St Mary’s Host Seminar on Higher Education

St Mary’s University College, Twickenham will be hosting a seminar looking into the expansion of Further Education institutions being able to teach at Higher Education (HE) level on Wednesday 27th November. Entitled ‘Can small institutions offer an adequate HE experience? Why not ask the practitioners’, Senior Lecturer Dr Tony Davies will be heading the event on the behalf of St Mary’s School of Management and Social Sciences. The seminar will examine a group of Further Education teaching practitioners and whether their institutions allowed them to provide an adequate Higher Education learning experience for their students. The talk is based on the Browne Report that sparked a proposal of change in reforms of market choice within Higher Education, thus creating a system where potential students were provided with more choice of their place of study. Topics to be discussed include the diversity of the providers within the HE landscape, alluding to the ‘dilution’ of the student experience; the impact of the policy steering process at institutional levels; whether the concept of a HE ethos is capable of definition and what are the ‘distorting factors’ when it comes to the smaller providers. The seminar will be taking place at Room F6 from 3pm-4pm and is open to staff, students and the public. For more information, please contact Dr Vicky Armstrong on victoria.armstrong@stmarys.ac.uk.