There has been much recent interest in the extent to which the teaching in higher education delivered by non-academic staff has increased in the recent past. Within the Biosciences there has always been a tradition of engaging postgraduate students to support the delivery of some forms of teaching. In this paper we report on the findings of a…

This study focuses on aspects of the Changing Academic Profession survey of 2007-08 that describe the place of faculty in their institutions. The authors examine the following aspects of institutional life: (1) the faculty role in institutional governance; (2) who evaluates their teaching and research; (3) the locus of their loyalties as between…

Accreditation can be seen as one of several complementary measures in a quality assurance system, and the starting point is the need to maintain and improve good quality in institutions of higher education. Accreditation can play a more or less dominant role in the field of different measures that aim at monitoring, steering, recognizing and…

Fieldwork is widely reported to be an effective learning and teaching tool. The authors report here how international fieldwork has enabled successful cross-phase collaboration to the benefit of both school and university geography departments. Eleven years' experience of joint A-level and university geography fieldwork in the French Alps and…

This article describes the role of the head of department in chartered and statutory British universities, drawing upon five research studies carried out over the past eight years. It describes how heads are appointed, their main activities, their main problems and how the role compares in chartered and statutory universities. The role is a…

The present paper makes use of detailed information gathered at university department level, combined with graduate survey data, to assess the impact of different kinds of employability skills initiative on graduate labour market performance. We find that structured work experience and employer involvement in degree course design and delivery have…

The objectives of this article are, first, to describe a collaborative project between teacher educators and a foreign languages (FL) department in a specialist language college and, second, to evaluate its success. The project focuses on Year 9 pupils across the ability range (in four groups) and involves staff in both institutions working…

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has contracted with the Learning and Skills Network to support awareness and take-up of Triple Science GCSEs through the Triple Science Support Programme. This publication provides an introduction to teaching and learning approaches for the extension topics within GCSE Chemistry. It…

Many university departments provide public engagement activities, often referred to as "outreach" to school students, their teachers and other members of the public. It is less common for University Departments to run activities for their employees let alone the children of these employees. This paper looks at the value put on an…

The issue of how concentrated research funding should be within the UK higher education sector and the implications of such concentration for the health and dynamism of the research base have been monitored by Universities UK for several years. In 2003 we commissioned a report from Evidence Limited to examine the potential impact of proposals on…

This article offers an account of online experimentation and innovation that has taken place in the English department of the University of Wolverhampton from 2003 to 2005. Focusing on an introductory first-year module and two third-year modules, it explores how and to what extent a virtual learning environment (VLE) can enhance the teaching of…

Examines transference issues in school effectiveness and improvement, including the relationship between within-school and across-school improvement. Describes how the head of a successful history department in an innercity high school changed the entire school from low achieving to high achieving after being appointed head teacher. (Contains 57…

This article raises some questions about the current policy context of debates on the link between research and teaching in academic work, specifically within university education departments. It draws selectively from a research project which investigated education academics' perceptions and experiences in Scotland and England but focuses…

This article draws on two research studies concerned with student teachers' learning of subject-specific pedagogical knowledge: a naturalistic study within two secondary school science departments and a collaborative action research project focused on two contested aspects of the history curriculum. Both confirmed the complexity of the process by…

Identifies two levels of analysis required to perform well in the United Kingdom's Research Assessment Exercise. Reduces inclusion of research-active staff in a RAE submission decision (the "who" decision) to a maximization formula. However, another level of analysis is needed--choice of assessment unit (the "where" decision).…