The transformative nature of adult working-class education and its relevance today

Transformational Further Education: Empowering People & Communities

The historical theme of adult working class education in relation to contemporary post school sector, now referred to as the Lifelong Learning Sector, has to some extent been overlooked. Since the...

Stories of Change and Transformation and in Further Education

Transformational Further Education: Empowering People & Communities

From its origins as the Mechanics’ Institutes in the 1800s, FE has served industry by providing vocational skills to adults to meet the needs of business. However from the beginning it also...

Remaking Tertiary Education

Transformational Further Education: Empowering People & Communities

The same policy options face Tertiary F&HE as face Primary and Secondary schools. They were recently presented in two lectures by Baroness Tessa Blackstone, former-Labour Higher Education...

The more qualifications you have, the less you learn – lessons from citizen science

Citizen science projects are becoming increasingly important sites for researching the learning of adults. Citizen science is identified as offering: new ways to engage in scientific research; new...

Vocationalism in Further and Higher Education

One of the most striking characteristics of the post-compulsory education sector in England is the teaching of programmes with a vocational route to work. There is a tenacious underlying...

Techno-science products for Education. What is on the horizon?

Schools are bombarded with products and courses that claim to be informed by research in Neuroscience and/or Digital Technology. Despite warnings from the OECD, the Royal Society (UK), the...

The impact of the austerity agenda in Further Education

I don’t remember ever seeing a group of famous ex-alumni in the news protesting against cutbacks to their former schools’ funding, yet in the case of further education (FE) in England, a...

Is it A levels or apprenticeship policy that damages vocational education?

There are regular assertions in both the press and academic literature that the low take up of vocational education in England, relative to selected comparators, is because it has lower status...

Can social competence be taught to older children and young adults?

As a practitioner within FE I have observed a variety of different levels of learners where the interaction between them may not always be as I would expect.  Some learners clearly display the...

Reading More Wisely

In 2014, ReadingWise invited us to carry out an independent study of its Computer-Based Literacy Programme for Accelerated Reading Acquisition. Following exploratory meetings, schools and adult...

Rhetoric in Vocationalism

The BERA SIG: Post-Compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning has held a number of runs of events in the last year or two and I’ve enjoyed being able to make a small number of the London ones....

Prison Education in England: a wicked policy problem for Michael Gove

A disjuncture exists between the discourses and legislation surrounding the rights of all prisoners to education in Europe and what is happening on the ground in English prisons. Whilst there is a...