At the heart of all change processes are people: people learning to lead and respond to the need to develop new ways of working. What then are the cornerstones of this practice? This concluding chapter reviews the chapters in this book to draw some key lessons about delivering and leading educational change. The chapter is divided in three parts. The first part reviews the established and innovative models of change to be found in the book. The second part analyses the key features of successful leadership to conclude with a final third part on the meaning of educational. In sharing their experiences of those leading change from a range of roles and spaces the authors and international respondents provide us with insights in the challenges, solutions and pitfalls in the current higher education context. Common to each chapter is the notion of critical reflective collective leadership practice: the art of creating safe and inclusive environments able to reflect both in and on action, to bring to bear the fruits of collective organisational learning through and from experience, to examine assumptions to become more self-aware leaders and change managers.

AbstractProviding doctoral students with the employability skills they needs is a developing area rich with a variety of training opportunities. This contribution argues that including students as co‐researchers through a process of “learning by doing” enables them to learn and implement new skills in a safe but risk‐taking environment.

Following the initial research conducted as part of IO1 and carried out by CIES-UIL (Mateus et al, 2018) on factors leading to ESL, the team at the University of Northampton developed guidelines for the implementation of IO2 (Devecchi, et al, 2018). This document is the final report of the IO2’s activities and includes the following: • The IO2 framework; • Report on training, its development and implementation; • Report on the pilot activities carried out by each partner; • Evaluation of training; • Evaluation of pilot activities; • Conclusion and recommendations. Part 1 of this report focuses on the work carried out in preparation for the implementation of the training and pilot initiatives. It outlines the IO2 framework and the support measure (management and leadership) put in place to ensure the effective and successful fulfilment of the IO2’s aims and objectives.

Where a high proportion of teachers who practice in primary and secondary schools are trained in a pre-service university setting, further education (FE) colleges train the majority of their teaching staff on an in-service, part-time basis. This paper discusses the experiences of eleven new teachers, based in two FE colleges, during their first year of an initial teacher training (ITT) course and examines the support provided by subject-specific mentors, both in terms of their expectations and actual experiences of being mentored. Q methodology was used as the main data collection tool, with the addition of post Q sort interviews. Forty eight statements, developed using focus groups with trainees and an extensive literature review, were sorted by the eleven trainee teachers. Findings indicated that all the participating trainees painted a positive picture about what a mentor could and should offer an in-service trainee in FE. However, in reality, differences in experiences were reported. In addition, there was evidence of the trainees finding support outside of the mentor-trainee dyad, in the form of communities of practice.

Abstract This paper reports on a small-scale practitioner enquiry undertaken with 17 work-based learners studying on a two-year Early Years Foundation Degree programme in a higher education institution in England. The first aim of the enquiry was to identify the perspectives of a cohort of work-based Early Years Foundation Degree students on teaching strategies they experienced at a higher education institution in the English midlands. The second aim was to identify how the findings could be applied to curricular and andragogic enhancements for future students. Beliefs and attitudes questionnaires were administered to the students half way through their programme. Findings indicate that students valued strategies that included the direct input of the lecturers they regarded as ‘more knowledgeable others’ (Vygotsky, 1978), yet they rated peer support as less effective for their learning. Findings indicate that early years students’ applications of learned theory to work-based practice may need to go beyond a singular notion of ‘communities of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Although these students are positioned and position themselves as more knowledgeable others in their own workplace communities, they regard themselves as lacking knowledge in their higher education community. As members of these various communities, they straddle heutagogic and andragogic approaches in their respective communities of practice. In recognition of this, the paper argues that not only should higher education lecturers working with work-based students adopt andragogic strategies but they should also promote heutagogic approaches that increase student autonomy. They should also communicate explicitly to their students the value of such strategies for learning in the field, both in theory and practice.

Over the past 20 years, the student voice pedagogical movement has been gaining momentum worldwide (Czerniawski & Kidd, 2011). Inspired by the need to enhance student engagement and participation in education (Cook-Sather, 2002), the movement seeks to bolster the position and role of students inside school and other academic contexts. In this light, students’ views on teaching and learning represent valuable input, informing the actions of teachers and policymakers alike (Fielding, 2001). The movement’s initial efforts were mostly focused on capturing the perspectives of school children and young students and on fostering their co-participation in teaching and learning practices (Flutter & Rudduck, 2004). More recently, major changes in higher education have resulted in the legitimisation of student voice at university level too (Cook-Sather, Bovil, & Felten, 2014). The student voice is now seen as a central component in the transformation of higher education and its alignment with students’ experience and expectations. It also contributes towards students’ experience and expectations as learners, and career aspirations as future contributors to the economy and society.

