In this collection, different experts from a range of backgrounds consider the current plan to defund many Business and Technician Education Councils (BTECs) and other popular Level 3 Applied General qualifications. Together, the chapters argue this could close off a useful and proven route for students from a wide range of backgrounds, including…

Without teacher and student feedback literacy, it is difficult for feedback processes to fulfil their potential. Feedback literacy development within the arts or humanities is, however, under-researched. The current study fills this gap by illustrating how educators in the performative creative arts designed signature feedback practices to…

Engagement with primary sources is a key feature of arts and humanities subjects, particularly classics and ancient history. Recent instructional trends emphasise integrating skills with content, particularly in the first year of higher education. We investigate how successfully first-year university students used a variety of sources in an…

The Misuse of Drugs Act (1971) and the Psychoactive Substances Act (2016) both reinforce the criminalisation of drug use in the UK. The Psychoactive Substances Act (2016) has been developed to control and monitor the use of legal highs, particularly in institutions. This study aimed to establish drug service providers' viewpoints on how effective…

In the UK, the Royal Aeronautical Society recommends the inclusion of practical flight exercises for accredited undergraduate aerospace engineering programmes to enhance learning and student experience. The majority of academic institutions teaching aerospace in the UK separate the theory and practice of flight dynamics with students attending a…

This scoping paper explores the experiences of overseas students from Nigeria studying in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the United Kingdom. It considers the context for these students and some of the particular pressures and challenges they experience in making the transition from education in Nigeria to achieving academic success and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the benefits of reclaiming the idea of professional competence and challenges fragmented approaches to academic qualification and professional recognition. It is argued that academic programmes that are integrated with the requirements for professional recognition can resolve the potentially…

Interdisciplinary research teams and departments are seen by some as a way of addressing problems that cannot be understood using a traditionally narrow and uniform approach rooted in a particular discipline. This paper presents a postgraduate perspective by discussing the positive and negative impacts on Ph.D. research of this type of work and…

This article examines the "integrated conception of competence" as conceived by Paul Hager and David Beckett and suggests that its characterization in terms intended to distance it from behaviouristic and reductionist notions of competence is not sufficient to differentiate it from other models. Taking up Hager and Beckett's idea that…

Since 1997, the Brazelton Centre UK has offered courses to a wide range of professionals working with newborn infants and their families. In 2009, the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale was recommended in the Healthy Child Programme by the Department of Health. Both the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale and the Newborn Behavioral Observations…

Research and enquiry skills are increasingly required of students at all levels of the higher education curriculum, and this requires a sophisticated pedagogical response. The question is: how can we integrate current knowledge about academic writing with current knowledge about supervision? This article integrates different approaches to writing…

Within a learning family, every member is a lifelong learner. A family literacy and learning approach is more likely to break the intergenerational cycle of low education and inadequate literacy skills, particularly among disadvantaged families and communities. The selection of case studies presented in this compilation show that for an…

There is limited literature that looks at the evolution of student services in the UK and their effectiveness in providing student support. Student support is broadly defined as all services that support students to learn. Academic and non-academic support are essential mechanisms in providing holistic student support. In this article, the author…

There is widespread agreement that more needs to be done to increase and diversify post-16 participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Here we discuss recent research evidence on what influences participation in science. We introduce a proposal for integrating awareness of STEM careers into the science curriculum for…

There are many different forms that work-integrated learning (WIL) takes and variants go by a range of different names. Based on current literature, key dimensions, shared by the various and disparate forms of WIL curricula, were identified and operationalised in a measurement model. The key dimensions identified were: authenticity, integrated…