Welcome to this Special Issue of Pastoral Care in Education, 2017. Writing as academics in the contemporary university in the world of Higher Education (HE), we are familiar with the profound and incessant change driven by neo-liberal values and an endemic culture of improving performativity, individual success and feminine marginalisation. This issue addresses a complex, political and, in current times, much debated field within the HE sector: the subject of 'care' . The work draws attention to matters of 'care' , 'compassion' and questions of place, roles and responsibilities in relation to the affective domain of students and faculty learning and working, which seems to have less consideration in this increasingly impersonal academic world. These are, arguably, core elements to consider for successful progression in education, that is, learner and faculty health when working towards individual and community transformation. Common threads in these articles suggest that this is due to the personal becoming de-politicised, or silenced, in reaction to a progressively technicist managerial HE world. We acknowledge the impact of such a phenomenon evident in higher numbers of students and academics seeking support for their 'emotional self' .The papers included highlight the need for cultural engagement and philosophical reflection as to the purpose and impact of the academy on all stakeholders -learner, academic, community and society. They evaluate and critically engage with questions and models of 'pastoral care' for HE in a 'changing era' . The material presented -both empirical and theoretical -engage with how the Academy can best respond to and plan for an ever-evolving campus and linked to this, issues regarding student drop out, academic progression and the matter of ethics.Six papers contribute to this exploration and critique of the politics of care, compassion and concern in the contemporary academy. We hope you enjoy reading them and find content in this special issue to support your practice, research and philosophical considerations on purpose, role and impact of the contemporary Academy.

Research and theory suggest that desistance narratives and pro-social identities are key to the process of desistance from crime. However, little research has examined how desistance narratives and related identities are produced in contexts other than research interviews or how core correctional skills intersect with the development of these narratives or identities. This study applies discourse analysis and conversation analysis to transcripts of 12 video-recordings of groupwork sessions for addressing sexual offending, examining how desistance narratives and identities are produced, and how practitioner skills and conversational styles intersect with their production. The analysis illustrates how criminal justice practitioners help to co-author desistance narratives through subtle and explicit aspects of interaction, although certain orientations to risk may limit this potential.

There is a substantial body of quantitative evidence about the benefits of higher education. However there is little qualitative evidence about the extent to which these benefits accrue to graduates from non-traditional backgrounds. This paper contributes to this gap in knowledge by exploring the experiences of a group of 15 graduates ten years after they had started at university. The cohort was unusual because they had all completed a collegelevel qualification before going on to study at an elite university. We draw attention to the impact of higher education on their positions in the labour market, as well as to their development of learning identities that supported them to make changes in their personal and professional lives. Although higher education brought real benefits to the cohort, including better employment prospects and the development of confidence in themselves, we show that they were clustered in various caring and public sector professions at the lower end of the graduate labour market.

We would like to thank all those who supported and participated in the research. Thank you also to members of the Discourse Analysis and Narrative Approaches to Social Work and Counselling research group, and the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the article.

Community justice professionals operate within deeply gendered territory, yet there has been little attention to how gender is understood and embodied by the workforce. Building on findings from a mixed method study, this article explores professional perceptions of how gender plays out in criminal justice social work (CJSW) in Scotland. Our findings demonstrate that gender is an important but neglected dimension of CJSW. We conclude that advancing gender in this field requires a more inclusive theorising of gender in professional education and research, a more practical commitment to gender equality in policy and practice, and more routine opportunities for dialogue on issues of gender and justice within and across these domains.