Changes in government policy and funding structures, alongside a rapidly evolving (international) market for education have made education provision a key revenue driver for UK higher education institutions. In this setting, the Russell Group of Universities (RGU), a self-selected association of elite, research-intensive universities and Business…

This article contributes to the debate on employability skills in UK higher education. It starts by discussing the concept of employability and places the debate in the context of mega-trends affecting UK higher education and the broader UK labour market. It distinguishes between different types of employability skills, as identified by employers'…

This article explores students' acquisition of cosmopolitanism through transnational education (TNE). It adopts a critical approach to educational cosmopolitanism, distinguishing 'ways of being' at the dispositional level and 'ways of doing' at the practice level, to unfold the contingency and multiplicity of cosmopolitanism as well as the…

This article provides a critical and theoretical exploration into teacher performance dispositions (orientations towards performance). The article explores research literature on dispositions, highlighting the representation of teachers in education policy and standards documents across several nations of the OECD: Australia, the USA and the UK.…

This paper outlines clear signs of market-led instrumentalisation for HE cultures in Britain, before critiquing the "ontological turn" in HE theory and its intrinsic political abdication from those signs. It focuses on a paper by Ronald Barnett to both diagnose the problem, which is a "precarité" that is ghosted in his work,…

This article uses student activism to explore the way in which activists are challenging the student as consumer model through a series of experiments that blend pedagogy and protest. Specifically, I suggest that Higher Education is increasingly becoming an arena of the post-political, and I argue that one of the ways this student-consumer…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been a prominent topic of recent educational discussion and debate. MOOCs are, in essence, university-affiliated courses offered to large groups of online learners for little or no cost and are seen by many as a bellwether for change and reform across higher education systems. This study uses content and…

Schools in the UK teach pupils about Fairtrade as part of Religious Education, Personal and Social Education, Citizenship, Geography and so on. There are also Fairtrade Schools, where the whole school, including staff and parents, is committed to promoting the brand. It is argued here that promoting this commercial brand to schoolchildren and…

An investigation of Native English Speaking Teachers' performance in schemes in six Asian contexts, commissioned by the British Council, and undertaken by three British academics, is subjected to critical evaluation. Key issues for exploration are the issue of a monolingual approach to English learning and teaching, and the inappropriate…

Shifts in funding and a worldwide trend towards marketising higher education have led to a new emphasis on the quality of the student experience. In the UK this trend finds its strongest expression in recent policy proposals to simultaneously increase student fees and student choice so that students themselves become the drivers of higher…

"Privatising the Public University: The Case of Law" is the first full-length critical study examining the impact of the dramatic reforms that have swept through universities over the last two decades. Drawing on extensive research and interviews in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada, Margaret Thornton considers the impact of the…

This article critically explores the consequences of the imposition of neoliberal ideology on a transnational scale on the higher education system. Its particular focus is England where the context of the "new managerialism" continues to dominate the "lifeworlds" of educators and the educated, despite strong concerns about its…

Do prospective students get the information they need to assess what can be gained from attending a particular higher education institution? Professor Gibbs' highly influential 2010 report, "Dimensions of Quality", found that student outcomes can be affected by the way that institutions choose to use available resources; class size, the…