In the context of repeated calls by policymakers and industry for the education system to increase its supply of highly qualified STEM workers, it is important to understand what motivates, or discourages, young people from choosing science programmes, hobbies or careers. With that in mind, this paper explores pupil attitudes towards science at school and their perceptions of scientists at work. It presents the results of a questionnaire study with a diverse sample of over 4000 lower secondary school pupils. The main findings suggest that pupils enjoy science and generally think that they are good at it. While they also think that scientists have exciting jobs, they do not necessarily think that a job in science is for them. We argue that one reason for this is their partial and narrow views of a scientist at work, which tends to conform to long-standing and difficult-to-change stereotypes rather than a broader view of scientists undertaking morally meaningful work. We consider this in the context of efforts to encourage more pupils to study school science for longer and subsequently enter the highly skilled STEM labour market.

There have been debates about the quality and usefulness of education research for a long time, with opinion often dividing along methodological lines. Those on different sides of an apparent methodological schism often bemoan the lack of recognition and resources afforded to their chosen approach. Whatever one's position on the existence, or persistence, of education research's own version of the ‘paradigm wars’, it is nevertheless the case that research design and methods are central to its identity, its usefulness and the impact it makes upon society. This paper contributes to wider debates around the status of education research as a field, or discipline, by exploring the extent to which the research methods used by education researchers working in UK higher education, and beyond, have varied over the last 20 years. It reports the findings from a comparative analysis of two large‐scale surveys—the ESRC‐funded Research Capacity Building Network survey of 2002 and the BERA‐funded Higher Education Research Census 2022. Both surveys explored the methods used by education researchers, mainly based in higher education, and took place against a backdrop of concern, from within and outside the field, about the quality and reach of its research. The findings show that education researchers draw from a variety of different methods and approaches but that the range of tools that they use has narrowed a lot over the period considered. Furthermore, there appears to be an increase in methodological polarisation, particularly between a minority who only use numbers in their research and a majority who never do. This is despite the considerable resources devoted to building research capacity to undertake numeric and combined research.

Policy and research engagement is a timely topic for researchers, decision-makers, and higher education institutions that aim to promote engagement and impact. Examination of the complex research-policy relationship in the higher education sector has been largely overlooked. This paper addresses this issue by presenting findings from in-depth interviews with 11 UK higher education policymakers and experts on how higher education researchers can engage with the policy process in the UK context. It also highlights the views of interviewees about policy priorities for UK higher education that may shape higher education research agendas. With relevance across fields of expertise, the paper also discusses the role of independent research in shaping policy. The paper discusses barriers to engagement, research generation and use, and the role of independent research in the broader policy evidence landscape. To conclude, we suggest possible pathways for more productive engagement between researchers and policymakers.

The article attempts a survey of the ways book prices have been conceptualised and deployed as part of bibliography and book history, with a particular focus on Shakespeare’s First Folio. In part it is an attempt to understand the changing prices of books which become valuable through different possible financial heuristics, but its major interest is in the implicit work, both rhetorical and methodological, that is done by conceptions of price, and through analogies and comparisons with what hypothetical book buyers might also buy or earn. The period in which rare books were invented as a consumer category is the period of wealth created by the trade in enslaved people and in goods produced by enslaved people: this differently freighted comparison brings out the ethical and conceptual problems raised in discussions of historic book prices.

Narratives of widening participation, inclusion, and equal opportunities have been increasingly prevalent throughout UK Higher Education (HE) in recent years. Simultaneously, a drive for institutions to collect data around protected characteristics and equalities metrics has supported these principles. This paper reports extended analysis of equalities data collected as part of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) State of the Discipline survey conducted in 2022, which sought to understand the dynamics, approaches, and characteristics of the population of researchers in the field of education in the UK. The survey data are a rare opportunity to develop a holistic understanding of a range of interconnected inequalities with a representative sample of education researchers. Anyone identifying as an education researcher based in HE was eligible to complete the survey, resulting in a sample of 1,623 respondents. The survey used both closed and open questions to understand fundamental characteristics and provide a deeper exploration of thoughts and experiences within the educational research community. In this extended analysis, we find significant disparities in representation in education research, including an underrepresentation of minority ethnic staff across the research career pipeline and a disproportionate underrepresentation of women in the professoriate. We further highlight inequality of experience, extreme workloads, and stagnant career trajectories that many in the field of educational research are currently experiencing, thus bringing forth new empirical evidence which is both timely and pivotal.

Widening participation remains a key bipartisan aim for higher education policy and practice in the United Kingdom. Universities are held accountable for their widening participation outcomes. Despite these policies, higher education inequalities persist.

