There are many compelling reasons to consider the potential contribution of military veterans to teaching in UK Further Education. To find out more about the perspectives and texts of veterans moving into teaching, a comprehensive review of the literature was done. The review's objectives were to acquire a thorough grasp of how former military…

Universities are critical to the success of a growth-driving industrial strategy, and to the sector plans, which must capitalise on the higher education sector's contributions: (1) developing a high-skilled workforce for the nation; (2) collaborating with businesses, further education colleges and Mayoral Strategic Authorities to bring coherence…

This paper represents the latest in a line of papers and think pieces that the author has prepared on this topic -- for the UK government, the UK Skills and Productivity Board, and the Scottish Government and Scottish Funding Council -- since 2014. It seeks to explain why trying to bring skills supply into closer alignment with demand for skills…

This historical exploration of the development of the academic workforce in the UK and France was triggered by the observation of significant similarities in contemporary debates on casualisation, and segmentation despite their distinctive HE systems. We develop a quantitative history of academic staff to understand why the differences in the two…

In this article the role of Human Resource Management (HRM) in the UK Higher Education (HE) sector is interrogated, with a focus on the Gig Academy. A literature review of the casualisation of academics in the sector is undertaken and critiqued through the consultative unitarist values and behaviours of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and…

There is growing global recognition of the contribution that leadership development can make to improving quality and outcomes in the Early Years (EY) education sector. UK governments are responding to such evidence through the creation of new national qualifications for EY professionals across the sector and the expansion of publicly funded…

The student workforce plays a substantial part in several low-paying industries such as retail and hospitality, and this has grown over time. However, there has been little recent research. The usual assumption is that students compete successfully with the local labour force for low-skill, part-time jobs, but there is little evidence for this.…

Currently, 3% of the early year's education workforce is male, a figure that has remained stubbornly resistant to change over the last four decades. Research has shown that support is key to increasing the number of male employees in this sector. In recent years, there has been an increase in the demand for male-only support activities, such as…

Purpose: This monograph reports on the strategic and operational roles of learning and development (L&D) professionals in Irish, UK European and US organisations including multinational corporations, small to medium enterprises, the public sector and not for profit organisations. This paper aims to investigate the contextual factors…

This article models the migration flow of EEA students who graduated from masters and doctoral programmes in UK universities. The increased intra-European mobility of students and graduates is claimed to have crucial positive influence on building Europe's high-skill labour force, which in turn would strengthen its competency in the global…

The contribution of scholarship to practice is an on-going concern of the AL/HRD community. This paper explores how one influential discourse may shape AL/HRD's understanding of that contribution. In 2020 the UK Government implemented the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) to gather data on English Universities' knowledge exchange activities.…

There is strong evidence that learning gained in, through and for work, whether it is through employment, voluntary, community, domestic or any other kind of work, helps to equip people with the capabilities that can improve their working lives, their employability and their life skills (Lester and Costley, 2010, Beehives, 2018, WEXHE, 2019).…

Following calls to 'bewilder' (Snaza 2013) the pioneers of early education, this article positions Montessori pedagogy as a 'desire path' that acts as resistance to normative policy-driven pathways in early childhood education and care. Desire paths are alternative tracks made aside from officially established walking routes. In this paper I think…

Interdisciplinary working plays an important role in achieving impact outside academia. One barrier to interdisciplinary working is the lack of mechanisms to assess contributions from outside the primary discipline. Positioning our research in debates about knowledge translation, we analyse the ability of narrative cases to assess the…

This research, commissioned by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, explores how a higher technical education offer with a focus on industry-specific skills, could help to address the needs of local people, local businesses and the local economy. Compared with its international competitors, the UK has a relatively low proportion of the workforce with…