Convenors

Professor Ann-Marie Bathmaker, University of Birmingham
Email: a.m.bathmaker@bham.ac.uk

Professor Kevin Orr, University of Huddersfield
Email: k.orr@hud.ac.uk

This network focuses on issues broadly concerned with technical, professional and vocational forms of higher education. Rapid change to the provision of higher level education across the globe includes reform and development to vocationally-focused higher education. The reforms occur both within the university sector and beyond, involving, for example, technical HE institutions and polytechnics, college-based HE, and community colleges. In addition, there is a growing role for private and ‘alternative’ providers. Dual degrees, higher level apprenticeships and sub-Bachelor qualifications are just some of the pathways offered as part of technical, professional and vocational HE. Alongside issues of quality, questions of equity and inequality, access and social justice form significant concerns in these evolving forms of provision.

The network takes a broad approach to bringing together work which highlights and critically interrogates HE in this area, including research that addresses policy, curriculum and practice occurring both inside and outside the walls of the ‘university’, in the UK and international contexts.

This Network was formerly named the Post-Compulsory and Higher Education Network.

Convenors

2012 – Present. Professor Ann-Marie Bathmaker, University of Birmingham, UK

2016 – Present. Professor Kevin Orr, University of Huddersfield, UK

Previous convenors

Professor Jill Jameson, University of Greenwich

Professor Yvonne Hillier, University of Brighton