This ethnographic study reports on the findings from seven English secondary schools that participated in Project Faraday. The project was funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families to build innovative learning environments to encourage students into upper secondary inquiry-based STEM. Despite the innovative classrooms, the…

The challenge of funding a high quality higher education system, ensuring it has the capacity to help meet the increasing demand for high level skills in our economy and the aspirations of our students, has been an ongoing concern for successive Australian governments over many years. This paper reviews the findings and recommendations of…

Australian policy relating to knowledge exchange has never been well articulated, notwithstanding that the nexus between knowledge, engagement and higher education in Australia has been on the national agenda for several decades (Grattan Institute, 2013). In universities, this policy deficit is reflected in a lack of project management and…

The paper looks at the ways in which policymakers in the UK have attempted to get student teachers to use new technology effectively in their subject teaching over the past decade. During this period, there have been changes in the competence frameworks for validating student teachers' ability to use ICT in their subject teaching, and the UK…

Consistent with the "looking back, moving forward" conference theme, in this paper we undertake a critical, research-based appraisal of the current, arguably neglected state of adult education in Australia in 2010, and proceed to paint a picture of how a different and potentially more positive future might be realised. Firstly, we…

There has been a recent surge of interest in cooking skills in a diverse range of fields, such as health, education and public policy. There appears to be an assumption that cooking skills are in decline and that this is having an adverse impact on individual health and well-being, and family wholesomeness. The problematisation of cooking skills…

This article uses data from the Australian Censuses of 1976 and 2001 to measure the extent to which the children of school teachers participated in the middle class shift from public to non-government secondary schooling of the closing decades of the last century. It builds on recent work by Craig Campbell and Geoffrey Sherington on the history of…

A joint project carried out by Leeds University and Loughborough University, funded by JISC, studied the information literacy of non academic staff in higher education. The in-depth, qualitative study deployed an information audit, interviews and focus groups with eleven staff in the Finance and Research Departments at Loughborough University. The…

The Federal Government is introducing a new funding model for research in Australian higher education institutions, the Research Quality Framework (RQF). This paper provides an overview of the RQF and looks at possible impacts of the RQF on academic libraries in Australia. These impacts are drawn from experience at one Australian university,…

The purpose of this paper is to outline government online training practice. We searched individual research domains of the human-dimensions of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), information and communications technologies (ICT) and instructional design for evidence of either corporate sector or government training practices. We overlapped these…

This paper is set against the backdrop of an increasing number of strategies and policies developed by the Department for Education and Skills in the U.K. regarding the promotion of positive mental health in schools and the recognition of the value of improving mental health in relation to children's learning, achievement, attendance and…

Higher education performance indicators are being increasingly used in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia. A model of performance indicators was applied to departments of education in 17 Australian universities, ranking departments on inputs, processes, and outputs. Implications of various weighting schemes are discussed. Tables…

This project on national standards and accreditation of career practitioners is set against a background of unprecedented interest by governments nationally and internationally in the provision of career guidance services. Currently more is known about the policy and delivery of career guidance than at any other time in history. There is growing…

This paper is in response to an invitation from the Victorian Department of Education and Training to undertake a targeted review of effective teaching recruitment strategies. The paper provides a "snapshot" of what is happening in other States and Territories and in selected countries overseas. The main focus of the review is on the…

This paper represents the second of two papers written as part of the National Standards and Accreditation of Career Practitioners project. The first, a scoping paper titled Shaping a career development culture: Quality standards, quality practice, quality outcomes (McMahon, 2004), provided information for and guided discussion at the National…