3.1 School of Educational Studies

The School of Educational Studies is now one of six schools aligned under a newly constructed Faculty of Humanities. This new faculty emerges out of the wider university's restructuring efforts (1999) which argued that it was more financially viable to have four rather than the former seven faculties within the institution. This has meant that the former Faculty of Education has lost the political bargaining power it could exercise through direct representation on the university higher structures e.g. the school is represented indirectly by the Dean of Humanities on the SENEX structures. This is a similar trajectory facing most university's former Faculties of Education which have become characterized by an increasing invisibility in the senior decision making processes affecting their future.

Accompanying the relegation to a "School status" within the institution, the School of Educational Studies realigned its own internal management structures. Whereas the power base of the former Faculty of Education lay in the hands of four Heads of Department and the Dean, the new structure institutionalized a management structure organized around two broad sectors: "initial teacher education" and "continuing teacher education". In 2001 the latter sector was divided to distinguish between "postgraduate education" and "educational research". This new structure shifted the emphasis away from the promotion of sub-disciplines within education (e.g. Psychology, Curriculum Studies) towards a promotion of effect delivery of designed curriculum qualifications.