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This submission contains eight papers and a synoptic commentary to be examined for the award of PhD on the Basis of Published Work. The papers focus upon the further education (FE) system in England. Each examines significant contemporary or historical issues and provides a critical analysis of the changing nature of FE. Collectively, the publications constitute an original and significant contribution to understanding further education and the social and economic context within which it is placed. The commentary highlights the links between the different papers and demonstrates their coherence; it locates the publications within an overarching analytical framework; and it shows how the work submitted makes a significant contribution to knowledge. It also explains my contribution to the three coauthored papers that constitute part of this thesis. It is argued that, taken together, my work provides a sustained and consistent critique of the English further education system from a critical materialist perspective.

This thesis draws on interviews with 10 further education (FE) curriculum managers. The subsequent analysis uses notions of Foucauldian discourse to critically evaluate the leadership and management practice described by the managers. The purpose of this was to analyse the discourse of leaderism in the college and argue for its existence as an embedded norm. Consequently, this research draws upon neoliberal policy ideals, the history of FE and the effect of this on education institutions, such as FE. Central to the argument in this thesis is that we are now in the era of leaderism in FE and have been so since the early 2000s. Furthermore, an argument is made that leaderism is a hybridised model of leadership that has strong links to managerialism and distributed leadership, through the prioritisation of task orientated managerial control driven by the fashionable lexicon associated withdistributed leadership. Subsequently this provides the persuasive language and enables leaderism to dominate the practice of managers in FE. Several factors have influenced this research, the role of the gatekeeper being significant and the potential for a clash between conflicting identities, one concerned with being a management professional and one of a classroom practitioner. Methodologically complexities existed concerning access to the sample however, this is critiqued to argue that defining the role of a curriculum manager is a complex task and that a singular working definition of leadership also has embedded complexity. In considering all of these factors, a final argument is presented that identifies the discourse at play using a rhizomatic metaphor and argues for the validity of leaderism as a conceptual tool to understand the discourse of leaderism in FE.

This research was undertaken while I was principal of an alternative provider of higher education in England - 'The College'. It focuses on my experience of seeking and establishing a collaborative academic partnership with an English university to offer degree-level provision to students. It is a highly personalised account, using analytic autoethnography to chronicle the events over a nineteen-month period. I analyse this through the application of Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and habitus. The data identifies the challenges that one institution experienced in seeking a partnership. It also recognises the challenges I faced as someone new to the institution and the alternative provider sector having worked in the mainstream university sector for over 15 years previously. The study demonstrates that despite rhetoric about establishing a level playing field in the English higher education sector, it was still very difficult for the institution to establish a collaborative academic partnership with the dominant players (universities) in the field. It concludes with a consideration of the potential implications for policy and practice that this study uncovers. This study is the first to consider collaborative academic partnerships from an alternative provider perspective, particularly in relation to how the power of the dominant subfield shapes and influences the relationship between the two parties. It also demonstrates the versatility of Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and habitus in being applied as a framework for an analytic autoethnography.

This research investigates the experiences of ten white working-class boys, at a comprehensive school in the north of England. It mobilises Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, cultural capital and symbolic violence to consider the consequences of their participation in Step-Up, an intervention entailing withdrawal from multiple GCSE subjects to undertake an alternative curriculum of modular learning on a variety of personal, social, citizenship and health topics. The research seeks to both tell the individual stories of the ten participants and contribute to our understanding of working-class boys' achievement. Bourdieu's ideas of habitus, cultural capital and symbolic violence are used to understand how Step-Up was experienced by the participants. Students were interviewed three times over the course of the study. The data suggests that the field of school was a difficult one for them to navigate and their changing expectations, sense of identity and future options were negatively affected by their school experience, both directly and indirectly by the intervention. In Year-9, the boys were viewed as a collective group by many others in the school, and although initially excited about the intervention they displayed feelings of personal isolation. An egalitarian habitus began to emerge in Year-10 as the boys began to consider what were the best and worst-case scenarios within the limits of the possibilitises they felt were open to them, until the emergence of a habitus clivé which was experienced individually in Year-11. The shifts and changes which occurred over the three years of this longitudinal research showed that the boys' emerging understanding of class was felt in some collective ways. However, as they came towards the end of their compulsory schooling, the boys felt the symbolic violence of Step-Up alienated and disadvantaged them in deeply personal ways. Step-Up inadvertently affected the boys' performance in Maths and English negatively. Surprisingly, there was a divergence between the boys' collective identity as the intervention continued. Ultimately, the participants felt isolated and lost within the field of school in disparate and individual ways.

