Purpose: The Further Education and Training (FET) sector is being positioned as a centrepiece of the government's post-pandemic recovery. However, issues of capacity and staff churn are threatening the potential success of this strategy. Unfortunately, there has been almost no strategic analysis of teacher churn in the English FET system or of the…

This paper reports on a small-scale, qualitative study, located in England and Wales, with the goal of advancing fairer teacher representation. Deploying a positive lens, the research shines a light on the lived experiences of 12 individuals from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, all of whom successfully entered the teaching profession…

This paper presents the results of a large-scale survey of undergraduates in England, concerning their envisaged career choices and how they made them. This gives a more complete account of those who do and do not want to be teachers than usual in the existing literature based primarily on prospective/existing teacher accounts. The paper looks at…

Why teachers choose their career has been a popular topic of research in many contexts since the introduction of the FIT-Choice framework by Watt and Richardson in 2007 to study teacher motivations. Although altruistic motivations have been identified as the common driving factor behind preservice teachers' (PSTs') decision to enter the field,…

This book offers deep insights into the agencies of teaching--pedagogies, professional identities, and knowledge--in the English further education (FE) sector. The sector's porous, inclusive, diverse, and prominent features of vocational offers have led to it being overlooked and misunderstood by policymakers. To rectify this misconception and…

I consider how teachers discursively instantiate their identities through narrative work, which I frame using the metaphor of weaving a tapestry of the self, and drawing together a conceptualisation of technologies of the self with ideas around performativity, agency and psycho-technologies. I have included data from my analysis of sixteen life…

Background and context of the study: This research employed a person-centred approach to evaluate the effectiveness of a recruitment intervention aimed at attracting STEM undergraduate students to the teaching profession. The study aimed to identify participant profiles based on changes of interest in teaching, examine the demographic factors…

Universities might aspire to teaching excellence, but do they enable academic teachers to make good teaching decisions? Using a critical realist perspective, a qualitative interview study in England and Australia explored academics' experiences of teaching decisions and their responses to strategic, institutional and departmental teaching policy…

The problem of educational achievement by boys and young men is a long-standing and big one that has been largely ignored by policymakers. This new HEPI report considers the consequences for individuals and society and proposes: (1) adopting a 'boy positive' environment in schools; (2) expanding proven grassroots initiatives that help boys; (3)…

Unprecedented reform to teacher education in England, through the Initial Teacher Training Market Review, led to the threat of removal of the right for established providers to offer programmes of initial teacher education beyond 2024 without reaccreditation. Such policy reform has been constructed in relation to a perceived gap in research about…

The concept of education for sustainable development (ESD) has emerged as one of the important educational themes in the past two decades. Advocates of ESD believe that ESD can lead to socio-economic and environmental justice. However, there is lack of research on the influence of teacher education programme on student teachers' conceptions of ESD…

This article discusses common geopolitical issues, such as globalisation, decolonialisation, and economic pressure that affect the development of teacher education policy in England, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Russia, Israel, Jamaica, Portugal, Japan, Poland, and China. It goes on to describe these nations' responses to these pressures and…

This paper compares the professional role and identity of teachers in private and state schools. It brings together theory within the sociology of the professions and approaches influenced by Basil Bernstein. It utilises his work on recontextualisation to identify the nature of teachers' professional "role"; and Beck and Young's (2010)…

Global education policy discourse is based on an unshakable belief that more and improved skills will promote economic prosperity, global competitiveness and social inclusion. In England, the Further Education and Skills sector (FES) has emerged as the vehicle to deliver these skills. However, the portrayal of FES as focusing primarily on…

National and regional variations in school systems, have often been explained in comparative school governance research in the Nordic countries with variations in long-standing traditions in curriculum development, characterised by a dichotomy between an Anglo-American curriculum tradition and a German/European continental tradition of Didaktik.…