Within Britain there are demands for better, more inclusive understanding of Islam and the West. Internationally there are major changes afoot in the Arab world and it is likely that these changes will have a significant impact on British Muslims, who hold loyalties to the umma (the world wide Muslim community) as well as their allegiances to Britain. It is difficult to predict what form this impact will take, but all the more necessary to ensure that proper channels for inter-community and interfaith dialogue and debate are open. Over the last five years we have worked on three approaches to improving practical understanding in British higher education between Islamic and secular cultures; first, looking at partnerships between Muslim colleges and mainstream universities (Mukadam et al 2010); secondly, working with Muslim women to develop modules that can be taught within mainstream courses (Cheruvallil-Contractor and Scott-Baumann 2011) and thirdly, investigating the health of Arabic teaching in Britain (Scott-Baumann and Cheruvallil-Contractor 2012).

Having a lifelong interest in knowledge and learning, I view the claims and practices of education and higher education practices with active and interested skepticism, which comes out of a profound optimism – that what we have now is not the best we could have. Higher education should always be in the best interests of the individual being educated, tempered by the interests of society at large; above all, education should do no harm. It seems to me that this “bottom up” approach, whereby improving the thinking abilities of individuals improves the behavior of whole societies is the primary reason for the expensive activity of education. Economic research indicates correlations between education and state prosperity (Berger and Fisher 2013) though benefits of increased productivity may not necessarily be equally distributed. Furthermore, the causal mechanisms at play are not finely elucidated.

This work was undertaken in 2011-12 as the result of successful competitive bidding for research funds from the subject centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies (LLAS). Learning a modern foreign language in UK has declined, yet the learning of Arabic is rising. Furthermore HEFCE designates Arabic as a Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subject (SIVS). This is important as it implies greater resources and support for Arabic courses. Although Classical Arabic previously had a code, the SIVS status of Arabic has increased its visibility and has led to four new codes for Arabic Language Studies, Modern Standard Arabic and related subjects in HESA’s latest JACS 3 listing (September 2011). We hypothesised that there is more Arabic language interest and competence among Islamic Studies students than is currently apparent in the university sector and in the independent Muslim institution sector, and found persuasive evidence for our hypothesis: moreover, we found that if the Arabic experience is neither assessed nor accredited this may represent missed career opportunities for such students. We explored possible relationships between students’ prior Arabic competence and Arabic language courses at Islamic Studies and other departments within UK universities. This study recognises the significance of Arabic language studies that students undertake in Muslim institutions such as Darul Ulooms, Madaris (singular madrassa), Muslim schools and Muslim HE colleges. It suggests that collaborations between Muslim institutions and universities could lead to cross fertilisation of curricula and pedagogy and staff exchanges. Furthermore, recognising students’ prior learning of Arabic could be beneficial to students, who would have options to enhance their skills and career opportunities, and also to universities who would have access to an increased cohort of potential students.

These toolkits are a distillation of the learning, methods and resources developed by Aimhigher and the Lifelong Learning Network programmes to support the effective strategy, management and delivery of outreach work to encourage progression to higher education for under-represented groups. The toolkits recontextualise the learning from these programmes to fit the current higher education environment. The toolkits form a suite of four. They include: • Toolkit 1 Partnership • Toolkit 2 Targeting • Toolkit 3 Programmes • Toolkit 4 Evaluation • Resources and glossary.This is the second and updated edition, the first edition of the Toolkits was published in December 2012.

The toolkits are a distillation of the learning, methods and resources developed by Aimhigher and the Lifelong Learning Network programmes to support the effective strategy, management and delivery of outreach work to encourage progression to higher education for under-represented groups. The toolkits recontextualise the learning from these programmes to fit the current higher education environment. The toolkits form a suite of four.They include: • Toolkit 1 Partnership • Toolkit 2 Targeting • Toolkit 3 Programmes • Toolkit 4 Evaluation • Resources and glossary.This is the second and updated edition, the first edition of the Toolkits was published in December 2012.

Learning and teaching practice is higher education has embraced various forms of technology over recent years directed at enhancing the learning experience. Background music is well-known to benefit learning in elementary schools, but has been largely ignored in higher education. There is evidence that background music is particularly beneficial for students with previous musical training which is important for educators on audio engineering or similar courses linked closely with music. This work aims to determine if there are merits to background music in higher education and to point towards future work required to give definitive proof.

For UK higher education students, the ‘gap year’ or ‘year out’ is historically conceptualised as an amassing of wider life experience, often overseas, during a twelve-month period between the completion of A-level studies and the first year of a university degree. However, in a recent comparative study, which saw interviews conducted in both 2014 and 2015 with final year undergraduate students (n74) from different social backgrounds, across two English universities (one Russell Group university and one Post-1992 university), the term ‘gap year’ was being re-appropriated to capture something different. The term was being used to describe a period following graduation in which graduands planned to take low-paid work or ‘ordinary’ jobs, take stock of their financial situation, and attempt to save money and/or repay urgent debt. A high proportion of students in the 2015 stage of the study (16/37) spoke of taking a graduate gap year, compared with 9/37 in 2014. It may be that the increasing costs of debt-based forms of higher education payment coinciding with growing precarious employment has contributed to this situation. By borrowing the term gap year to describe a new and different phenomenon, some of the student interviewees may be legitimising the predicament in which they find themselves. This chapter explores the experiences of students who spoke of taking a graduate gap year. It examines the different roles of a graduate gap year and discusses wider implications for unequal graduate outcomes.

It became almost fashionable to refer to the term “flipped” in higher education. Expressions like flipped learning and flipped classroom are often used interchangeably as an indication of innovation, flexibility, creativity and pedagogical evolution. We performed an exploratory study on this topic following the Critical Interpretive Synthesis methodology for analysis of the literature. Our findings indicated that the term “Flipped Learning” is misleading and that, in fact, the synthetic concept behind it is “Flipped Teaching”. We derived a synthesising argument, in the format of two synthesis models, of the potential benefits promoted by flipped teaching and the potential issues which affect its success in practice. Those models allow STEM course tutors not only to make informed decisions about whether to flip teaching or not, but also to better prepare for flipping.

Most psychological studies rely on student samples. Students are usually considered as more homogenous than representative samples both within and across countries. However, little is known about the nature of the differences between student and representative samples. This is an important gap, also because knowledge about the degree of difference between student and representative samples may allow to infer from the former to the latter group. Across 59 countries and 12 personality (Big-5) and attitudinal variables we found that differences between students and general public were partly substantial, incoherent, and contradicted previous findings. Two often used cultural variables, embeddedness and intellectual autonomy, failed to explain the differences between both groups across countries. We further found that students vary as much as the general population both between and within countries. In summary, our results indicate that generalizing from students to the general public can be problematic when personal and attitudinal variables are used, as students vary mostly randomly from the general public. Findings are also discussed in terms of the replication crisis within psychology.