In the face of chronic crises affecting our environmental, economic and social worlds resilience has emerged as the solution to these problems. Arguably, resilience is a laudable quality as it seeks to enhance the opportunity to thrive in the face of such adversity. In the field of social work resilience is normally associated with supporting vulnerable service users to face future adversity. More recently there has been an interest in promoting resilience in social work practitioners as they face more demanding workloads with fewer resources. The promotion of resilience is currently dominated by positive psychologists advocating personal responses to social problems. This approach has attracted criticism as it is in the service of maintaining a neoliberal model of society. Developing this critique further this is the first study to look at how resilience is understood in practice from a Radical Social Work perspective which seeks to locate its meaning in the material context of social work practice. This thesis presents a qualitative study which investigated how student social workers perceived resilience in their practice. Sixteen student social workers and six Practice Educators were interviewed using a semi- structured interview. Practice Educators were interviewed as they could provide a wider perspective on the student social worker’s experience of resilience in practice. The aim is to analyse the capacity for resilience to be deployed as mean of exercising domination over social work students in order to exploit and control them. More specifically this study draws on the ideas of Charles Wright Mills and his defining principles to relate the ’private’ concerns of being resilient to the ‘public’ context which creates this experience. In other words, students are encouraged to see struggling not as a personal deficiency but as arising from intolerable circumstances. In seeking to expose the limits of dominant discourses of resilience an alternative conception of resilience is promoted which advocates a collective response to the challenges facing social workers.

This thesis sets out to explore why those who attend university careers fairs choose to do so; what expectations they have and how these are formed; what motivates attendance; and how they themselves understand these choices. Furthermore, it aims to determine their interpretation of what happens at these events and the extent to which careers fairs facilitate access to the graduate labour market. The main unit of analysis is the individual participant and the findings are drawn from a series of semi-structured interviews with students, graduates, recruiters and careers services; contextualised by observations undertaken at two university careers fairs. The research adopts a Careership theoretical framework (Hodkinson et al, 1996) and utilises a thematic analysis approach (Braun et al, 2019). One of the main findings from this research are that rationales for attending are unique to the individual attending and expectations are manifold for students and recruiters alike, often based on intricate combinations of agency, structure and capital. Also, that there is a rich and multi-layered depth to the interactions that take place during the careers fair, primarily determined by how the protagonists choose to engage with others and the space itself. Finally, that careers fairs are a significant factor in making the transition from university to career, however more can be done to ensure that this transition is fair, inclusive and more effective for all involved.

This thesis examines the role of education for working-class pupils at 'Lillydown Primary', a state school for 3-11 year olds, in a former mining community in South Yorkshire. Through examining teachers' perceptions and practice, this critical ethnography engages with the complex ways in which pupils' experiences of education are not only shaped by wider structures and relations in capitalist society, but also by historical class-based performances and codes. The thesis enhances our understanding of how historical transmissions materialise and affect pupils' experiences of schooling and illustrates how particular values, relations, and performances, specific to the locale, are transmitted and retraditionalised across various spaces within the school, in often subtle and multiple ways. The research draws on neo-Marxist analyses of education and society, and uses Avery Gordon's notion of 'social haunting' to understand the socio-historical context in which schooling takes place. This, it is argued, provides a powerful way of conceptualising the educational experiences of children at Lillydown Primary, and those of working-class communities more broadly. Whilst the notion of social haunting provides the backdrop to the thesis, I argue that we must move beyond conceptualisations of social haunting as always registering the harm, the loss, and social injustice if we are to fully understand the interplay of class, education, and social change, and potentially transform experiences of schooling for the working class. A haunting, this thesis suggests, must also register the 'goodness' of our ghosts. We must reckon with and harness the potentiality of all facets of the ghosts of those we study - the loss, the social violence, and the goodness - to reimagine and transform the nature of schooling in contemporary capitalist society.

There is an increasing move towards an outcomes-based approach to educating healthcare professionals including the development of key skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking. Some healthcare regulators have changed accreditation criteria to ensure that graduates can apply knowledge and skills, analyse complex situations, and develop the skills to learn independently. There is a move to ensure that curricula are designed to take into account modern educational theory and research and promote active and deep approaches to learning. Accordingly, educators have redesigned curricula to be delivered by more learner-centred approaches involving active problem solving and peer and collaborative learning. These approaches require educators to adapt from the role of content deliverer to that of learning architect and facilitator of learning. This qualitative research study takes a phenomenological approach to consider the experiences of pharmacy educators and students in a pharmacy school that has designed its curriculum to be delivered predominantly by team-based learning (TBL). The findings of the study include: a dissatisfaction with traditional methods in engaging and motivating students; mixed feelings about the initial idea of TBL; the need for substantial resources for planning, staff training, designing and quality assuring resources when transitioning to TBL; improved student engagement and student preparation with TBL; staff benefits in working more collaboratively and enhanced enjoyment of teaching using TBL; perceived benefits of peer learning and transferable skills development; substantially higher staff workload during transition; challenges in writing effective application exercises, and developing the facilitation skills needed for a learner-centred classroom. In addition there is the need for substantial planning around timetabling, sourcing suitable rooms, ensuring consistency of approach across educators, and the development of bespoke quality assurance processes. Overall this research suggests that the majority of participants supported the implementation of TBL in the curriculum and that the benefits outweighed the challenges.

