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Inherent tensions exist in skills policies that aim to combine national economic growth and productivity with localised implementation for education and training. This is particularly apparent in the over-emphasis on employer engagement in national education and training policy, where the localisation of skills formation is particularly envisioned through employer engagement. Yet further education colleges have acted as anchors within local skills ecosystems working successfully with employers, often through Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), providing the key bridging mechanism between national skills policy and localised enactment. We unpack the tensions between national and local skills policy by presenting a case study of a local skills ecosystem. Through interviews with key stakeholders--representatives from the local college, the LEP, and employers--we deploy Stephen J. Ball's approach to policy enactment to map the complex processes and tensions involved in the translation of national skills policy into local skills systems. Our findings highlight the critical role of colleges as anchor institutions in local skills ecosystems, with employers and LEPs working as 'collaborative anchors' in the policy cycle. We present the concept of 'local collaborative anchors' as a heuristic device for understanding tensions within local skills ecosystems and national skills policy enactment.

As the English Higher Education (HE) system becomes characterised by centralised regulation, many professional services staff increasingly occupy significant positions sitting between traditional administrative roles, academia and management with responsibility for interpreting and implementing key policies. This study presents findings from a nested institutional case study, in a research-intensive institution, of the experiences of professional services staff implementing the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Examining how policy 'landed' in two academic schools, the findings present staff acting as both operational and strategic drivers: experiencing the regulatory policy cycle as opportunities, subjugation and threat. On the one hand, the high-stakes nature of the TEF led to the development of policy-specific, third space-type roles with enhanced employment contracts, prestige, and agency and the reformulation of working relationships. On the other, the TEF, as but one feature of the regulatory burden on institutions, provided only a limited kind of agency -- a term referred to here as 'structured agency' to staff. Through analysis of the diversity of roles, experiences and skills within the professional services workforce, this paper highlights the critical importance of professional services staff in a complex regulatory policy process, and the ways in which policy enactment in this space both constrains some individuals while, given adequate resource, enables others to carve out new career spaces and career trajectories. As the Office for Students (OfS) continues to normalise its power in institutions, these insights have important implications for labour force management, in turn allowing for the meaningful enactment of central policy within universities.

Despite the fact that precarious modes of employment have become increasingly common in academic careers, studies have shown that precarious contracts are often hidden and masked within higher education structures. This has important implications for the identities of those on such contracts. This paper uses Goffman's work on stigma, 'spoiled identities', and identity management, and Archer's concepts of morphostasis and morphogenesis as heuristic devices to examine the ways in which precariously employed academic staff experience their work and think about their identities. In doing so, the paper maps out the complex relationship between structure, agency, and identity in precarious academic careers and the ways in which participants reproduced embedded career norms and dominant career scripts through the process of masking the stigma of their precarity.

In England, the Studio Schools model, focused on developing employability skills in young people, represents a disruptive attempt at educational innovation. Through a documentary analysis of foundational documents, interviews with the model's architects and case studies of five Studio Schools, we map the tensions between theoretical conceptualisations of the model and the messy realities of implementing it. We found that the schools faced a wide range of challenges related particularly to local inter-school competition, centralised accountability measures and structural assumptions about the 'gold educational standard'. When facing these challenges, the course of least resistance for the schools was an iterative abandonment of the distinctive aspects of the Studio Schools model and a move back towards mainstream approaches to schooling. This process of institutional homogenisation is discussed through the lens of neo-institutional theory, with the challenges schools faced and their trajectories framed in terms of coercive, mimetic and normative isomorphism. We argue that the use of isomorphism as a heuristic device provides important insight into the process of educational innovation in an educational system that combines competition and the risk of market failure with coercive accountability measures and embedded assumptions about the 'gold standard' schooling pathway.

