Critical Apprenticeships: The Wrights and the Wrongs of Passage

This critical article was written in 2016 to review five years of policy documents on apprenticeships in Britain and the monumental failures in this area. We live in a time when the meaning of language in policy-land has become so eroded that a collective sense of confusion raises its head when words like ‘apprenticeship’ are thrown about. It seems that there is a common puzzlement now as to what it means in practice…. Read more…

The Marketisation of Higher Education

Since the late 1970s the culture of academic life has been transformed by the institutionalisation of the policies of marketisation. Outwardly, universities increasingly model themselves on private and especially public sector corporations. Academic exercises and practices have been gradually displaced by management techniques as departments operate more as cost centres often run by administers recruited from the private and public sector. Read more…