This research investigates the experiences and expectations of working-class law students at a ‘new’ university. It critically examines the influence of cultural, social, linguistic and academic capital on working-class law students and their chances of success in the legal labour market. Statistics show that the number of working-class students beginning a legal education continues to grow despite the rising cost of qualification; continuing class prejudice and decline in number of training contracts and pupillages. With supply consistently exceeding demand in a middle-class dominated legal labour market, working-class students face ongoing and increasing difficulties in negotiating the barriers to entry, often with very little chance of success. This thesis presents the findings from a case study employing semi – structured interviews and focus groups used to collect qualitative data. Bourdieu’s theories on class, field and habitus are used to illuminate the findings and the data. Students describe their thoughts and experiences about their legal education and their attempts to enter the legal labour market; about why they chose to study law and why Middlebridge was their preferred university. The data suggests that the difficulties they face become apparent and their expectations begin to change as they progress through their legal education. However, instead of attempting to overcome the barriers they face, in the main, participants adjusted their sights downwards and were prepared to settle for employment at the lower-end of the legal labour market. This study suggests that universities like Middlebridge may, perhaps inadvertently, encourage inequality in law because those who enter with the lowest stock of capital benefit the least. Higher education masks how power within the legal profession is distributed, instead allowing students to believe it is based upon merit and ability.

This study examines the educational choices made by some of the first cohort of further education students at an art college to face fees of up to £9,000 per annum for higher education study. Focusing on lower socio-economic status students, potentially most easily deterred by increased fees and debt, it explores the influences on their decisionmaking and considers the adequacy of the theoretical models underpinning their choice processes. It is a case study essentially concerned with why students make the choices that they do, what processes are involved and what influences shape student choice. The study was undertaken in the case study college – which delivers undergraduate programmes of study – partly as a result of the potential impact on the college of reduced FE to HE progression. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with 16 students on three occasions during the 2011-12 academic year, to coincide with particular points during their decision-making process. An interpretivist paradigm was adopted as the literature shows that many aspects of higher education choice relate to socially constructed realities which could only become fully apparent during qualitative inquiry, with a close relationship between the researcher and what is studied. The study found that students were not deterred unduly by the prospect of increased tuition fee debt on graduation, but that their choices of where to study were strongly influenced by concerns about living costs whilst studying and other considerations such as proximity to home that are already documented in the literature on higher education choice, largely from the theoretical perspective set out by Pierre Bourdieu (1974). The need for ontological security (Giddens, 1991) was clearly evident in many participants’ comments and was a strong underlying theme. Fieldwork demonstrated that at the point of decision-making, actors sought to make pragmatically rational decisions, within limits conditioned by their social capital, and therefore argues for a two-stage model of decision-making similar to that espoused by Raymond Boudon (1974). Glaesser and Cooper (2014) have argued convincingly for a combination of Bourdieu and Boudon’s work in this manner. Whilst this has merit, this thesis notes Hodkinson’s (2008) concerns regarding the explanatory capability of existing theoretical models in simultaneously addressing key aspects of HE choice at both macro and micro levels, rather than merely severally. It argues that at a micro level Herbert Simon’s 1957 model of bounded rationality best explains decision–making, and uniquely that the boundaries of actors’ choices are limited by their habitus. It concludes that actors’ boundedly-rational decisions and levels of satisficing are conditioned by their habitus, such that higher education choice is best characterised as ‘conditioned bounded rationality’.

This thesis is based on an institutional ethnography in a primary school in the north of England during a period of ‘notice to improve’. This regulatory status followed an inspection by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted 2010) in which the school was judged as ‘performing less well than it might in all the circumstances reasonably be expected to perform’. The teaching team is all female. This study situates the teachers’ experience of ‘notice to improve’ within their everyday practices and embodiment of ‘care’ as they enact the policy discourses that organize their work. The study aligns institutional ethnography with a narrative method, ‘The Listening Guide’ (Mauthner and Doucet 1998), and a political ethic of care (Tronto 1993), to reveal and analyse the co-ordination of social relations. Care emerged as a problematic from the teachers’ standpoint, a disjuncture in experience, as they activated and appropriated texts in order “to get out of” notice to improve. Institutional ethnography (Smith 2005) explicates the ruling relations of education policy and performative texts and how these texts are taken up and activated by teachers in coming to care as an institutionally organized aspect of their work. As such the study reveals the trans-local, extra-local and situated connections and coordination of work during a time of enhanced scrutiny and accountability which give rise to disjunctures in the teacher’s wider understanding of care. Analysis reveals an understanding of care as political and moral and involving more than the discourses of intimate relationships and behaviour role modelling promoted in policy and guidance as necessary to good pupil outcomes. The research reveals the hierarchy of textual mediation of teachers’ work and explicates how teachers come to care through political, moral, and personal and professional moral boundaries. This leads to concerns over pedagogical principles, workload, stress and a wider consciousness of the teachers’ self. When behaviour and practice is regarded as risky to pupils, the school, colleagues and self, the recourse, through talk, is to take up the institutional discourse of quality mediated through regulation. A key finding is that teachers’ wider care needs are silenced.