This paper reviews recent policy understandings of research capacity in teacher education in the UK. It then draws on a case study from Wales to suggest a conceptualisation of research capacity-building in teacher education that encompasses individual, organisational and systemic levels while remaining sensitive to the particulars of professional practice in teacher education. We argue that a healthy ecology of research-rich teacher education practice and policy includes teacher educators based in universities, schools, colleges or other settings, teachers and other education practitioners, students, school management, governors, local authorities, policy makers, research funders, publishers. We recommend a principled approach to public investment in capacity-building initiatives that embraces a vision of collaborative research-rich professional practice and professional development along all career stages, and commits to sustaining more expansive understandings of research culture in organisations, matched by appropriate recognition mechanisms.

This paper introduces the concept of digital structural violence and examines the negative role it could have in future learning systems. To address it, we propose a new interdisciplinary research agenda at the intersection of three current but disparate lines of work that: (1) Use the concept of epistemic privilege to theorise the inclusion of marginalised learners in the design of learning systems, and utilise participatory action research and emancipatory methodologies to pragmatically ensure this happens; (2) Support young learners and teachers to understand and build their own artificial intelligence algorithms; and (3) Develop sustainable interdisciplinary links with computer science to address digital structural violence at the algorithmic level and to make its societal implications and underlying processes more widely understood, especially by teachers. Taken together, these provide for a material form of resistance to digital structural violence and a theoretically and methodologically coherent future research agenda for building just learning systems.

This article presents a cross-national exploration of responses to widening participation (WP), with a specific focus on the provision of foundation year (FY) programmes and the use of contextualised admissions (CA) in "selective" Irish and UK institutions. There remains a dearth of research on these routes, with little understanding of the characteristics of students who utilise them, of why students use these routes and little knowledge of their effect on students' experiences in university and their overall sense of belonging. A year-long longitudinal comparative case study design examined three alternative entry routes in two selective higher education institutions (HEIs) in England and Ireland: a well-established FY; a newly formed FY; and a CA pathway. Data were collected through a mixed-method approach. Questionnaires and in-depth focus groups were employed at fixed points with participating students in each route. Results indicated that FY students had lower levels of familial educational history and parental occupation. FY students' sense of belonging significantly increased over the year, with students reporting increased confidence and sense of belonging due to the relationships established during the FY. CA students' sense of belonging remained the same, with students reporting feeling different and isolated. Results indicate that while students utilising FYs may be 'more disadvantaged' than CA students, their experiences helped establish a sense of belonging; illustrating the need for diverse WP routes catering to a wide range of needs. Results highlight the importance of providing opportunities to develop social and bridging social capital for all non-traditional students.

Researchers and advocates have long argued that on-going engagement by broad segments of the public can help make forests and forest-based communities more sustainable and decisions more enduring. In Canada, public engagement in sustainable forest management has primarily taken one of two approaches: advisory forums through forest-sector advisory committees (FACs) and direct decision-making authority through community forest boards (CFBs). The purpose of this paper is to compare these two approaches by focusing on who participates and the values that participants bring to their deliberations. We conducted a national survey of FACs and CFBs involving 402 participants. Results showed that both models favoured well-educated, Caucasian men and fell short on the representation of women and Indigenous peoples. Additionally, despite different levels of authority in relation to forest management decisions, participants in CFBs and FACs shared similar forest values. Hence, we conclude that neither model of forest governance encourages participation from a diverse public. Our findings suggest the need to find new ways of recruiting diverse participants and to investigate more deeply whether local and extra-local pressures and power dynamics shape these processes. Such information can inform the establishment of more robust institutions for decision-making in support of sustainable forest management. Key words: community forest boards, forest advisory committees, values, representation, sustainable forest management. Les chercheurs et les partisans soutiennent depuis longtemps que l'implication continue de larges segments du public peut contribuer a rendre les forets et les communautes forestieres plus durables et les decisions plus eclairees. Au Canada, l'engagement du public dans l'amenagement durable des forets a surtout pris l'une ou l'autre des deux approches suivantes: des forums consultatifs grace aux comites consultatifs du secteur forestier (CCF) et des structures de prises de decisions directes par le biais de conseils forestiers communautaires (CFC). Le but de cet article est de comparer ces deux approches en se concentrant sur la nature des participants et les valeurs qu'ils vehiculent dans leurs deliberations. Nous avons mene une enquete nationale aupres de 402 participants concernant les CCF et les CFC. Les resultats ont montre que les deux approches favorisent la participation des hommes caucasiens ayant un niveau d'education eleve, mais ne representent pas les femmes issues des communautes autochtones. De plus, malgre les differents niveaux d'autorite en lien avec les decisions d'amenagement forestier, les participants dans les CCF et des CFC partagent les memes valeurs forestieres. Par consequent, nous concluons qu'aucun des modeles de gouvernance forestiere n'encourage la participation d'un public diversifie. D'apres nos resultats, il est necessaire de trouver de nouvelles approches de recrutement pour assurer une diversification de la participation et d'etudier plus en profondeur si des pressions locales ou externes et les dynamiques de pouvoir influencent ces processus. Ces informations peuvent aider a la mise en place d'institutions plus robustes pour la prise de decisions en lien avec l'amenagement durable des forets. [Traduit par la Redaction] Mots-cles: conseils forestiers communautaires, comites consultatifs du secteur forestier, valeurs, representations, amenagement durable des forets., Introduction The conditions and practices supporting public engagement in forest governance have been a long-term focus for researchers (e.g., Sinclair and Smith 1999; Sinclair and Lobe 2005; Teitelbaum et al. [...]

