In the UK, further education (FE) colleges play a key role in providing literacy programmes. This article draws upon our research in FE, with a focus on literacy, learning and identity, to explore how different learners are positioned differently depending on the value of the literacy practices they bring with them from home. Indeed, it is…

This paper addresses a recurring theme regarding the UK's Vocational Education and Training policy in which further education (FE) and training are primarily driven by employer demand. It explores the tensions associated with this process on the everyday working practices of FE practitioners and institutions and its impact on FE's…

For the past decade, I have been observing, researching and reporting on a group of Scottish further education lecturers and schoolteachers, who, through their trade union activities, have had a significant impact on their colleagues' engagement with post-compulsory education and professional development. They are members of the Educational…

This paper examines the key role that graded lesson observations have within the measurement of quality in the post-compulsory education sector. Using semi-structured interviews, it looks at their impact on participants and also their execution in light of their stated purpose to "improve teaching and learning". The sample selected…

The purpose of this study was to establish if lecturers in further education colleges (FECs) delivering higher education business courses (HEBCs) undertook research to improve specialist knowledge. A critical analysis of the literature was undertaken, providing an overview of what is understood by the term "research". Lecturers in FECs…

The problematisation of the professional standards for teachers in the UK lifelong learning sector tends to focus on the discourses that the standards embody: discourses that are posited as being based on a restricted or technicist model of professionalism, that fail sufficiently to recognise the lived experiences of teachers within the sector…

Research on reading in the lifelong-learning sector has tended to focus on the attitudes, habits and practices of the recipients of further education (FE), or the practices of literacy within the cultural and contextual environments of the subjects and spaces of further education. Although teachers' conceptualisations of literacy are often…

Widening participation within higher education and increasing social mobility have been high on the agendas of former and current governments. This paper examines the admissions procedure of a Foundation degree in Early Years programme using Bourdieu's concept of capital as a vehicle for analysis. During the process of an admissions…

This paper considers the concept of professionalism via perceptions (real or imagined) of lecturers delivering higher education business programmes (HEBPs) in further education colleges in England. The study comprised 26 in-depth interviews conducted in the Yorkshire and Humber region in the UK. The study builds on Perkin's views of a…

In the United Kingdom, changes in the policy, funding and commissioning landscape for mental health and well-being are posing opportunities and challenges for adult community learning (ACL). Opportunities include increased recognition of, and funding for, the "wider benefits" of learning, whereas challenges include the risks of ACL…

The English education sector is undergoing major restructuring with the coalition government placing great emphasis on two key principles of policy: deregulation and marketisation. This development follows on two decades in which the British state has sought to raise performance levels and reduce costs through a variety of policies that are drawn…

Vocational education and its leadership is an important sphere of economic activity worldwide and is being impacted by several trends including: the increasing significance and centrality of skills development in today's economies; economic trends associated with globalisation (internationalisation of education and emergence of global labour…

This article explores aspects of the relationship between professional standards for teachers and the curriculum for teacher education in the lifelong learning sector in the United Kingdom. Drawing on an analysis of different editions of three core textbooks for teacher education in the lifelong learning sector, which are positioned as acting as…

The Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) is a two-year senior school certificate available to secondary students in Victoria, Australia, and has been operational for almost a decade. It is delivered by secondary schools and further education providers. In 2010, two programmes from each of these providers were reviewed and considered in…

At the centre of the study on which this article is based, there is a sense of cultural collision. While from a global perspective, Literacy education has an exciting and radical pedigree, the teaching of Literacy in England has been harnessed to an explicitly instrumentalist policy agenda since the introduction of the Adult Literacy Core…