Education faces its own credibility crunch as overschooling combines with undereducation to leave young people overqualified and underemployed. This book reveals what has gone wrong in schools, colleges and universities and how this relates to the changing relationship between young people, educational qualifications and employment in the early 21st century. Combining their experience across sectors, the authors present a comprehensive review of education and training from primary to postgraduate schools. Meeting the crisis in policy and theory, they suggest new pedagogical principles are needed to combine research with teaching to produce as well as reproduce knowledge through application, creation, experiment, scholarship and debate. This new pedagogy would both reclaim the expertise of teachers and enable students to find purpose in what they study. They advocate a new educational politics bringing together students and teachers in new conceptions of education and democracy as the only opportunity to break the impasse in education at all levels.