The last several years have seen an escalation in calls for an adequate response at governmental level to the reality of a teacher supply crisis in Ireland. This article traces the evolution of the crisis, providing important socio-historical context and analysis. It argues that while the issue of a steady supply of teachers has been a feature of…

Regional Technical Colleges, later Institutes of Technology, were developed just over fifty years ago in response to a perceived gap in knowledge, skills, and competencies required to promote market growth and success (Thorn, 2018). It was envisaged that this change to Ireland's higher education landscape would be capable of continuing adaptation…

The Intermediate System of schooling, which operated in Ireland between 1878 and 1922, has, generally, been considered limited in ambition and as having generated a culture of high-stake terminal examinations. This article seeks a more nuanced understanding of the system and proposes that, despite an evolving system of secondary provision in…

Drawing on archival material and oral testimony of former students, this paper examines the lives and experiences of women in Catholic primary teacher training colleges in Ireland in the period 1922-1974. It commences with a brief overview of the historical context in which these colleges emerged, situating their development within the…

Early advocates for the expansion of women's higher education imagined a future that was deeply embedded in their aspirations for social, economic and political equality. In the vanguard of campaigns for wider access to higher education were women professors, they themselves outsiders within an academic hierarchy marked by male privilege. This…

Through the lens of nineteenth-century Irish society and through an interrogation of the diaries of one of the first women professors appointed to the National University of Ireland, this article traces the entry of women into the professoriate in Ireland. The aim of the paper is to extend the map of the international research agenda which speaks…

This article investigates policy and provision of music in initial teacher education (ITE) in Ireland and Northern Ireland through a novel approach to comparative music education in ITE. Employing literature reviews and a survey of music ITE policy and provision in the two jurisdictions, it draws on a range of primary and secondary sources and…

It is timely to pause as we reach the centenary of the creation of the contested border which divides Ireland and the advent of Brexit to examine teacher education across the island, revealing intersecting contrasts and similarities which reflect both common origins and increasing divergences. The relatively high esteem of both scholarship and of…

In this piece the author provides a critical response to the new 'Looking at Our School' quality framework in Ireland and illustrates how policy overlooks critical scholarship. The author questions the claim that the updated policy reflects recent thinking and developments, and critiques the policy's stance on notions of both distributed…

This article assesses the rates of third-level degree obtainment amongst Republic of Ireland-born football migrants who played league football in England in the period from 1945 until 2010. It will illustrate that despite a general widening of access and participation at university level in the Republic of Ireland in the late twentieth century,…

In recent years, and particularly with the emergence of cultural history,historians of education have begun to adopt a wide variety of theoretical approaches to their scholarship. Notwithstanding this, cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) remains underutilised in the field of history of education, despite being employed widely in other…

The separation of examining from teaching, pushed furthest in the "examining university" of which London University, founded in 1836, was the model, was a much-debated principle in nineteenth-century Britain. This separation was generally rejected in Scotland, but only after complex controversies that illustrate how Scots defined their…

The paper considers the relation between society, science and institutionally-embodied higher education reform in nineteenth-century Ireland. Institutional reform is measured in terms of governance, curriculum, access and teaching practice. Superiorisation, subversion and fusion are identified as characteristics of reformed institutions. Mobile…

This article problematises the place of religion within publicly managed Education and Training Board (ETB) schools in the Republic of Ireland. The study draws on interview data from 43 school personnel across 18 ETB second-level schools, as well as eight interviews with ETB Education/Chief Executive Officers. Having established the legal and…

It is often assumed within much of the academic literature and by many of those working in higher education that universities across Europe are homogenising, converging around an Anglo-American model as a result of neo-liberal pressures and the aim of creating a single European Higher Education Area. However, drawing on an analysis of 92 policy…