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Dear all, this has been a very interesting discussion. I also hadn't realised this particular sort of reorganisation was so common. Jan Martin wrote: >As regards CE reorganisation, we in Aberystwyth are also being re-organised. >The Centre for Continuing Education has just been merged with the Education >Department, to form the 'School of Education and Lifelong Learning'. As far >as I can see, the only thing that the two departments had in common was the >word 'education' in their titles. I understand, however, that this sort of >merger has happened elsewhere. Does anyone have any experience of this? > In 1999 Glasgow University and St Andrews College of teacher education merged, and a new Faculty of Education was created. We are one of the four academic departments of the new Faculty, the only pre-existing university department to come through merger unchanged. Our experience has been like yours in some respects: we're about widening access to university expertise, while our colleagues are focussed on the preparation of teachers and the school curriculum. We can have nice conversations, but the scope for really working together is limited. There are certainly joint developments in postgrad and undergrad teaching in Education, however. We're also looking into having some of our fully accredited courses approved as (subject-specific) CPD for teachers. A science teacher might find it useful to do one of our Astronomy courses, for instance. We believe this is possible without us having to change these courses in any way, so it won't become a distraction from our core business. That might be a result of differences north of the border, I don't know - or we may still find it's not true in practice. Of course there are other issues that arise in such a merger, differences in culture and so on. These things get easier with time! And they're probably less of an issue in internal reorganisations. I'd be happy to compare experiences if that's useful to anybody, maybe best off-list. Alec. -- Dr A L MacKinnon DACE, University of Glasgow St Andrews Building, 11 Eldon Street GLASGOW G3 6NH (44) (0)141 330 1857 http://www.gla.ac.uk/adulteducation/Personnel/alec.hmtl