Reclaiming professional identity through postgraduate professional development: Career practitioners reclaiming their professional selves

Careers advisers in the UK have experienced significant change and upheaval within their professional practice. This research explores the role of postgraduate level professional development in contributing to professional identity. The research utilises a case study approach and adopts multiple tools to provide an in-depth examination of practitioners’ perceptions of themselves as professionals within their lived world experience. It presents a group of practitioners struggling to define themselves as professionals due to changing occupational nomenclature resulting from shifting government policy. Postgraduate professional development generated a perceived enhancement in professional identity through exposure to theory, policy and opportunities for reflection, thus contributing to more confident and empowered practitioners. Engagement with study facilitated development of confident, empowered practitioners with a strengthened sense of professional self

Engaging with childhood: student placements and the employability agenda.

Employability is a particular organising narrative within the global, neoliberal economic discourse, with increasing relevance across different educational contexts. For universities in the UK, student employability, that is the readiness of students to gain and maintain employment and contribute to the economy, is a significant feature of accountability with employability outcomes increasingly used by students in making their decision of which university to attend. Yet little attention is paid to the organizing power of the employability agenda and to university students’ participation in that agenda apart from focussing on knowledge and skills relevant to gain employment. This is particularly concerning in university programmes that develop professionals who work with children. Placement, gaining knowledge, skills and experience in the places where children and young people are found, is a common aspect of employability being embedded within programme curricula. This article explores the organising power of the employability agenda for children and young people in a context of university placements. Focused on student experiences on placement in primary school settings in the north of England analysis considers students’ engagement with their own learning and the children who are essential to that learning

Student budgets and widening participation: Comparative experiences of finance in low and higher income undergraduates at a Northern Red Brick University

Drawing on a thematic analysis of longitudinal qualitative data (ntotal = 118), this article takes a “whole student lifecycle” approach to examine how lower and higher income students at an English northern red brick university variously attempted to manage their individual budgets. It explores how students reconcile their income—in the form of loans, grants, and bursaries—with the cost of living. Four arenas of interest are described: planning, budgeting, and managing “the student loan”; disruptions to financial planning; the role of familial support; and strategies of augmenting the budget. In detailing the micro‐level constraints on the individual budgets of lower and higher income undergraduates, the article highlights the importance of non‐repayable grants and bursaries in helping to sustain meaningful participation in higher tariff, more selective, higher education institutions. It also supports an emerging body of literature that suggests that the continuing amendments to the system of funding higher education in England are unlikely to address inequality of access, participation, and outcome

Governing the governors : a case study of college governance in English further education

This paper addresses the nature of governors in the governance of further education colleges in an English context (1). It explores the complex relationship between governors (people/agency), government (policy/structure) and governance (practice), in a college environment. While recent research has focused on the governance of schooling and higher education there has been little attention paid to the role of governors in the lifelong learning sector. The objective of the paper is to contribute to the debate about the purpose of college governance at a time when the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) commissioning era ends, and new government bodies responsible for further education and training, including local authorities, arrive. The paper analyses the nature of FE governance through the perspectives and experiences of governors, as colleges respond to calls from government for greater improvement and accountability in the sector (LSIS, 2009a). What constitutes creative governance is complex and controversial in the wider framework of regulation and public policy reform (Stoker, 1997; Seddon, 2008). As with other tricky concepts such as leadership, professionalism and learning, college governance is best defined in the contexts, cultures and situations in which it is located. College governance does not operate in a vacuum. It involves governors, chairs, principals, professionals, senior managers, clerks, community, business and wider agencies, including external audit and inspection regimes. Governance also acts as a prism through which national education and training reforms are mediated, at local level. While governing bodies are traditionally associated with the business of FE - steering, setting the tone and style, dealing with finance, funding, audit and procedural matters – they are increasingly being challenged to be more creative and responsive to the wider society. Drawing on a recent case study of six colleges, involving governors and key policy stakeholders, this paper explores FE governance in a fast changing policy environment

Government policy failure in public support for research and development

peer-reviewedPromoting Research and Development (R&D) and innovative activity is a key element of the EU Lisbon Agenda and is seen as playing a central part in stimulating economic development. In this paper we argue that, even allowing for benevolent policy-makers, informational asymmetries can lead to a misallocation of public support for R&D, hence government policy failure, with the potential to exacerbate preexisting market failures. Initially, we explore alternative allocation mechanisms for public support, which can help to minimize the scale of these government policy failures. Of these mechanisms (grants, tax credits, or allocation rules based on past performance), our results suggest that none is universally most efficient. Rather, the effectiveness of each allocation rule depends on the severity of financial constraints and on the level of innovative capabilities of the firms themselves.ACCEPTEDpeer-reviewe

Assembling the Healthopolis: Competitive city‐regionalism and policy boosterism pushing Greater Manchester further, faster

Health and care policy is increasingly promoted within visions of the competitive city‐region. This paper examines the importance of policy boosterism within the political construction of city‐regions in the context of English devolution. Based on a two‐year case study of health and social care devolution in Greater Manchester, England, we trace the relational and territorial geographies of policy across and through new “devolved” city‐regional arrangements. Contributing to geographical debates on policy assemblages and city‐regionalism, we advance a conceptual framework linking crisis and opportunity, emulation and exceptionalism, and evidence and experimentation. The paper makes two key contributions. First, we argue health and care policy is increasingly drawn towards the logic of global competitiveness without being wholly defined by neoliberal political agendas. Fostering transnational policy networks helped embed global “best practice” policies while simultaneously hailing Greater Manchester as a place beyond compare. Second, we caution against positioning the city‐region solely at the receiving end of devolutionary austerity. Rather, we illustrate how the urgency of devolution was conditioned by crisis, yet concomitantly framed as a unique opportunity by the local state harnessing policy to negotiate a more fluid politics of scale. In doing so, the paper demonstrates how attempts to resolve the “local problem” of governing health and care under austerity were rearticulated as a “global opportunity” to forge new connections between place, health, and economy. Consequently, we foreground the multiple tensions and contradictions accumulating through turning to health and care to push Greater Manchester further, faster. The paper concludes by asking what the present crisis might mean for city‐regions in good health and turbulent times