Rob Smith

An overview of research on student support: helping students to achieve or achieving institutional targets? Nurture or de-nature?

In the quasi-marketised environment of the new, mass higher education (HE), centralised policy continues to dictate conditions, and traditionally stable sources of income are being made increasingly unreliable. An increasing emphasis on student support within HE institutions (HEIs) has been made necessary by targets for student numbers and the funding that rests on these numbers. These tensions have been added to for ‘post-1992’ universities, by the Widening Participation initiative that brings with it particular issues around recruitment and retention. Rather than focusing on the models and systems of support that are being developed in different HE settings and their effectiveness, the aim of this paper is to theorise the imperatives behind these, to look again at the context that informs their inception and how the various support structures position and identify students. Through this, the tensions that exist between financial incentives, ‘bums on seats’, Widening Participation and academic achievement rates will be explored.

New Public Management in an age of austerity: knowledge and experience in further education

This article originates in a piece of educational research into the experiences of further education (FE) student teachers in the West Midlands region of England. This cohort of students experienced significant upheaval in their college workplaces and placements during the 2010/2011 academic year. Pressures on FE funding were exacerbated by a Comprehensive Spending Review by the coalition government in late 2010 – prompted by the on-going global economic crisis. Some of the repercussions of these funding cuts for staff and students in the sector are discussed in this article, as perceived by this cohort of student teachers working in a range of FE providers across the West Midlands. Many of these repercussions can broadly be seen as an extension of existing managerialist practices, as the justification for an increasing squeeze on local resource allocation continues to be a wider appeal to global market ‘realities’. But we theorise that new public management (NPM) plays an important role in a reductive kind of knowledge production for policy-makers which fuels and legitimises on-going policy intervention, and we see this as an important shaping force in the emerging professional identity of these new teachers.

Work, Identity and the Quasi-market: The FE Experience.

The Further and Higher Education Act (1992) brought about the incorporation of further education (FE) colleges in England and Wales. This legislation effectively removed the influence and control that Local Education Authorities (LEAs) had over the educational provision of colleges and created a quasi‐market in which local colleges were forced to compete for students and funds. My research involved an investigation into how quasi‐marketisation impacted upon the work and lives of teachers, middle and senior managers in three colleges in the city of Coppleton in the West Midlands region of England. I was interested in exploring how quasi‐marketisation affected staff at different levels within the colleges and whether dominant cultures emerged. My findings were that the managerialist practices that became widespread through the sector as a consequence of quasi‐marketisation were deployed strategically within colleges; that marketisation served to place colleges’ self‐interest over the interests of students; and that the quasi‐market environment impacted on data in specific (negative) ways.

The state of professional practice and policy in the English further education system: a view from below

This paper addresses a recurring theme regarding the UK’s Vocational Education and Training policy in which further education (FE) and training are primarily driven by employer demand. It explores the tensions associated with this process on the everyday working practices of FE practitioners and institutions and its impact on FE’s contribution to the wider processes of social and economic inclusion. At a time when Ofsted and employer-led organisations have cast doubt on the contribution of FE, we explore pedagogies of practice that are often unacknowledged by the current audit demands of officialdom. We argue that such practice provides a more enlightened view of the sector and the challenges it faces in addressing wider issues of social justice, employability and civic regeneration. At the same time, the irony of introducing laissez-faire initiatives designed to remove statutory qualifications for FE teachers ignores the progress made over the past decade in raising the professional profile and status of teachers and trainers in the sector. In addressing such issues, the paper explores the limits and possibilities of constructing professional and vocational knowledge from networks and communities of practice, schools, universities, business, employers and local authorities, in which FE already operates.

Of ‘duckers and divers’, mice and men: the impact of market fundamentalism in FE colleges post-incorporation.

This paper provides a critique of the current policy orthodoxy of using markets to organise and structure education provision in England, focusing in particular on Further Education (FE) provision. Starting from the context of New Labour’s so‐called Third Way, it sets out research findings that indicate that marketisation not only produces cultures that relate first and foremost to institutional self‐interest but also may be detrimental to quality provision for students. Drawing on qualitative research, the paper explores the impact of quasi‐marketisation, focusing on how one college ‘successfully’ negotiated the funding changes and the competitive context of the FE quasi‐market. The paper concludes by looking at the findings through the theoretical lenses of some key concepts from Habermasian theory.

