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This chapter provides an historical perspective on the evolution of educational marketing both as a professional field within the management and leadership of educational organisations and as a research field for academics and practitioners. It weaves together three important strands of analysis:•The evolution of the political, economic and social ideologies which have created the context in which marketisation of education has occurred.•The development of approaches to educational marketing in schools, colleges and universities.•The development of the research arena focused on marketisation and marketing in educational institutions.

The analysis considers the challenges that market-based concepts have brought to the existing hegemonies within both education and academic research, and also the politics and sociology of academic research. This provides a perspective on the challenges of developing a ‘new’ research field as a valid and significant area of study. The chapter concludes that educational marketing has evolved very significantly over the last 30 years, but has a done so in a context of substantial intellectual and sociological challenge. Resistance to its development has at times reflected resistance to the underlying concepts of marketisation rather than a concern that its approaches and findings are not important.

The aim of this research is to draw from a project sponsored by the Higher Education Academy and undertaken jointly by researchers at the University of Southampton and The Knowledge Partnership UK, which aimed to investigate the likely impact of the recently introduced new fees regime on students' attitudes to HE and to issues of debt.

Based on a sample of 64 students approaching the end of their A level study in four Further Education Colleges in the South and North of England, the research utilised focus group interviews to seek views about the new fees regime which were to be introduced in September 2006 throughout the country.

The research found that, while the issue of debt was a significant concern for many students, the desire to go to university either immediately or in the long term, remained a strong priority for the students. Different types of debt aversion, including risk debt aversion, sticker type debt aversion, value‐based debt aversion and life‐style debt aversion, were evident from the students' discourses.

Overall, sufficient evidence was not found to support the general belief that issues of student debt would significantly dissuade students from participating in HE. Rather, it was found that students were more likely to be rational in their decisions, as long as the increased fees would add value to their HE experience. Significantly, the research discovers a new form of debt aversion among the participants. HE institutions need to be aware of the variety of forms of debt aversion in order to plan for more strategic recruitment in a new fees and debt economy.

Tristan Bunnell began teaching International Baccalaureate economics at the International School of London in 1990. He is currently head of economics at the Copenhagen International School. He was awarded his MA in school marketing and development from the University of Surrey in 1993. He obtained his doctorate on ‘public relations activity as an indicator of the unique nature of international schools’ from the University of Southampton in 2003. He has published a number of articles about distributed leadership, marketing strategy and public relations activity in international schools. His current research interests include global curricula developments, especially the growth and development of the International Baccalaureate.

FORTY YEARS have elapsed since the idea was first mooted; now it looks like happening. The Booksellers Association is to establish a UK Book Trade Promotion House.

IN 1946 there was in the British Isles a clear image of librarianship in most librarians' minds. The image depended on a librarian's professional environment which was of the widest possible range, not less in variation than the organisations, institutes or types of community which required library services. Generalisations are like cocoanuts but they provide for the quickest precipitation of variant definitions, after the stones have been thrown at them. A generalisation might claim that, in 1946, public librarians had in mind an image of a librarian as organiser plus technical specialist or literary critic or book selector; that university and institute librarians projected themselves as scholars of any subject with a special environmental responsibility; that librarians in industry regarded themselves as something less than but as supplementing the capacity of a subject specialist (normally a scientist). Other minor separable categories existed with as many shades of meaning between the three generalised definitions, while librarians of national libraries were too few to be subject to easy generalisation.

People go into employment for a range of reasons. One of those is usually to find a sense of meaning, as humans are meaning‐seeking animals.In the public sector there is even more likelihood of some kind of ‘calling’. This may not be a religious call, or even an overtly spiritual one, but there will usually be some sense in which the role and the individual reach out to one another.In a time of recession and strain on public finances and services, leaders need to work in a way that appeals to the spirit, the vocation in each person and the team.

THE NEWS will doubtless appear in the May issue of the Record, and several days after that they will send me a press release just in case the Record's prose style has defeated me, announcing that the LA's president‐elect for 1978 is to be Godfrey Thompson, Guildhall Librarian (City of London) and currently Treasurer of the la, as well as a member of our editorial board since its inception. (I had therefore better make it clear that it wasn't Godfrey who told me, or indeed anyone else on the board.)

Interviews ‐ We shall publish from time to time reports of interviews with librarians and others. We shall endeavour to feature librarians in different kinds of work (or none); we shall neither seek out nor avoid the well known, but hope to meet those whose work and view of it will demonstrate that variety which is a characteristic of library and information work.