Was there ever a golden age of academe: a time when academics were able to pursue their own interests, had relatively light and undemanding teaching responsibilities, and enjoyed widespread respect from both the general public and policy makers? This article explores that question, primarily in the context of the United Kingdom, but with some…

Middle Eastern Studies, modern foreign languages and Islamic Studies have been recognized by the UK government as strategically important subjects in higher education. Motivated by government concerns about lack of knowledge about the Middle East and the radicalization of British Muslims, this designation has complex implications for the teaching…

This article contributes to understanding of the professional learning of expert school teachers when they are appointed as university-based teacher educators. In this case study of a single department a qualitative analysis is used to interpret the transcripts of 16 semi-structured interviews with lecturers in teacher education within four years…

A project funded through the National Vocational Education and Training Research and Evaluation program investigated higher education programs--mostly bachelor's and associate degrees--offered by technical and further education (TAFE) institutes. This overview highlights the implications for TAFE management identified through this project. [This…

Approximately 85,000 part-time teaching staff working in further education (FE) and adult and community learning (ACL) are often seen as "a problem". The intrinsic "part-timeness" of these staff tends to marginalise them: they remain under-recognised and largely unsupported. Yet this picture is over-simplified. This article…

In this article we explore the level of job satisfaction and the sources of job dissatisfaction for 210 secondary school teachers in southwest England and compare our results with the results from a similar study published in 1962. Using anonymous questionnaires, we asked 210 secondary teachers in southwest England (63% female) to rate their level…

Union Learning Representatives (ULRs) are a relatively recent phenomenon and are a new category of lay representation within the workplace in the United Kingdom. They are part of the present New Labour administration's drive to expand and improve lifelong learning and continuous professional development and create the new "learning…

We analyse the role of private schools in the teachers' labour market. Private schools employ an increasingly-disproportionate share of teachers in Britain, relative to the number of their pupils. Their teachers are more likely than state school teachers to possess post-graduate qualifications, and to be specialists in shortage subjects.…

In this article, Tina Axup, an educational psychologist working in Southend-on-Sea, and Irvine Gersch, director of educational and child psychology programmes at the University of East London, describe a small-scale study of teachers' attitudes regarding the impact of student behaviour on their professional lives. Anecdotal evidence within a local…

This report describes how the education system in the United States compares with education systems in the other Group of Eight (G-8) countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom) that are among the world's most economically developed countries and among the United States' largest economic partners.…

The "Every Child Matters" policy raises questions about what "mattering" means in school contexts and how schools will know the extent to which "Every Child Matters". The question of what matters means is a philosophical one and is addressed here with reference to the work on community and dialogue of two…

The recent industrial action taken by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) has given the issue of academic pay high prominence in the UK press. There appears to be a remarkable consensus that higher education academic salaries are too low, relative to other groups of workers in the UK, and that this is leading to an academic "brain…

Globalisation of the world economy has intensified migration in the twenty-first century. Professionals are vulnerable to transnational migration and the trend is for professionals from developing countries to fill labour gaps in developed countries. South Africa's (SA) inclusion in the world labour market suggests that she is not immune. She is…

One of the few areas of consensus in the literature of higher education concerns the status of teaching. Unanimously, writers report the low status which higher education institutions give to teaching as an activity. This article draws on research investigating activities and perceptions of staff in a single discipline: social policy. The question…

Growing concerns about the experience and achievement of Black pupils (especially Black males) underpin calls for more Black people to serve as teacher and lay mentor role models in schools. Calls for increased numbers of Black teacher role models assume firstly, that Black teachers regard themselves as role models and want to perform such a role…