COVID-19 has caused the closure of university campuses around the world and migration of all learning, teaching, and assessment into online domains. The impacts of this on the academic community as frontline providers of higher education are profound. In this article, we report the findings from a survey ofn = 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy. Respondents report an abundance of what we call ‘afflictions’ exacted upon their role as educators and in far fewer yet no less visible ways ‘affordances’ derived from their rapid transition to online provision and early ‘entry-level’ use of digital pedagogies. Overall, they suggest that online migration is engendering significant dysfunctionality and disturbance to their pedagogical roles and their personal lives. They also signpost online migration as a major challenge for student recruitment, market sustainability, an academic labour-market, and local economies.

The neoliberal transformation of higher education in the UK and an intertwined focus on the productive efficiency and prestige value of universities has led to an epidemic of overwork and precarity among academics. Many are found to be struggling with lofty performance expectations and an insistence that all dimensions of their work consistently achieve positional gains despite ferocious competition and the omnipresent threat of failure. Working under the current audit culture present across education, academics are thus found to overwork or commit to accelerated labour as pre-emptive compensation for the habitual inclemency of peer-review and vagaries of student evaluation, in accommodating the copiousness of ‘invisible’ tasks, and in eluding the myriad crevasses of their precarious labour. The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools and more specifically, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, offers potential relief for academics and a means to offset intensive demands and discover more of a work-based equilibrium. Through a recent survey of n = 284 UK academics and their use of GAI, we discover, however, that the digitalisation of higher education through GAI tools no more alleviates than extends the dysfunctions of neoliberal logic and deepens academia’s malaise. Notwithstanding, we argue that the proliferating use of GAI tools by academics may be harnessed as a source of positive disruption to the industrialisation of their labour and catalyst of (re)engagement with scholarly craftsmanship.

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the university sector globally. This article reports on the Australian findings from a large-scale survey of academic staff and their experiences and predictions of the impact of the pandemic on their wellbeing. We report the perceptions of n = 370 Australian academics and accounts of their institutions’ responses to COVID-19, analysed using self-determination theory. Respondents report work-related stress, digital fatigue, and a negative impact on work-life balance; as well as significant concerns over potential longer-term changes to academia as a result of the pandemic. Respondents also articulate their frustration with Australia’s neoliberal policy architecture and the myopia of quasi-market reform, which has spawned an excessive reliance on international students as a pillar of income generation and therefore jeopardised institutional solvency – particularly during the pandemic. Conversely, respondents identify a number of ‘silver linings’ which speak to the resilience of academics.

Given that an estimated 5–10% of the worldwide population is said to have dyslexia, it is of great importance that teachers have an accurate understanding of what dyslexia is and how it effects their students. Using results from a large‐scale survey of teachers in England and in Wales (N ≈ 2,600), this paper demonstrates that teachers held a basic understanding of dyslexia, based on the behavioural issues that it is associated with. Teachers lacked the knowledge of the biological (i.e., neurological) and cognitive (i.e., processing) aspects of dyslexia. Moreover, a number of teachers mentioned visual factors in their description of dyslexia, despite there being inconclusive evidence to suggest a direct relationship between visual functioning and dyslexia. Further findings demonstrate the importance of good‐quality teacher training in increasing teachers' confidence working with those with dyslexia, while increasing their knowledge of the cognitive aspects of dyslexia. This paper argues that evidence‐based teacher training, which informs teachers of the up‐to‐date research on the biological, cognitive, and behavioural aspects of dyslexia, is essential to combat misconceptions and ensure that teachers have more nuanced and informed understandings of dyslexia.

Purpose: This paper provides a detailed analysis of inclusive education policies in the context of major system reform in Wales, United Kingdom. Wales is currently undergoing the most significant changes to its education system since political devolution from the U.K. Government in 1999. Key to these changes is the new Curriculum for Wales and the Additional Learning Needs (ALN) regulations; alongside these and wider system-level reforms, there is an ambition to create an inclusive education system in Wales. This paper explores how inclusion is articulated and communicated within the key policy and guidance documents, using two continuums—“practice” and “values”—to map and interpret these documents. Design/Approach/Methods: This paper uses critical policy analysis to make sense of these various inclusive education policy reforms in Wales. Findings: The analysis reveals that despite a foregrounded commitment to inclusion, there is disparity both within and between the policy and guidance documents. Originality/Value: The paper highlights the lack of coherence of key messages articulated through education policy documentation in Wales, providing insight into the emerging national education system reforms, as well as developing an approach for evaluating inclusive education systems in other jurisdictions.

The disruptive potential of generative AI (GenAI) tools to academic labour is potentially vast. Yet as we argue herein, such tools also represent a continuation of the inequities inherent to academia’s prestige economy and the intensified hierarchy and labour precarisation endemic to universities as prestige institutions. In a recent survey of n = 284 UK-based academics, reasons were put forward for avoiding GenAI tools. These responses surface concerns about automative technologies corrupting academic identity and inauthenticating scholarly practice; concerns that are salient to all who participate within and benefit from the work of scholarly communities. In discussion of these survey results, we explore ambivalence about whether GenAI tools expedite the acquisition or depletion of prestige demanded of academics, especially where GenAI tools are adopted to increase scholarly productivity. We also appraise whether, far from helping academics cope with a work climate of hyper-intensifcation, GenAI tools ultimately exacerbate their vulnerability, status-based peripheralisation, and self-estrangement.