New Reports on HE in FE

Many foundation degrees are delivered at Further Education colleges and two recent reports provide new data and insights on teaching HE in FE. Inspiring Individuals: teaching higher education in a further education college by Madeleine King and John Widdowson has been published by the Higher Education Academy while Understanding Higher Education in Further Education Colleges by Gareth Parry, Claire Callender, Peter Scott and Paul Temple is a BIS research paper. Both make recommendations for developing practice that will be of interest.

Students or Employees?

The question of whether those undertaking placement are employees or should be treated as employees was raised in a paper at the recent Political Studies Association Conference. The paper 'Masters on the Hill – The employment contract of internships' by Mary McLaughlin of Queen’s University Belfast, examines the Northern Ireland Assembly Commission bursary programme run by the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s and the Northern Ireland Assembly Commission. You might not each the same conclusion as the author, but it is a well argueld paper.

Placement Learning in Politics

The Higher Education Academy and Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) are running a one day workshop entitled New Developments in Placement Learning in Politics on 27 June 2012. The event will be held at SHU and aims to open up the discussion around the experiences of setting up politics placements and to share in areas of good practice. An anticipated output from the event is the development of an on-line support network, hosted by SHU, which offers a network of contacts and examples of good practice that can be used by colleagues across the country interested in learning more about the setting up and running of effective politics placement opportunities. Click here for further details.

Pedagogy for employability

The Higher Education Academy have just published a new report Pedagogy for employability written by Ann Pegg, Jeff Waldock, Sonia Hendy-Isaac and Ruth Lawton. It contains a lots of material and case studies that are relevant to the social sciences. Well worth reading.

Graduate employability data

The Office of National Statistic has published recent data on graduate employability. Social Scientists perform reasonably well in the earnings rankings, earning above the average for all graduates. Watch a short video of the finding.

The full report can be read here.

Wilson Review recommends more internships

That "every full‐time undergraduate student should have the opportunity to experience a structured, university‐approved undergraduate internship during their period of study" is one of the recommendations of the newly published Wilson Review on Business–University Collaboration. Examples of how such learning can be structured for politics students can be found on the placements page of IPED and in the book The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics edited by Steven Curtis and Alasdair Blair.