There is a longstanding imperative from both government and industry for a workforce with the skills needed to drive forward the scientific and technological advances that are considered so crucial to the economic prosperity of the nation. However, the skills of this workforce have purportedly been both in short supply and inadequate for many decades, leading to the well-established narrative of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) skill shortages. One solution to this challenge has been to encourage, through myriad policies and initiatives, more young people, particularly young women, to study more science for longer. This paper contributes to the literature on the supply of STEM workers by documenting the long-term trends in the participation and attainment of girls and women in STEM education: from school science through to graduate entry into the highly skilled STEM labour market. Using population datasets that extend across seven decades and include millions of students, it shows that gendered patterns of participation in science subjects have varied little in recent decades, suggesting that efforts to increase the number of women studying science in school have not resulted in a substantial increase in well-qualified female graduates entering highly skilled STEM jobs. Furthermore, studying STEM appears to be generally advantageous for men, in terms of field-related employment outcomes, but is not always associated with such higher status occupations among women.

At a time when the focus of school science policies in many nations is to encourage more pupils to study science for longer, a better understanding of who is and is not interested in STEM careers will play an important role in shaping the guidance that schools can provide their pupils and the interventions that seek to inspire more young people to remain in the science stream. This paper explores the career aspirations of more than 4000 pupils at the end of lower secondary school in the UK. It considers the relationship between career aspirations, pupil characteristics, and school-based factors linked to enjoyment of and motivation for learning about science. The findings show that most pupils enjoy and look forward to studying science and feel that they are successful at it whether they aspired to a career in STEM or not. The study also confirmed the multi-dimensional nature of STEM career aspirations in which underlying inequalities, particularly linked to gender and ethnicity, were very much apparent. The complexity of these relationships confirms what decades of initiatives have told us - that increasing the number of young people who study science and later enter the highly skilled STEM labour market is no easy task.

Whether enough highly qualified STEM workers are being educated and trained in the UK is an important question. The answer has implications not only for educators, employers and policymakers but also for individuals who are currently engaged in, or are considering entering, education or training in this area. Set against a policy backdrop that prioritises students studying more science for longer, this paper considers long-term patterns of participation in STEM education - from school science through to graduate entry into the highly skilled STEM labour market. Using a unique dataset that extends across seven decades and comprises many hundreds of thousands of students, the paper finds that patterns of participation in most STEM subjects have varied little over the period considered; suggesting that efforts to increase the numbers of students studying science in school has had limited impact on the throughput of students who study STEM, including the pure sciences, at university level and, subsequently, on the number of graduates who would be available to undertake highly skilled work in areas for which degree-level skills are a pre-requisite.

In this article we scrutinise the anti-theatrical bias implicit in attempts to distinguish between Shakespeare and his collaborators; we attempt a taxonomy of the many different forms that collaborative practice took in the early modern theatre; and we examine the extent to which scholarly attitudes to early modern dramatic collaboration, particularly the tendency to see it as a vertical hierarchy rather than horizontal partnership, are shaped by modern ambivalence to academic collaboration in the humanities.

