The Department of Health released the long-awaited strategy to tackle childhood obesity in August 
2016. This article extracts and summarises key elements from the strategy. The sections relating to 
physical activity have been reproduced in detail. To read and reference the full strategy, download 
it from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/childhood-obesity-a-plan-for-action

The Association for Physical Education's response to: Childhood obesity: A plan for action

Ethnography in Education

Internationalisation, competition and performance orientation are nowadays essential in the managing and financing of universities. This pattern has intensified with the austerity measures and fiscal consolidation that followed the financial crisis in 2008. This article examines the academic labour process and career making of academics from a gender perspective. Based on findings deriving from an Icelandic University, we argue that the austerity measures and increased focus on becoming one of the top universities in the world has changed the official responsibilities of academics. We show how ‘academic housework’ affects academic capital and how the amount of academic housework is unequally distributed between senior academics and newcomers. While the majority of academics conform to this contemporary academic system, marginalised groups put up some resistance but with limited success.

Academic career making and the double-edged role of academic housework

This article examines the rise in precarious academic employment in Ireland as an outcome of the higher education restructuring following OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), government initiatives and post-crisis austerity. Presenting the narratives of academic women at different career stages, we claim that a focus on care sheds new light on the debate on precarity. A more complete understanding of precarity should take account not only of the contractual security but also affective relational security in the lives of employees. The intersectionality of paid work and care work lives was a dominant theme in our interviews among academic women. In a globalized academic market, premised on the care-free masculinized ideals of competitive performance, 24/7 work and geographical mobility, women who opt out of these norms, suffer labour-led contractual precarity and are over-represented in part-time and fixed-term positions. Women who comply with these organizational commands need to peripheralize their relational lives and experience care-led affective precarity.

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Precarity, gender and care in the neoliberal academy

The continued gender imbalance in senior positions in higher education is a problem that persists despite decades of feminist research and publications in the area, as well as interventions in many countries to promote the advancement of women. In this article we view the issue of gender inequality through the lens of the prestige economy, which suggests that academics are motivated by prestige factors accrued through advancement in their careers. Prestige, authority and status, we suggest, may be more easily acquired by male academics. We draw on a case study of one institution in the Republic of Ireland, including data from a survey on academic careers (n = 269), to explore how the concept of prestige is gendered. We explore the cumulative effect of four themes: homosociability; non-transparency of criteria; academic workload balance; and self-promotion.

Indicators of esteem: gender and prestige in academic work

Management and gender in higher education

This paper presents an ethnographic account of the culture of school meal time at Peartree Academy, with a specific focus on notions of social learning. This qualitative study is focused on a colle...

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School meal time and social learning in England

Policy makers in the UK are trying to improve school meals, by focusing on eating well. This article explores the way policies are framed by academic performance and health as a reason for providin...

Healthy meals, better learners? Debating the focus of school food policy in England

This paper examines the discourse on school meals, as evidence suggests that political agendas feed into policy making. The paper fills a void by proposing new insights into how school meals could ...

Gurpinder Singh Lalli

Papers

Management and gender in higher education

School meal time and social learning in England

Healthy meals, better learners? Debating the focus of school food policy in England

A review of the English school meal: ‘progress or a recipe for disaster’?

Schools, Food and Social Learning