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In this research informed perspective, I discuss some of the barriers students face during progression to higher education. A crucial role can be played by higher education institutions (HEIs) and other public bodies. I discuss some of the measures taken and critically evaluate these to show how these can be improved. In the absence of a centralised admission system and autonomy exercised by HEIs, it is not clear yet how these targets will be achieved. HEFCE and OFFA play a vital role, but there is further scope towards addressing equality and diversity. This paper discusses some of the ways forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with the argument that within modern-day society, engineering has shifted from being the scientific and technical mainstay of industrial, and more recently digital change to become the most vital driver of future advancement. In order to meet the inevitable challenges resulting from this role, the nature of engineering education is constantly evolving and as such engineering education has to change. The paper argues that what is needed is a fresh approach to engineering education – one that is sufficiently flexible so as to capture the fast-changing needs of engineering education as a discipline, whilst being pedagogically suitable for use with a range of engineering epistemologies. It provides an overview of a case study in which a new approach to engineering education has been developed and evaluated. The approach, which is based on the concept of scholarship, is described in detail. This is followed by a discussion of how the approach has been put into practice and evaluated. The paper concludes by arguing that within today's market-driven university world, the need for effective learning and teaching practice, based in good scholarship, is fundamental to student success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The decline in the number of UK universities offering undergraduate degree programmes in subjects such as sciences, mathematics, modern languages and humanities has been well documented and is now of real concern. It appears that economics may be going through a decline in new (post-1992) UK universities with many economics programmes having been withdrawn altogether. How market forces, government policy and other developments in UK higher education may have combined to stimulate the withdrawal of the undergraduate economics degree is explored in this paper. Data on the current level of provision and how this has changed over the last decade are presented. The study reveals how the economics degree, which until fairly recently was offered by old and new universities alike, appears to be expanding rapidly in the former but not in the latter. The withdrawal of economics undergraduate degree programmes from the UK’s new universities coupled with the fact that these institutions are the primary conduit through which under-represented groups are able to access the UK’s higher education system raises important questions about lack of equality of opportunity. The paper concludes by considering the implications of polarisation of access to economics degrees. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using Giddens’ theory of structuration as a theoretical framework, this paper outlines how five prominent United Kingdom universities aimed to integrate top-down and bottom-up approaches to the adoption and diffusion of e-learning. The aim of this paper is to examine the major challenges that arise from the convergence of bottom-up perspectives and top-down strategies. Giddens’ theory is used to understand the dynamics of organisational change as they pertain to the adoption and diffusion of e-learning. This is intended to support our understanding of the interplay between top-down strategy and bottom-up adoption of e-learning. From the research and from our findings, we present a set of change levers that are intended to provide practical value for managers responsible for the diffusion of e-learning strategy in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Courses are widely used to provide professional qualifications for higher education (HE) practitioners. However, the question of how experienced academics might gain recognition as professional educators without completing a course is not well explored. This paper introduces the use of professional dialogue for this purpose, describing an approach being applied within four UK universities. The paper discusses the value of the professional dialogue, drawing on assessors’ and participants’ voices to provide empirical evidence. Findings from the study suggest that ‘assessed dialogues’ provide a more authentic route to professional recognition for experienced HE academics, effectively synthesising professional development, the individual and organisational learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to critical understandings of the significance of employability in current debates about the transformation of Higher Education (HE). We express our concerns about the implications of orientating HE to utilitarian demands in the light of a tendency to align discussions about the significance of studying at university with the idea of employability. The research underlying this article explores how the experience of UK university students in the context of education studies programmes shapes their conceptions of employability and their understanding of their subject of study. Ideas developed by Gert Biesta are used as a framework to discuss different forms in which thoughts about employability are articulated. The analysis of data that includes reflections on the experience of placement suggests that tensions between education as training for teachers and education as the possibility for change, point to the emergence of a new form of understanding employability that may have to work the boundary between both. We argue that lessons learnt from the case of education studies can be useful to other subjects and programmes of study that also share an interest in the theoretical study of a discipline or where a narrow career expectation is being challenged by broader possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the evolution of further education colleges in England is marked by both continuities and change, and provides evidence to show that they retain many of the characteristics and the underlying rationale present at the turn of the twentieth century. A defining characteristic remains the colleges’ need to respond to student demand in a continued climate of voluntarism and lack of policy commitment to the education of young people beyond school-leaving age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the introduction of tuition fees for undergraduate programmes in the UK universities, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the impact of the changes on higher education. But the lack of coverage given to the effects of the growing consumerist discourse that was influencing teaching methods and assessment approaches was puzzling [Naidoo, R., and I. Jamieson. 