This study analyses the effect of a change of focus in a traditional mission (teaching) of higher education institutions (HEIs) on the variety and intensity of knowledge exchange (KE) activities. In doing so, it bridges two partially disconnected streams of the literature in science and innovation focusing on HEI missions and heterogeneity in HEI…

The 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) changed the direction of statutory education in England by introducing a culture of competition between schools. A market in education was created that placed school against school in neighbouring communities with the aim of the 'fittest' ones surviving while the weaker ones failed and closed. By the end of the…

University rankings envision a level playing field between competing universities, particularly in higher education (HE) systems regulated along market lines. Drawing on social stratification theory, we argue that rankings exacerbate, rather than alleviate, resource inequalities between universities with historically consolidated reputations…

In recent years school-to-school collaboration in the English context has been promoted by a myriad of policy initiatives. Many of these initiatives have been directed at structural reforms seeking to facilitate a 'self-improving system' in which schools support one another to raise standards of teaching and learning and address educational…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the physical match profiles of professional soccer players using 3 and 5 min fixed and rolling averages as well as fixed 1 min averages, with considerations to training prescription. Methods: Twenty-nine professional U23 soccer outfield players competed across 17 competitive matches during the…

The goal of equity in education in England is damaged by regional disparities in outcomes and a marked social gradient in school exclusion. The most vulnerable groups are disproportionately represented in in-year transfers. Drawing on 24 interviews with school leaders and education decision-makers in a socioeconomically deprived area, this study…

Freestyle-disco is a relatively new and complex competitive dance style that, to our knowledge, has yet to be researched. Thus, the purpose of this research was to explore two fundamental physiological characteristics of exercise in relation to freestyle-disco as a starting-point for future research into the style. From this, the authors hope to…

This report looks at why men are more likely than women to achieve first-class degrees at Oxford and Cambridge. This situation stands in stark contrast to the UK higher education sector as a whole, where women are generally more likely to achieve both first-class honours and 'good' honours. The author argues that the first-class awarding gap…

Problem-based learning along with other game and player-centred approaches have been promoted as valuable alternatives to more traditional, skill-based, directive, and leader-centric pedagogical approaches. However, as research has shown, they are not unproblematic or straightforward to apply. Heeding to calls for more empirical studies of…

Background: This paper reports on the gendered embodiment of physical education (PE) pre-service teachers, as they learnt to teach gymnastics using mobile website technology. Methodology: Framed within an interpretivist paradigm and informed by a constructivist grounded theory, qualitative data from module observations, focus groups and…

This paper explores the experience of researching food in schools. Food is personal. It is an ingested symbol of culture, family, tradition, ethnicity… What does this mean as a researcher? How do we navigate food relationships? How is this relationship shaped by the rules of the school? This paper examines how I went about doing food research in…

In this paper, we make initial advances towards building an argument for the inclusion of Critical Literacy Awareness within the new Early Career Framework in England. Using illustrative examples from recent research projects, we argue that post-2010 education policy has discursively divided practitioners, structuring relationships between…

This paper examines how the policy process around initial teacher education (ITE) during the pandemic of 2020 was experienced by the leaders of ITE programmes across England. Education policies, it is argued, are solutions to perceived problems, revealing latent values that drive action. Group interviews with leaders of ITE programmes across the…

This article explores the powerful yet contradictory role of neoliberalism, its competitive mechanisms and emotional logics. Theoretically, it reviews the shifting state-higher education-market nexus through the lens of a critical cultural political economy paradigm. Conceptually, it closely examines Davies' work on the 'logic of competition'…

The ongoing marketisation of higher education in England can be understood both conceptually -- in terms of its ideological commitment to competition and accountability; and practically -- in terms of the way that it has altered higher education structurally in a variety of ways. Methods of standardisation and quantification offer validation and…