In recent years, teachers have turned to online social spaces for peer-to-peer interaction in increasing numbers. This online engagement has been highlighted by both practitioners and academics as having important implications for teachers' professional learning and development. However, there is a need to move beyond instrumental discourses that simply discuss engagement and technology in terms of costs and benefits, and analyse the complex social contexts in which engagement takes place. Therefore, presenting data from a digital ethnography of three online social spaces used by teachers, this paper uses professional identity as an analytical framework in order to understand teachers' online engagement in holistic terms in a way that acknowledges the messy social realities in which teachers work. It then presents a new theoretical framework for conceptualising teachers' professional identity that develops the concept of embedded ideal identity and takes into account context, social complexity, structure and agency.

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With a growing number of teachers engaging online with their peers, online social spaces are increasingly highlighted as playing a key role in teachers' professional learning and development. However, while academic and professional discourses tend to focus on the benefits and weaknesses of teachers' engagement in online social spaces, little attention has been given to the spaces themselves. Rooted in essentialist or instrumentalist assumptions about technology, these spaces are often conceptualised as neutral contexts, free from values, structures, and agendas that simply facilitate interaction. However, presenting data gathered during a year-long digital ethnography of three such spaces, this paper argues that they are in fact highly complex social environments that contain embedded structures relating to technical design and functionality, dominant discourses, and the agendas of parent organisations. Such structures shape user engagement and have a constructive influence over the ways in which teachers think about their subjects and themselves as professionals. Therefore, it is argued that in order to understand fully the place online social spaces could or should have in teachers' professional lives, the complex online environments in which teachers engage and the relationship between structure and agency must be analysed.

While we agree with Cooling's argument from fairness, we argue that Cooling fails to give an adequate account of how fairness can be conceived, particularly because he does not decisively tackle the issues surrounding doing God in a plural context, or the contentious issues of compulsory collective worship and faith schools. In order to explore an argument from fairness with these issues in mind, we introduce three key concepts from the philosophy of John Rawls: reasonable pluralism, overlapping consensus and hypothetical contract. We then invite readers to conduct a thought experiment based on a hypothetical contract to explore the issues of faith schools and collective worship. We conclude from this exercise that hypothetically, a rational person behind a veil of ignorance would choose a system of educational provision where faith schools should be made available, but compulsory collective worship in religiously unaffiliated schools should not be enshrined in legislation. By appropriating concepts from the philosophy of Rawls, we hope to have offered a coherent, if novel, way of thinking about how to do God fairly; where those of all religious perspectives, including those of no religion, can put aside their partiality and think about the fairest way of doing God in the context of a liberal democracy.