Teachers’ knowledge and experiences of Information Advice and Guidance: some implications for the current policy context in England

Good information and career guidance about what post-compulsory educational routes are available and where these routes lead is important in ensuring that young people make choices that are most appropriate to their needs and aspirations. Yet the Association of School and College Leaders (2011) express fears that future provision will be inadequate. This paper reports the findings from an on-line survey of 300 secondary school teachers, and follow up telephone interviews with 18 in the South East of England which explored teachers’ experiences of delivering post-compulsory educational and career guidance and their knowledge and confidence in doing so. Results suggest that teachers lack confidence in delivering information, advice and guidance outside their own area of specialism and experience. In particular, teachers knew little in relation to alternative local provision of post-16 education and lacked knowledge of more non-traditional, vocational routes. This paper will therefore raises important policy considerations with respect to supporting teachers’ knowledge, ability and confidence in delivering information in relation to future pathways and career guidance

'Let the Right Ones In!': Widening Participation, Academic Writing and the Standards Debate in Higher Education

This paper challenges the frequently expressed concern, post-1992, that widening participation (WP) has contributed to a general ‘dumbing down’ of higher education in English universities *(Burke, 2005; Leathwood, 2010). In particular, it explores the implications of a long-standing ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1972) about the poor quality of students’ academic writing, particularly in the ‘new’ universities, which have been raised in various academic reports and countless media articles. A vampire metaphor is used throughout the paper to highlight ways in which assumptions about these falling standards in undergraduates’ academic writing feed on the foundations of a longstanding, albeit implicit, distrust of the growth in the sector on elitist, ideological grounds. The second half of the paper investigates how academic writing practices, whilst difficult to define, nonetheless wield a ‘disciplinary power’ (Foucault, 1980), over lecturers and students in the academy. This includes a discussion about how a situated, New Literacy Studies (NLS) approach to academic writing development challenges the view that students’ academic writing standards are falling. In contrast, the paper suggests that all universities have a responsibility to acknowledge and develop the different literacies that students, especially widening participation students, bring with them to university. (193