This original study presents findings from a study of members of the first cohort of legal degree apprentices. Introduced in the UK in 2016, legal degree apprenticeships (LAs) remove uncertainty towards legal qualification in an otherwise competitive graduate recruitment environment and could help to increase social mobility into the professions.…

The increased reliance of universities on a pool of highly skilled but poorly paid casualised academic labour for teaching and research has emerged as a defining feature of higher education provision under neoliberal New Public Management. Based on seventeen visual timeline interviews with academics in the North East of England, this article…

Basic skills -- including literacy, numeracy, ESOL and digital skills -- are key to support adults' life chances and the need to invest in them is increasing. Investing in higher level and technical skills is important for economic recovery and future prosperity. But a sound base of basic skills are both essential in their own right and provide…

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has had profound impacts on society, the economy and on the entire education sector. Teachers' workload, well-being, recruitment and retention have been affected by the national crisis. The aim of the National Foundation for Educational Research's (NFER's) annual series of Teacher Labour Market reports is to monitor the…

The Commission on Education and Employment Opportunities for Young People (Youth Commission) aims to find ways to improve education and employment opportunities for England's 16-24-year olds. The Commission's first report (see ED604277) identified five key challenges: (1) Better supporting 700,000 young people not in education, employment or…

National Foundation for Educational Research's (NFER's) first annual report on the state of the teacher workforce measures the key indicators of the teacher labour market and teachers' working conditions. The recruitment, development and retention of teachers and school leaders is a crucial underpinning for a successful education system. However,…

Young people in theory have a world filled with opportunity and longer lives to enjoy it. But for too many these opportunities are out of reach. Educational attainment is increasingly central to life chances, but more dependent on family background here than in other countries. Rises in insecure work along with stalled pay risk further divides…

Objectives: To investigate whether a new model that delegates some out-of-home care services from the public to the private and not-for-profit sectors in England enhances practitioners' job control and stress levels. Methods: A 3-year longitudinal matched-control evaluation examined changes in Karasek demand-control model and Maslach burnout…

This paper is based on findings from a three-year longitudinal study in England called the Teacher Study which aimed to provide an analytical description of who Skills for Life (SfL) teachers are and what they do in their working lives. The main focus of the paper is teachers' career pathways and the possibilities of making a career in…