Internationally there are increasing numbers of young people on the ASD spectrum attending higher education. Early transition planning is essential and students with ASD often require support to articulate their post-school educational goals and actively participate in transition planning meetings. Services within higher education are primarily designed to provide academic supports however, non-academic supports may be an even more crucial factor in enabling successful transitions for young people on the ASD spectrum who often experience heightened anxiety within an unfamiliar environment. Within this paper, the results of a small-scale exploratory study of the transition experiences of six young people on the ASD spectrum to post-secondary education will be shared. There was limited evidence that transition planning had been initiated as a formal process for the six students. Accessing support in higher education proved to be a complex process for some students who required sustained input from parents to ensure that they would utilise the supports available. Encouraging the development of self-determination skills, a key predictor of success in higher education, needs to begin in secondary school. It is anticipated insights from this study can contribute to the development of an embedded infrastructure to support effective transitions for students with ASD to post-secondary education.

Street Play projects have become increasingly popular in Western contexts where children’s outdoor free play has been in decline. Street Play projects are generally organised by adults: children play on urban streets closed to traffic. This paper reports results from an evaluation focused on the Hantown Street Play Project (pseudonym) that took place in a large English town. Hantown Leisure Trust (pseudonym) set up the project, run by playworkers, and commissioned the evaluation ‘ … to identify the impact of the Street Play project on participating children’s perceptions of play in their community and residents’ perceptions of community spirit’. Children aged 3–11 years, parents and local residents participated in questionnaire surveys (n = 216) and semi-structured interviews (n = 25), eliciting 10 themes indicating that participants generally regarded the project positively. However, this paper argues that Street Play is a different proposition from children’s own play on the streets, according to widely recognised definitions of play.

This paper reflects on the future of educational research by examining the emerging role of project managers. Increasingly their role is becoming pivotal in supporting those aspects of research, which are not strictly academic in nature. As funding environments become more complex, success in research projects requires expertise in accountancy, public relations, and the management of extended global networks. It is therefore telling of this development, that emphasis on including this group of professionals is found in the new Erasmus+ funding bids (2013). Yet, their role and impact on the success of any research project is still under researched and somehow misunderstood. In the UK the commonly used term research administrator brings to mind an individual who sits at a desk, files paper and send emails. Far from it, Kirkland (2009) and Langley (2012) have argued that increasingly this has become more of specialist role for staff working in Higher Education. A Research ‘Project’ Manager is caught between neither being traditional administrative staff nor fully fledged academics, they occupy what Witchurch (2008) calls a ‘third space’. Greg Cimmarrusti, was quoted as saying “Being a Project Manager is like being an artist, you have the different colored process streams combining into a work of art”. The changing roles of project managers are part of wider changes in higher education in which traditional binary boundaries between academic and administration and management responsibilities have been blurred. Simultaneously, academic pursuits, whether related to teaching and learning or research, are progressively more aligned to business models against an entrenched dislike and misunderstanding of what a business ethics can bring to the success of academic enterprises. In such a landscape, both academics and professional support roles undergo continuous revision, which however has tended ‘to occur by default, and have remained relatively unremarked and under-theorised, either in the literature or by professional staff themselves’ (Witchurch, 2008: 4).

This chapter considers the capability approach as developed by Amartya Sen and its application in respect of children with special educational needs. In particular it focuses upon the notion of pupil voice and its use as a means for achieving social justice and inclusion of potentially marginalised learners.

We are three educational researchers working together in the School of Education at the University of Northampton. A University since 2005, Northampton comprises six Schools and 14,000 students and has embarked on a programme of major changes, asserting itself a leader in social enterprise and innovation and planning a new campus. Our School of Education has a good reputation for teaching but despite its current tally of 40 PhD students it is less renowned for research. In 2013, we three were seconded for a minimum of two years as the first substantive researchers at senior lecturer level within our School’s Centre for Education and Research, with Dr Cristina Devecchi since appointed an Associate Professor. In a volatile national context of rife marketization and increasingly scarce research funding in education, our core role is to build educational research capacity within our University. In this paper we relate our professional stories, reflecting on where we have come from, what we are doing as educational researchers in a highly dynamic space and where this might lead …

"Human Development and Capabilities: Re-imagining the University of the Twenty-first Century." Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 15(2-3), pp. 288–289

A PP presentation given at the VI Brazilian Congress on Special Education at UfSCAR, 1-4 November 2014