In this article, the author talks about citizenship, which raises raises a question whether the good citizen is the one who fits in, the one who goes with the flow and is part of the whole, or whether the good citizen is the one who stands out from the crowd, the one who goes against the flow and bucks the trend, who is, in a sense, "out of…

Britain is not only more diverse than ever before, but that diversity itself is growing more diverse. Britain's simplistic "tick-box" approach to identity is in danger of inhibiting the very equality it seeks to promote. To question the tick-box is not to accuse local authorities of "political correctness gone mad". The notion…

National learning and skills policy aims both to build economic prosperity and to achieve social justice. Participation in higher education (HE) has the potential to contribute substantially to both aims. That is why the Campaign for Learning has supported the ambition to increase the proportion of the working-age population with a Level 4…

Reductions in further and higher education spending, combined with cuts to helping-hand schemes such as the Education Maintenance Allowance, present a fundamental threat to everything educators stand for. This author discusses the need to build a credible alternative that puts tertiary education at the heart of a strategy for economic growth and…

A conference event is mediated through keynote speeches, power point presentations, professional role-playing and the turgid language of policy agendas, initiatives, benchmarks and outputs. Serious human concerns rarely surface in the orchestrated and anodyne arena of professional conference-going. The ready recourse to ritual and procedure means…

In this article, the author talks about a gathering that was marching through the dusty Brazilian streets of Porto Alegre. 200,000 noisy representatives of civil society from the global South, together with dedicated supporters from more privileged countries like UK, travelled across continents to insist that "another kind of world is…