Introduction

This book offers deep insights into the agencies of teaching—pedagogies, professional identities, and knowledge—in the English further education (FE) sector. The sector’s porous, inclusive, diverse, and prominent features of vocational offers have led to it being overlooked and misunderstood by policymakers. To rectify this misconception and re-emphasise its importance in England’s educational ecology, FE is reframed as a rich, all-encompassing and connected sector. It proposes a new language of educational engagement by uniting vocational education and training under a new umbrella term: occupational education (OE). OE intersects work, teaching, and learning across pre-university, higher education, and professional education. A new system is provided that maps lifelong learning, irrespective of age, ethnicity, gender, disabilities, or station in life. The key audience is students, teachers, teacher educators, institutional managers, policymakers, and academics.