Concerns over the supply of highly-skilled (HS) science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) workers are well established and have been a feature of policy discourse in the UK for more than 50 years. Since the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, these concerns have been exacerbated by uncertainty about the movement of labour between UK and Europe. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of STEM skills in a wide range of areas. However, despite continued government investment in initiatives to address these concerns, the evidence base for shortages is neither well-established nor compatible with economic theories of labour supply. In order to fill a gap in the current evidence, we report on a unique analysis following the career destinations of STEM graduates from the 1970 British Cohort Study. While only a minority of STEM graduates ever work in highly-skilled STEM jobs, we identified three particular characteristics of the STEM labour market that may present challenges for employers: STEM employment appears to be predicated on early entry to the sector; a large proportion of STEM graduates are likely to never work in the sector; and there may be more movement out of HS STEM positions by older workers than in other sectors.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewGhosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619; Bibliography in the Longue Durée. Zachary Lesser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. x+198.Emma SmithEmma SmithHertford College, Oxford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt’s not often an academic book review starts with a spoiler alert, but Zachary Lesser’s Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619; Bibliography in the Longue Durée unfolds so like a golden-age detective story that it feels unfair to fillet it to present readers of Modern Philology with its conclusions. New Bibliographers drew, sometimes consciously, on the forensic methods and narrative reconstructions popularized by contemporary crime writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Edmund Crispin. W. W. Greg’s foundational 1908 essay, “On Certain False Dates in Shakespearean Quartos,” is to the bibliographic field what Sherlock Holmes’s famous monograph on identifying cigar ash was to the world of Victorian crime fighting: an intervention that signaled by its dogged detail, a newly empirical, coolly professional approach. In turn, fiction writers of the period were fascinated by early modern texts and emerging scholarship around them. Ellery Queen’s 1933 story “Drury Lane’s Last Case,” which turns on a lost letter by Shakespeare, is symptomatic of the reciprocal relationship between textual scholarship and crime fiction between the wars.Lesser’s thorough reinvestigation of one of the New Bibliography’s causes célèbres, the mysterious “Pavier Quartos” published in 1619, is likewise a work of detection. The Pavier Quartos are not an absolutely cold case, but as Lesser points out, much recent revisionist scholarship has nevertheless drawn on the same limited evidence as Greg himself. Lesser revisits this group of texts, and Greg’s assumptions about their provenance, and brings to bear two new and revelatory techniques. First, he interrogates many more witnesses: three hundred copies of the plays have been consulted with forensic attention. Second, he has consolidated the technologies of the New Bibliographers with extensive use of multispectral imaging techniques and large-format magnification to see the documents that make up the case in an entirely new light. The results significantly redirect narratives of Shakespeare in print in the immediate period after his death, but they also reflect on the ideological and practical critical biases that make certain solutions acceptable or inevitable at certain times. Lesser’s work thus contributes to the larger project of revisiting New Bibliography and its assumptions: like “bad quartos,” “memorial reconstruction,” and the commitment to the lost manuscript as the source of authorial intention, the Pavier Quartos are now ripe for reassessment. This study is thus both bibliographical theory and practice.Part of that reassessment includes nomenclature. Around halfway through the book, Lesser renames this sequence of play books “the Jaggard Quartos” (78), placing the burden of responsibility more squarely with the established stationer William Jaggard than with Thomas Pavier. Lesser suggests that making Pavier the fall guy for this series of obscurely illicit publications did important work for Greg’s wider critical agenda. Keeping Jaggard on the margins of these dodgy 1619 imprints allowed him to emerge as the savior of Shakespeare’s print reputation with the First Folio four years later, and helped maintain the boundary between good and bad texts. And if Pavier is decentered in this new account, so, to some extent, is Shakespeare himself. A compelling investigation into the place of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness in several extant or reconstructed anthologies of 1619 texts shows that the assumption that this venture was all about an authorial canon that needs to be modified.Lesser’s investigation into collections of Jaggard Quartos is fascinating. He recovers ghost contact prints that reveal now lost adjacencies, and he looks for the marks of stab stitching and analyzes survival rates to clarify whether the texts were sold singly or in anthologies. His eye catches on numerous examples of scuffing or patching around the date imprints, and his expansive survey suggests that many copies have been doctored, probably in the printing house, and probably to confuse this murky print episode still further. This exciting, hands-on bibliography produces challenging new evidence about print, marketing, and Shakespeare’s reputation.The golden-age detective novel typically concluded with a neat exposition that arranged the facts into a compelling narrative. Lesser’s final chapter does not quite gather us together in the library for this Hercule Poirot moment of revelation; the model of detection here is existential rather than positivist, and what is left are a series of questions. This may well be Lesser’s most important methodological contribution to the discipline of book history in which he is such a leading light. Professing a radical open-endedness resists, rather than merely replaces or updates, the ossified fictions we tell ourselves about Shakespeare’s texts. For, as he is the first to admit, just like Greg’s foundational essay on the false dates of the 1619 texts more than a century ago, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes is also of its time. Lesser points out that the unit of critical analysis for the New Bibliographers was the edition, so that one copy could stand in for the rest of the run. Greg’s own work drew on a handful of accessible exemplars. For modern historians of the book, that unit of analysis is the specific copy.The questions Lesser asks of his texts will seldom have been anticipated by even the best special collections digital imaging: they require physical encounters with books across the United States and Europe. This is a bibliography enabled by cheap, routine air travel and the modern scholarly apparatus of library fellowships and research budgets. Perhaps the period just before 2020 will turn out to have been the last moment for this kind of research. Post-COVID bibliography during the advanced period of the Anthropocene may need again to modify its procedures, consider its footprint, and consider the barriers to participation. But it is hard to imagine a better scholarly justification than Zachary Lesser’s terrific book for this deceptively simple method: looking, and looking again. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 119, Number 3February 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717658 Views: 883 HistoryPublished online November 23, 2021 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.