Brenda Little

UK Work Placements: A Choice Too Far?.

Increasing expectations are being placed on higher education institutions to ensure the economic relevance of research and knowledge creation as well as developing the skill needs of workers in modern knowledge-based societies. In the UK, workplace learning has long been a feature of higher education in certain subject areas, and in the late 1990s the idea of work experience for all students re-emerged as a significant issue. Various studies have considered the relationship between work placement experiences during higher education and students’ subsequent transition into employment after graduation, but there has been less recent research exploring how the placement experience translates into academic development. This article presents some of the findings of a study on the effects, as perceived by undergraduates themselves, of work experience placements on aspects of learning as well as employability. The majority of placement students indicate personal and intellectual development and report increased levels of confidence and enhanced motivation towards study. However, national data show a continuing decline in the numbers of UK students taking up placements, and the study suggests that more general moves towards flexibility within undergraduate programmes may be contributing to this decline.

Conceptions of Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Implications for Future Policy and Practice

As higher education has expanded from a rather small and elite activity experienced by a minority of the population into a mass system in which it is expected that a majority of the population will, at some point in their lives, gain a higher education experience, the range of learners engaging in higher learning has grown and diversified as has the range of provision on offer.

The hidden benefits of part-time higher education study to working practices: is there a case for making them more visible?

Within the UK, part-time study is now seen as important in meeting wider government objectives for higher education (HE) and for sustainable economic growth through skills development. Yet, measures to capture the impact of HE may not be wholly appropriate to part-time study. In particular, the continuing focus on tangible, economic measures may be down-playing, or even completely overlooking, other gains. Data from a longitudinal study of part-time students show that irrespective of whether graduates had changed job or employer, or had stayed in the same job, individuals reported substantial work-related gains from their HE studies. We suggest that current research questions that focus on job moves and progression within the labour market, may well be the wrong questions to ask to gauge measures of benefits/returns to HE. Further research is needed to develop measures to fully capture the social returns of skills acquisition through part-time study.

The Uk Bachelors Degree – A Sound Basis for Flexible Engagement with an Unregulated Labour Market?

The higher education system in the United Kingdom has traditionally consisted of a two-cycle structure for taught programmes, leading to two main qualifications: the Bachelor’s degree at undergraduate level, which is normally awarded “with honours” and is often termed the first degree; and the Master’s degree at postgraduate level. These are equivalent to first and second cycle qualifications respectively in the framework for qualifications of the European Higher Education Area (FQ-EHEA). The doctorate degree (equivalent to a third cycle qualification in the FQ-EHEA) is a research-focussed higher degree, and follows on from studies at the undergraduate level plus research training (often provided through a Masters degree). Of the 2.4 million students in UK higher education in 2008/09 over half (56 per cent) were studying at Bachelors (first) degree level; a further 21 per cent were studying at “other undergraduate level” (equivalent to short cycle qualifications in the FQ-EHEA); and the remaining fifth (22 per cent) were studying at postgraduate level. Some 670,000 higher education qualifications are awarded every year: half of these are Bachelor’s/first degrees; a fifth are “other undergradduate” qualifications, and the remaining 30 per cent are postgraduate awards.

Changing practices, changing values?: A Bernsteinian analysis of knowledge production and knowledge exchange in two UK universities.

Bernstein’s concept of classification and framing links notions of knowledge, democracy and social justice, providing a perspective from which to address critical questions of what knowledge is produced, who has access to it, and how knowledge is distributed. Bernstein’s conceptual framework is used to inform an analysis of national policies steering knowledge production and knowledge transfer in the UK, and the changing practices and values associated with knowledge production and knowledge transfer in two UK institutional case study universities. The analysis reveals how reputational and financial consequences of the formal assessment of research quality interacts with the institutional and disciplinary contexts of research units to differently shape what knowledge is valued and produced, and with whom it is shared.

Steering Higher Education Towards the Workplace

This article examines the changing relationship between higher education and the state in the United Kingdom during a period of rapid higher education expansion and diversification. The roles, respectively, of the academic community, the labour market, and government in the steering of this relationship are considered. The paper concludes that, although external initiatives may have an important role to play in stimulating change in higher education, it is the academic community itself which determines the pace and direction of change.