Education has often been seen to impact on the opportunities of individuals to gain and maintain a quality of life. Governments have invested in education because it is seen to improve economic growth and promote cultural identity, both which impact on quality of life for individuals and wider society. More recently, with the shift from the welfare to post welfare states, there has been a trend to deinstitutionalise and re-institutionalise education as the state withdraws from full provision of public education, to that of subsidising education for the needy and regulating all education sectors with the move to self managing schools, life long learning centres, and use of new learning technologies which can network educational providers to homes and the workplace. This is signficantly changing the home/school/ work relationships, as well as blurring what is public and private. See the rise of learning networks, inetragency and full service schools to 'fill the gap' of loss of social welfare infrastructure.

These shifts are gender, race and class inflected as well as having implications for the capacity of education instiutions and systems to provide opportunities of quality of life of students and teachers. This raises important quality of life issues such as teacher and student welfare, resiliency, and psycho-social dimensions of indentity formation. It also leads to broader questions as to the capacity of education and training to develop individual and collective citizenship capacities for 'the good life'.
Email Professor Jill Blackmore