2005. “Empowering Participants or Corroding Learning? Towards a Research Agenda on the Impact of Student Consumerism in Higher Education.”Journal of Education Policy20 (3): 267–281]. There has been a similar silence within the critical management education (CME) literature despite the anecdotal accounts of the progressive erosion of the educational space for criticality. The changes to the educational environment present an opportunity to take stock of how critical approaches are able to respond – or if they are able to respond – to a more consumerist environment where different generational priorities and expectations of education are being expressed. This paper seeks to open up the debate and outline a research agenda to examine CME in the new higher education in the context of marketization, generational change and internationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that theTimes Higherprovides a powerful tool for understanding the changing character of UK higher education (HE) and can usefully be seen as representative, and in some ways constitutive, of that changing character. Drawing on an analysis of a sample of stories from theTimes Higher, it documents the changing policy climate of UK HE from 1979 to 2010. It offers a broadly chronological account of themes that have emerged as prominent at different times during this period, pointing,inter alia, to fears about threats to the humanities, the rise of various forms of instrumentalism and the incorporation of HE institutions and agencies into a common mindset characterised by a preoccupation with marketing and corporate success. The last of these is embodied in the changing format of the newspaper itself and in its own activities as a key player in the HE sector, notably as a sponsor of university rankings and awards. Whilst being sensitive to countervailing tendencies, the authors suggest that the growing instrumentalisation of HE and related cultural shifts represent a changed ‘structure of feeling’ in UK HE. They conclude that the university rankings, awards and other image commodities that are a key part of this changed structure of feeling now play such a substantial role in the cultural life of universities that the norms of both rationality and professional ethics which tended to prevail in deliberations about university strategy 30 years ago may no longer be taken for granted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 university tradition in comparative terms, and how Scottish developments interacted with those in England and Ireland. Among the issues involved were proposals for a National University or central examining board, and claims that graduates should have a right to give ‘extramural’ teaching in competition with professors. The paper traces this aspect of university reform in Scotland from the 1820s to the 1890s, and argues that the professorial model and the integration of teaching and examining were successfully consolidated and defended. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past decade higher education policy in England has gradually switched from a stance of ‘government as purchaser’ to ‘government as informer’. During 2012 this policy stance has been intensified through new requirements for the advice provided by schools and the introduction of ‘Key Information Sets’ which are intended to ‘drive up quality’ through informed choice. This paper documents this policy shift and subjects it to critical scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the organizational and management consequences of the changing policy environment facing public sector education in England and Wales over the past 10 years. In particular it considers how far arguments about the replacement of older ‘bureau-professional' forms of organizational order by more ‘managerialist' forms in the public sector in general can be applied to the specific case of education. The paper begins by reviewing the major policy changes that have affected schools and colleges since 1988. Drawing on published studies from these sectors, it then considers a number of themes: changing roles of senior and middle managers; changes in managerial and organizational culture; and changes in specific aspects of management. Emphasizing the tentative nature of the evidence, the paper identifies some common trends which imply a movement towards managerialism in many institutions. However, it also identifies areas where the position is less clear and suggests a number of factors which may explain differences of experience. It emphasizes the importance of not reifying a previous ‘golden age' of collegiality and concludes that what is being experienced is a complex and dynamic process of adjustment between old and new organizational and managerial forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the introduction of the post-1992 university, various, and ongoing, higher education (HE) policy reforms have fuelled academic, political, media and anecdotal discussions of the trajectories of UK university students. An outcome of this has been the dualistic classification of students as being from either ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds. An extensive corpus of literature has sought to critically discuss how students experience their transition into university, questioning specifically the notion that all students follow a linear transition through university. Moreover, there is far more complexity involved in the student experience than can be derived from just employing these monolithic terms. This research proposes incorporating students’ residential circumstances into these debates to encourage more critical discussions of this complex demographic. Drawing upon the experiences of a sample of students from a UK ‘post-1992’ university this research will develop a profile for each accommodation type to highlight the key characteristics of the ‘type’ of student most likely to belong to each group. In doing so this establishes a more detailed understanding of how a ‘student’ habitus might affect the mechanisms which are put in place to assist students in their transitions into and through university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have often recognised important links between the processes of university and civil service reform in mid-nineteenth-century England. Yet such connections are usually seen as forming part of a wider project of modernising reform with any conservative or counter-revolutionary aims largely discounted. However, as this article suggests, the decision to tie success in the new examinations to a career at the ancient English universities was not designed chiefly to recruit the most efficient people (as the report itself claims) or to provide new employment opportunities for Oxbridge graduates. Rather, the reformers sought to take advantage of the socialising function of the universities, to ensure the recruitment of men of sterling moral character, reliable and loyal, into a civil service increasingly called upon to serve as a bulwark of the state at a time of social and political upheaval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author talks about the challenges faced by academics and administrators who undertake the leadership and management of research activity in contemporary universities in Great Britain. According to the author, the higher education reforms in Great Britain have increased the workloads of many academics, leaving less time for research. The author says that research activities at universities will be much more challenging in the aftermath of the economic recession.

