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.

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.

Journal articles on placements and experiential learning

IPED – the International Political Education Database – is a new online bibliographic resource that lists peer-review journal articles relating to teaching, learning and assessment in politics, international relations, public administration and related fields. It includes a sub-section relating to ‘Service learning, Placement Learning and Internships’ and another to ‘experiential learning’, both of which should be of interest to readers of this blog.

PSA Conference - London 2011

The Political Studies Association Annual Conference takes place in London next week. I will be chairing a panel on ‘Politics as a Professional Education’ which will include papers from Katherine Brown (Kings, London) on ‘A Learning Institution? The politics of Professional Military Education’ and Brid Quinn (Limerick) on ‘Reflection and research: reflection on research’. Other papers that are also of particular interest to those interested in work-based and experiential learning and the social sciences are Sarah Hale (Birkbeck, London) ‘Workplace Politics: Foundation Degrees in Local Government and the Public Sector’, David Bates (Canterbury Christchurch)‘Teaching Engagement’ and Annabel Kiernan (Manchester Met) ‘Connecting communities: Community Engagement and the Big Society at MMU’

New Journal

Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning is a new peer-reviewed journal of UVAC. In the first issue John Hayes MP, the Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, provides a welcoming comment and there are articles from authors based in Britain, Ireland and the United States that give the issue an international feel. The second issue is also available online and has another strong set of papers. I should declare an interest as I am a member of the editorial board, but can assure you that I would be promoting it even if I was not.

Citizenship and Politics

The latest issue of the Journal of Political Science Education (JPSE) is a special issue on Youth, citizenship and Political Science Education. Many of the articles raise issues that relate to experiential and work-based learning in the context of politics - but will also be of interest to others in the social sciences.

Higher Skills, Global Economy

As part of the Politics after Leitch project, we undertook some research into how the agenda for higher education related to broader changes in the global economy. Andrew Gunn (University of Leeds) and I developed this into an article entitled 'Higher skills and the knowledge economy: the challenge of offshoring', which I am pleased to say has just been published in the OECD's journal Higher Education Management and Policy. The paper considers the extent to which offshoring challenges some of the assumptions of policy makers and considers a number of strategies that might be pursued by higher education institutions.

Sociology and Employability

C-SAP have recently published a 60 page report looking at employability and sociology in higher education. "Getting into Work: The Benefits of a Sociology Degree" is written by Max Farrar and Anna Gruszczynska and explores a range of issues such as graduate attributes and the role of community based learning. The relatively high rates of employment for sociology graduates was noted in the 2009 UK Government's Framework for Higher Education 'Higher Ambitions ', so it is useful to see how academics of the subject see the issues.

The third most popular FD choice

HEFCE have just published the latest edition of Foundation degrees: Key Statistics. Much of the initial focus is on the overall number of students now enrolled on FDs - 99,475 - which is very close to the government's target for 2010-11.

Looking at the stats for subject areas Social Studies come in as the third most popular area for part-time students with 12% of 2008-09 entrants (behind Education and Business and Administrative Studies) and third for full-time students at 10% of entrants (behind Creative Arts and Design). No breakdown is given for the different areas of study within the Social Studies which includes economics, politics, sociology and social work.

Research and Foundation Degrees

A review of research literature relating to Foundation degrees has recently been published on the fdf website. I've not had a chance to read it all yet - but from what I have seen, it provides an excellent survey of publications up to the start of this year.

Who’s the customer? Who’s the employer?

Within higher education these days, we often come across the idea that students should be seen as customers. This can sometimes become a rather polemic debate, with the best and worst implications of the term becoming centre stage. However, whether we recoil from the idea of our students seeing our modules as just another item on the supermarket shelf or embrace the notion of students taking a more active role in choosing what and how they want to study, in both cases it is the student who remains at the centre of attention. Contrast this with the idea expressed in the CBI report Stepping Higher (supported by UUK and HEFCE) that we should “re-think that traditional university-student relationship to give employers a central role” (p.11). The dangers of an approach that replaces a student focus with an employer focus is highlighted in a recent paper published in Education and Training by Julie Drake, Joanne Blake and Wayne Swallow. Drawing on a case study of a Foundation Degree produced in partnership by the University of Huddersfield and First Direct, they argue convincingly that the higher skills agenda “has to include engagement of employees rather than just engaging employers” (p.40).

Of course, in some cases, it can be difficult to identify who the employer is at all. In a paper that Sarah Hale and I presented to the Higher Education Academy conference in 2008 we considered the result of work that Sarah had undertaken exploring the experiences of local councillors studying higher education courses. The elected councillors are not ‘employees’ in any normal sense and might well be considered the employers themselves, as they have overall charge of the council. Yet, they are often cast in the role of employees and the object of training and development programmes. If all this shows us anything, it is that the identities of all those involved in the higher skills agenda are perhaps more complicated and fluid than simple definitions may suggest. All the more work for us social scientists to try and make some sense out of then – as both researchers and teachers.