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In light of the investigation by the General Medical Council on prescribing practices at a well‐respected treatment centre, we present the case for slow detoxification.

The purpose of this paper is to explore data from the University and College Union (UCU) Further Education in England: Transforming Lives and Communities research project and through this the paper develops a distinctive, theorised conceptualisation of transformative teaching and learning (TTL).

The research used an approach grounded in critical pedagogy utilising digital methods, including video interviews, to collect narratives from learners, teachers, family members and their communities from colleges across Britain.

Within a context in which there are structural pressures militating in favour of instrumentalising students in further education, TTL offers a way of theorising it as a transformative critical space that restores students’ hope and agency. The research provides evidence of how further education offers this “differential space” (Lefebvre, 1991) and subverts the prescriptive, linear spaces of compulsory education. While productivist approaches to vocational education and training support ideologies that legitimate prescribed knowledge, reproducing inequality and injustice through the practices employed (Ade-Ojo and Duckworth, 2017; Duckworth and Smith, 2017b), TTL shifts to a more holistic approach, achieving a different level of engagement with students.

The findings suggest that the TTL lens is a way of focusing on the dignity, needs and agency of further education students. The lens allows us also to identify how the existing structures associated with funding and marketisation can undermine the potential of TTL to activate students’ agency through education.

Extending on existing literature around transformative learning, and drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks, the paper formulates a new, contextually specific conceptualisation of TTL.

Recently, the relationship between gender representation and organizational performance has been the focus of various studies. However, some research gaps still exist. First, in the healthcare sector, this relationship has been poorly explored. Moreover, in public management studies, researchers focusing on performance tend to focus exclusively on gender differences at the top and/or middle management level. This research aims at exploring the relationship between women's representation and performance in public hospitals at all organizational levels.

To achieve the research objective, 63 healthcare organisations were analysed through ordinary least squares regressions on panel data from 2012 to 2018.

Results show that, in the hospital setting, gender diversity and financial performance are related at every organizational level.

To the authors' knowledge, this is one of the first studies focusing on the link between gender and performance at every level of professional and employment category; avoiding focusing exclusively on top management, which was the case in previous studies on the topic. Moreover, it contributes to a poorly explored literature which is gender studies in public healthcare management.