The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in profound disruption to geography higher education. A pivot to online teaching required staff to rapidly adapt their practices to novel digital spaces. Whilst many studies have reported the different pedagogic approaches adopted, fewer have evaluated the resultant student learning experience. In this study, we…

This article explores student engagement with tuition at The Open University (a distance learning Higher Education institution in the UK), specifically students with declared mental health disabilities, comparing their access rates with (disabled) students overall, studying in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, 2018-2019. The results show…

The closed-door PhD and doctoral viva voce--the approach adopted in the United Kingdom--is esteemed by some as being a valuable academic tradition. However, an increasing body of literature and research has raised concerns about the quality, transparency, reliability and validity of this viva format. This systematic literature review aims to…

In "Belonging and Identity in STEM Higher Education," leading scholars, teachers, practitioners and students explore belonging and identity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, and how this is impacted by disciplinary changes and the post-pandemic higher education context. In STEM fields, positivist…

Attempts to personalise mass higher education systems have received increasing attention as universities compete to attract students. In the United Kingdom (UK), most higher education institutions have a system of personalised supported learning, usually called personal tutoring. Personal tutors are typically academic members of staff who support…

Gender bias exists in our language environment. We investigated personal name usage in two large corpora of language written for and by U.K. children aged 5-13. Study 1 found an overrepresentation of male names in children's books, largely attributable to male authors. In stories written by over 100,000 children, Study 2 found an overall male bias…

Universities are under increasing pressure to equip graduates with a broader set of competencies, such as communication, teamwork and leadership skills, that go beyond subject-specific knowledge. This, alongside growing student numbers in higher education, creates pedagogic challenges, especially with regards to assessment design. Conventional…

Low levels of concern about anthropogenic climate change have been attributed to a range of factors, some of which relate to education. These include people's lack of understanding and engagement with the multifaceted nature and extent of the problem that it presents to current and future generations. Limited knowledge is also known to be an…

The transition from primary to secondary school is a major life event for eleven-year-old children in the United Kingdom, where they face simultaneous changes. Following the outbreak of COVID-19, transfer children face additional uncertainty on top of this. Negotiation of the multiple challenges, combined with the reduced support associated with…

Forest schools are distinctive outdoor spaces that are often regarded as an alternative to mainstream education. Their increasing popularity in the United Kingdom is often attributed to a perceived decrease in children's outdoor play, due to a concomitant increase in children's use of digital technologies in the home; further compounded by the…

University participation gaps between free school meals (FSM) and non-FSM students have remained largely stable in the UK since 2006. The efficacy of UK widening participation (WP) interventions in changing attitudes towards university and increasing participation of disadvantaged students is uncertain. Some approaches have shown to be effective…

Children who are currently, or were previously, 'looked after' by the state, are educationally disadvantaged, with exclusion rates historically higher than in other groups in the UK. A conventional way of thinking about these children is that they have been affected by trauma and attachment issues in their early years, and that they import their…

This article presents the methodological approach taken to investigate students' experiences of synchronous online tuition in health and social care at a large, distance learning university in the UK. Seeing the students as the 'privileged knowers' on the topic of their tutorial experiences, this study took an experience-centred narrative approach…

In distance cross-cultural supervision scenarios PhD students are supported by supervisors located in different cultural contexts, which may, or may not be, the same as that of the student. Very little research has been conducted into experiences of cross-cultural supervision. This paper aims to explores opportunities and challenges for students…

In order to address urgent workforce considerations and changing demographics, in 2017 the National Health Service in the United Kingdom introduced a new role in healthcare, the Nursing Associate. Education for the new role was delivered by work-based learning in partnership with local universities. This paper reports on a qualitative longitudinal…