Those training to become teachers in England during the 2019/20 academic year were severely impacted by the first national lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with many missing school placements, giving them less time to build experience and confidence before becoming newly qualified teachers (NQTs). Their first year of teaching was also…

Critical pedagogy in the UK has traditionally been practised in the Lifelong Learning sector. However, the sector has become constrained by funding cuts, instrumental curricula and accountability measures, and teachers can feel that they have little room for professional autonomy and therefore the practice of critical pedagogy. Yet some do…

This paper offers an autoethnographic account of my first academic year as a Human Geography lecturer at a 'new' public university in the North West of England. This research is timely and much needed, since teaching at universities in England has recently come under increasing scrutiny. The Teaching Excellence Framework is a new scheme, which…

The quest continues to standardise quality assurance systems throughout the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) under the auspices of the Bologna Process and led by the European Network for Quality Assurance (ENQA). Mirroring its member organisation in England, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), ENQA identifies, as one of its core aims, the…

Rural clergy often lack colleagues and may struggle with isolation, especially if over-extended in multi-parish benefices. Theory suggests that this sense of isolation could be addressed by launching clergy action learning sets, which have the potential to establish a peer support network through the formation of social capital as a by-product of…