The roles of some key stakeholders in the future of accounting education in Australia

This paper explores the role of institutional and systemic leadership in changing higher education in accounting in Australia. In particular, it discusses the roles of the Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching, the Australian Business Deans’ Council Teaching and Learning Network (ABDC T&L) and the professional accounting bodies in meeting the challenges confronting accounting education in the tertiary sector today and in the coming years. Details are provided of a Carrick funded accounting discipline research project arising out of a recent ABDC T&L Network Business Scoping Study. The critical non-technical skills required by stakeholders are explored with their role and responsibility in their development discusse

Higher Education Mergers: Integrating Organisational Cultures and Developing Appropriate Management Styles

Research evidence indicates that an unusually broad range of issues take on strategic significance in a merger and that organisational cultures are critical to the successful integration of staff, students and other stakeholders within a newly combined higher education institution (HEI). This study was based on two specialist higher education (HE) colleges seeking to expand through merger in order to meet the revised criteria for university status in England. It sought a better understanding of the similarities and differences between the management styles and organisational cultures of the two colleges and an assessment of the significance of these for the proposed merger. The main conclusion of the study was that management styles and initiatives needed to be mindful of the existing cultures and subcultures of the two colleges, otherwise there was a risk that the status and efficiency of the new HEI might be improved at the expense of its academic and scholarly development

Graduate Migration Flows in Scotland

One of our objectives is to quantify the nature of graduate labour market flows between the countries and regions of the United Kingdo

Geographers Count: A Report on Quantitative Methods in Geography

This report is drawn from a project funded to better support the teachers of quantitative methods in UK social science. In it we identify the types of quantitative methods taught in the geography curricula for UK schools and universities, and discuss attitudes towards those methods amongst students and teachers. We argue that geography has benefitted from its position at the intersection of the sciences, social sciences and humanities, retaining a quantitative component. Consequently, levels of basic numeracy and data handling have remained relatively high, leaving the discipline well placed to respond to the call for greater quantitative training within the social sciences in the UK. However, we also suspect that the typical levels of quantitative training in university human geography courses are not sufficiently high to compete on the international stage. As the title suggests, our report is focused on geography. However we raise issues germane to other disciplines including what actually we mean by quantitative methods, what should be taught in a twenty-first century curriculum, how to meaningfully embed those methods in the substantive themes and teaching of a discipline, and whether more should be expected as a minimum standard of quantitative competence than the existing Quality Assurance Agency benchmarks require