The article discusses changes in the English Higher Education (HE) sector. Topics discussed include the concept of disruptive innovation and the ways this concept applies to the HE sector, an argument that the HE sector in England needs to be distinctive and focus on its strengths, and the use of university mission as a driver of organizational motivation.

Over the past 20 years, universities in the United Kingdom have been undergoing a dramatic period of transformation and change which can be attributed to the expansion of the higher education sector, the growth in student numbers and the development of an ideological approach to public service management referred to as ‘new managerialism’. The growth in student numbers has provided a challenge for universities, and many have adopted enterprise-wide information systems such as Strategic Information Technology Services (SITS) to support the management of student data in all areas of the university. This article explores through a three-year case study in a UK university how the introduction of SITS, an enterprise-wide student administration system, intended to deliver better quality student information, has had some unintended consequences for organisational culture, which include the expansion of new managerialism and the further weakening of academic status within the university. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Once an élite system dealing with a privileged few, UK universities now have to deal with the challenges of educating many more students. State funding per student has become constrained as the country has struggled to control the increases in costs that the expanded number of students entails. Semiautonomous* universities are therefore looking for revenue streams to bolster increasingly restricted government funding. Two particular issues have emerged as responses to resource constraint as universities and the state have grappled with generating revenue and controlling costs: internationalization and private sector involvement. Both of these are considered here in order to illustrate the context of the theme articles contained in this issue of Public Money & Management.* Universities have a level of autonomy but reliance on government funding constrains their autonomy (Broadbent, 2011). This is manifest in a variety of ways, but particularly in control of undergraduate student numbers, limiting the number of home and European Union students that a university can recruit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of quality assurance and enhancement initiatives on teacher identities in higher education. Data from an interview-based study of a research-led institution in the United Kingdom are drawn upon to consider the implications of quality – for example, whether it has captured the inner assumptive worlds of higher educators (and supplanted their own understandings of quality) or whether it has opened up new subject positions and possibilities for change. I focus on a particular group of people within the article – those who have demonstrated an interest in higher education teaching by participating in professional development programmes. Such programmes have proliferated in the light of the quality movement whilst offering exposure to ‘educationalist’ discourses. Contextualising the work through previous critical higher education research, I consider the group’s perceptions of quality initiatives and the construction of their teaching identities within a research-led institution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In changing times for higher education that are dominated by a neoliberal ideology, we set out to uncover how Heads of Departments (HoDs) perceive their role with respect to supporting their staff and their academic freedom. Freedom to pursue academic research is seen as key to the generation of new knowledge yet it is potentially constrained by funding regimes and university accountability systems. As HoDs operate at the interface between university systems and individual academic projects, how they perceive their role can have a profound influence on the working environment of their departmental staff. The research study is located in two successful departments in a research intensive university in England. The study shows that the HoDs were not captured by the neoliberal discourse and aimed to protect their staff so they could ‘get on with their work’. In so doing they interpreted university demands to the best advantage of their departments but were not active in challenging university driven changes, thus raising questions about the effects of accommodating to change, so risking incremental change, and of how less successful departments might be able to protect their staff and their academic freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article the author discusses ideas for reform of university in governance in Great Britain. The author argues that present governance arrangement in universities and colleges need some improvements for ensuring effectiveness and efficiency. He also commented on the limitations of the present governance as it is difficult to differentiate between governance from management, or avoid governor participation in executive matters.

Reports on the education bills introduced in Great Britain. Intention of the bills to increase the accountability and quality of schools and further education colleges and to reorganize and improve access to higher education; Aim of the Education (Schools) Bill to ensure parents receive a summary of the reports of school inspections and an action plan drawn up by the school governors to tackle any problems highlighted; Impact of the reforms on the British education service.