effects of deprivation. The authors explain how a simplistic 'craft' version of teaching has tended to reduce initial teacher education in England to training in the pragmatics of curriculum 'delivery' and policy implementation, leaving teachers theoretically and practically ill-prepared to deal with extremes of inequality. Finally, it presents a pilot research project designed to see beyond statistical labels and into the particularities of students' lives out of school, in order to reveal not only the realities of deprivation but also potential sources of cultural and social capital in their extended families and neighbourhoods.

Abstract:There are intense policy pressures on urban schools and teachers working with different cohorts of disadvantaged students to 'raise achievement' and 'close the gap' in England. Known

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This paper reports on the work of a small group of Education academics to build a professional learning community in a regional university in the north of England. Their efforts form part of a 'Leading Learning' school-university partnership serving schools in disadvantaged communities in inner city Leeds. This is designed to support teachers' professional learning and development and reclaim their sense of collaborative professionalism in a new era of austerity Britain. The account given here is about the new partnerships being created between and among academic colleagues, who are learning to work effectively with each other and their schooling colleagues on their collective professional learning and to build their collaborative sense of professionalism. The complexities of this task-of working in a professional learning community within Faculty in order to model and support a city-wide professional learning community with teacher partners, school communities, and civil servants in the local Authority-are framed in terms of knowledgebuilding for the improvement of educational provision for disadvantaged students in local schools and the university.