Beryl Gilroy (1924-2001) is often referred to as one of the first Black primary school headteachers in London, England. Her refusal to continue teaching in schools once she reached her fifties has not been explored in recent publications. Her interest in sound, pedagogy and therapeutic recovery can be revisited retrospectively. She strove to…

Improving mathematical skills is a priority in England, and a series of policy levers and government change projects have focused on improving mathematical outcomes in further education (FE) in recent years. Yet little is known about the mathematics teacher workforce that supports these students on vocational and technical programmes. This paper…

The mental health and well-being of teachers is an issue of great policy concern. This is particularly true in England, where high workload and the associated stress is thought to be leading to a recruitment and retention crisis within the education profession. But do individuals who decide to leave teaching for another career actually see their…

The practitioner-academic transition can be a challenge. There are often tensions and difficulties involved in identity change, key aspects of which are writing, publishing, and maintaining the writing habit. In order to support this transition, the writing meeting framework, originally designed to support academic writers in changing and…

England currently faces a shortage of teachers, in part due to declining retention. Research suggests that one important influence on teachers' decisions about whether to leave teaching is the quality of working conditions in their school. Understanding which specific aspects of working conditions have the strongest relationship with retention…

England has been living with COVID-19, through peaks and troughs since March 2020. Policymakers see schools as integral to economic and social maintenance and recovery and have thus placed a high priority on education as a stable provision operating throughout a very long period of considerable uncertainty and instability. Because of rapidly…

The working lives of teachers and leaders study is an annual survey of teachers and leaders in state schools in England. The survey explores teachers and leaders': (1) workload, wellbeing and flexible working arrangements; (2) attitudes to pay; (3) experiences of professional development; (4) views on pupil behaviour; (5) career reflections; and…

The drivers of learning for mid-career workers with few initial qualifications from the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Italy and Poland are examined. The focus in this article is upon the learning pathways and experience of the low-qualified drawn from empirical research which gathered and analysed the strategic career and…

Accurately documenting the occupational biographies of older people can be challenging given their lengthy duration and the complexity of contemporary employment. This paper shows how a traditionally quantitative occupational history calendar (OHC) instrument can be adapted for use in a mixed methods research design, to gather in-depth information…

The decline in manufacturing and growth of service-based jobs has prompted many social theorists to argue that the ability of working-class men to construct meaningful and rewarding careers is becoming ever more limited. Despite using the universal label "working class", the experience of skilled working-class men has been largely…

This paper presents findings from a study examining the career development experiences of female head-teachers in the south of England. Adapting a three-stage career model, the study examined different stages of the women's lives and careers in order to understand what encouraged and influenced them to become educational leaders and how their…

What are the motivations, needs and interests of academics entering mid-career? To answer this question, we drew on data from our longitudinal research program to examine the career trajectories of thirteen social scientists and scientists, five or more years post-PhD, in research-teaching positions. We used an identity framework to understand how…

This study explores the motivation of "high-status" professionals to change career and enter teaching, and their experience of undertaking initial teacher education (ITE) programmes in England. The study builds on previous research which found that career-changers are disproportionately more likely to fail to complete their ITE studies,…

Evidence linking teacher quality and the "performance" of education systems has led to a widespread emphasis on improving the quality of entrants to teaching. In the USA and UK particularly, policymakers have encouraged entrants who have been highly successful in other careers to switch to teaching, on the assumption that they bring…

This article explores constructions of teacher identities at a time of significant changes to public service professionalism. The article draws on different discourses of professionalism, contrasting "organisational" and "occupational" professionalism, with discourses of "personal" and "critical"…