Culture clash: mentoring student Literacy educators in a marketised and instrumentalist further education policyscape

At the centre of the study on which this article is based, there is a sense of cultural collision. While from a global perspective, Literacy education has an exciting and radical pedigree, the teaching of Literacy in England has been harnessed to an explicitly instrumentalist policy agenda since the introduction of the Adult Literacy Core Curriculum in 2001. This paper sets out to explore the impact of this policyscape on a specific area: the mentoring of Literacy student teachers. The study draws on a qualitative data set from a series of interviews with Literacy mentors from different FE colleges in the English West Midlands. The study found that Literacy mentors are able to promote the holistic approaches that are fundamental to established Literacy pedagogy but that institutional and cultural factors can militate against this in decisive ways. The paper concludes that whilst Literacy mentors have a significant role to play in the education of new Literacy teachers, the motivations and values associated with Literacy mentoring seem to jar in many cases with the marketised cultures in which they operate.

Skills for Life: insights from the new ‘professionals’

This article originates in a networking project that facilitated the coming together of a group of Skills for Life (SfL) teachers from different Further Education (FE) contexts across the West Midlands region of England. The original impetus was to explore and develop a model of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) that was shaped by the needs of SfL teachers. The project created a forum in which the participants were empowered to share their experiences outside their college settings. Through this discursive process a textured picture emerged of similar experiences and common concerns. The congruence of these experiences suggested that, in certain respects, there was a degree of commonality across the various FE institutions the participants were working in, at least in the way that SfL provision was taking place. Furthermore, the data yielded specific insights into the meaning of professionalism for SfL practitioners. Foremost amongst these findings was the sense that the participants felt marginalised and perceived their professional identity as situated on the bottom rung in a hierarchy of subject specialisms. Another important outcome that related to CPD was that through participation in the network project, these teachers reported feeling that despite the managerialised nature of their workplaces, their agency was re‐energised and their sense of themselves as teachers affirmed.

Collaborative writing and dis‐continuing professional development: challenging the rituals and rules of the education game?

This article discusses a critical challenge to current paradigms of continuing professional development within higher education institutions. A small group of higher‐education‐based teacher educators for the English post‐compulsory sector describes and exposes the values and processes operating within a particular kind of professional development ‘space’ of their own creation. Within this space for thinking, talking, reading and writing as academics, a different way of characterising professional development emerged that challenged existing power relations in higher education, and that can best be named ‘critical educative practice’. The main constituents of this way of working are identified and the process is illustrated with reference to the experience of collaborative writing within the group. The focus on criticality leads to an emerging concept of ‘critical collaborative writing’, and the implications of this particular example for higher education colleagues and institutions are explored.

The possibilities of re-engagement: cultures of literacy education and so-called NEETs

This article reports on a study into literacy education for young people identified as not in education, employment or training (so-called NEETs) and who were attending courses with further education (FE) providers. The study aimed to gain insights into how literacy is being taught to NEET students, to identify factors that influenced delivery and to gather teachers’ and student teachers’ views on what constituted effective practice in this area. This small-scale study researched the ways in which literacy classes were delivered in 14–19 provision across a range of further education settings. It focused specifically on Foundation Learning and functional skills classes. The participants worked in 11 different FE settings in the West Midlands region of England. These settings included colleges, training providers, a sixth form college and a dedicated ‘unit’ within a college with a distinct curriculum offer. The data was gathered from student teachers’ reflective journal entries and follow-up interviews. Interviews were also conducted with experienced literacy teachers in different providers. The data showed that much of the provision for NEET students taught literacy through a technical approach that included a focus on grammar, word classes and apostrophe use. Teachers in these same providers also reported low levels of engagement amongst their students. More positively, the research also discovered literacy provision that engaged with students through innovative holistic curricula. However, existing funding and assessment regimes as well as traditional notions of literacy were found to present barriers to this kind of provision. The study concluded that existing marketised funding arrangements and prescriptive curricula militate against the (re)engagement of students that fall into NEET categories.

College Re-Culturing, Marketisation and Knowledge: The Meaning of Incorporation.

The further education (FE) sector in England has experienced two decades of marketisation. This article takes as its focus the first five years of incorporation (1993–1998) for one case study college in a city (‘Coppleton’) in the West Midlands of England, five years that were dominated by a contract dispute. Data from interviews with trade unionists active in Coppleton College (anonymised name) and from a trade union archive are set against selected official College documents in a genealogical enquiry into the colleges corporate identity as an educational institution and employer during this time. This article looks behind the ‘legibility’ of the incorporated college and its knowledge production practices and focuses on excluded narratives, specifically the experiences of union activists caught up in a new era of industrial relations. In analysing the data, theories of New Public Management and marketisation reveal that Coppleton College has features that make it culturally distinct from its unincorporated forebear. The corporation as an institutional model – it is argued – brought with it features including institutional self-interest, an authoritarian culture, the erosion of trust, and the stifling of dissent as part of an incorporated view of knowledge production that worked against staff and the public interest.