The aim of this research is to examine, from children’s perspectives, where bullying exists in their everyday experiences of school. A Foucauldian perspective is used to conceptualise bullying and perceives it as involving power which is fluid and involves struggles between individuals. Different modalities of bullying are examined (between pupils, between teachers and pupils and systemic bullying). This research also investigates different severities of bullying from clear to ‘grey’; and different perspectives and feelings children have. Traditional definitions are challenged which distinguish bullying as a specific form of aggression, experienced by a minority of people. Observations, focus groups and individual interviews were conducted with children in five state schools, a private school and a pupil referral unit, 84 children in total were interviewed. This research found that although most children experienced characteristics of bullying such as name-calling and humiliation, which often caused them distress, few children considered it as bullying and no-one referred to themselves as a bully. Teachers were subject to powers of normalisation and panopticism where they were under surveillance to ensure children conformed to education norms. Although bullying was found to be multi-causal, a particular finding in this thesis is the role played by boredom. Working-class boys with learning difficulties were particularly under ‘the gaze’ and increasingly targeted for punishment, which usually increased their boredom. Some of these children wanted revenge and engaged in bullying. Because they often felt increasingly targeted for punishment, they also experienced bullying by teachers and systemic bullying. Another reason children bully is to be popular and exercise social power over others. This research is an original contribution to knowledge because of its complex and multi-faceted understanding of bullying. These findings have wider resonance and are likely to apply where these processes occur, for example, in other schools.

This research uses learner voice to explore low level disruption in level two classrooms in a college of further education. The aim of the research is to develop a better understanding of factors influencing classroom interaction and learner achievement, and to suggest ways in which the findings may be used to minimise disruption in the classroom. The learners who took part in the research had been identified by teaching staff as persistent disrupters in level two vocational classes. The purpose of the research was explained to each individual and the research comprised of three stages: individual interviews were held with learners; a card sorting exercise, selected for its interactive qualities, was conducted with each learner; and college-held data was used to establish factors which affected behaviour in the classroom. The research findings have been theoretically grounded in Giddens’ structuration theory. Structuration theory facilitated recognition of changes in behaviour in classrooms, and the identification of explanatory patterns. It has been used to underpin the final argument; that reasons for disruption are complex, different for each learner, and can be critical to learner progression. The findings demonstrate that individual, home and community and institutional factors have the capacity to influence learner behaviour in the classroom. Whilst the impact of these factors can vary from individual to individual, they can all be seen to be of significant relevance to achievement and progression. The value of learner voice can be seen in the insight gained into individual learner experiences and in the attempt taken to use this information to address the balance of power in the classroom.

This study investigates the conceptions of information literacy held by student nurses on a BSc Nursing Studies course and asks whether the information skills sessions taught are successful from the students’ viewpoint. Additionally, it compares attitudes to, and use of information literacy within the artificial environment of the university and the ‘real world’ of the nurse as perceived by participants on their clinical and community placements. The inquiry introduces the concept of information literacy and charts its development before discussing it in relation to the changing context of nurse education and evidence-based practice. The research adopts the interpretive paradigm with phenomenography as its methodology. It uses focus groups and twenty-one individual interviews to obtain rich data from a purposive sample of students across the three years of the course. Such data were analysed to produce categories of description representing the collective experience of information literacy across the sample. The thesis questions whether learning to nurse effectively is best achieved through training along traditional lines, education, or a combination of both. For the latter it is imperative to find an appropriate balance between academic and clinical skills. The findings reveal a tension between the academic and clinical aspects of learning to be a nurse which some students struggle to resolve. The study concludes that while information literacy is perceived as part of a nurse’s professional role in supporting evidence-based practice, participant observations suggest that its use is context dependent and variable. The thesis recognizes that the adoption of evidence-based practice may depend on the presence or absence of particular personal and organisational barriers. Suggestions for further research include the relationship between academic and clinical learning, the importance and influence of informal learning, and the nature of the transition from student nurse to autonomous practitioner.