Abstract
Social science departments are regularly criticised for a perceived failure to provide their graduates with a range of transferable or employability skills. This is particularly acute in many politics departments that have the difficulty of not being seen as a vocational subject. This article provides a national audit of levels of transferable skills teaching in UK Politics departments, carried out in academic year 2013–2014. It will argue that there is much good work in these areas being carried out in the UK political studies community, providing students with a range of transferable skills they will find of great use as they move towards employment. It will however observe that the discipline is poor in highlighting this in the online descriptions of course content they provide to students (and their parents).
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Notes
£9,000 p.a. undergraduate fees were introduced in England in 2011. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have different systems with either no or lower tuition fees. The implementation of (lower) fees predates the coalition government and were introduced by Labour.
It also includes inter-cultural skills and awareness.
Chattopadhyay’s comments were made in regard to the Indian system, but similar views are held in the United Kingdom. See, for instance, Power (2015).
For example at Nottingham University.
Newcastle University.
We are grateful to PSA for providing the citations for these prizes, which include LSE GV314 and Nottingham University’s Parliamentary Studies and research methods modules.
χ 2 values calculated by individual cross-tabulations of each skills type with the independent variables, Russell Group/non-Russell Group. English HEI/non-English HEI and first year/other years. We would argue that even if the other results may be non-statistically significant, they are nonetheless substantively significant for the discipline.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are extremely grateful to the PSA Executive’s Education, Teaching and Skills Sub-Committee for enthusiasm for this project and funding the research assistance and empirical data collection upon which this paper is based. The views are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of PSA. They are also grateful for the comments received by participants at a panel on this topic at PSA Annual Conference in April 2015, to Jocelyn Mawdsley for her comments, and to the reviewers for their helpful insights. The usual disclaimer applies.
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clark, a., martin, t. an audit of transferable skills teaching in uk politics departments. Eur Polit Sci 15, 389–403 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2015.94
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2015.94